Is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central the right solution for your company?

Paul Duffy (00:00:09):
Thank you everyone for joining the webinar today. The webinar is put on, on behalf of MNP Digital in conjunction with Microsoft. And today’s webinar is discussing is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the right solution for your company. Today is February 1st and happy to have you all here.
This is the first of three webinars we’ll be running. Today, again, we’re going to be talking about Business Central. Our next webinar we’re going to be discussing Power Platform and Power Automate, and how it can connect to Business Central and help automate tasks. And then our third webinar we’re going to be discussing CDAP and funding opportunities around deploying solutions like Business Central or other software solutions for your business.

I’ll be your host today and through the rest of the webinar series. My name is Paul Duffy. I’m director of Client Services here at MNP Digital. We also have Tony Qian on who’s a cloud solutions architect at Microsoft. We also have Chris Hansen who is part of MNP Digital as well as a consult. And we have Paul Austin-Menear who’s one of our customers at Nanoleaf.

Regarding an agenda, we’ll be discussing MNP and MNP Digital. We’ll then also talk you through why digital transformation could be right for your business. And then Tony is going to come on and chat a little bit about Microsoft Dynamics Business Central products specifically. Chris will then run a demo and then following that Paul from Nanoleaf and myself will have a bit of a Q&A.

To introduce MNP, we’re a fairly large tax accounting and professional services firm, and we started up around 60 years ago out of Brandon, Manitoba. We’re one of the largest accounting firms in Canada today. And you might be wondering right away, why is an accounting firm talking to us about digital solutions. As you might see here, we have around 450 employees now on our digital team and it’s the fastest growing sector at our firm today.

To jump in a little bit about MNP Digital we have seven different service lines as part of our digital practice here. We do digital advisory. We have a BI and analytics team. We also have an application development team as well as a digital platforms team, where Chris and I reside, where we do ERP solutions, CRM as well as CMS platforms. We also have Cyber Security, Cloud Services and Managed IT Services as part of our digital team. So our digital team was originally built to help support the rest of our firm, and the rest of our clients. So we’ve been growing it out rapidly.

Regarding today’s webinar, we’re going to be discussing why digital transformation? And “Is an ERP solution like Business Central right for your operations?”

So just to start a little bit. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. And systems like it and like Business Central typically have a finance system at its core. And then have other modules layered on top of it. So, those other modules could be like, manufacturing, production, warehousing, inventory, CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management tool, as well as a bunch of other modules. And the idea of these systems are to integrate it into your business so you reduce redundancies from having multiple other software solutions. And the idea is that you remove these multiple different software solutions so you have one source of truth for all your data. And yourself or the C-level team at your company, getting real-time data is very important because then you can start making real-time decisions based on that data and you don’t have to scramble around through multiple different Excel sheets, or extracts from those systems or trying to connect them all through API. You essentially have one source of truth for all that.

And then what does that do? That helps reduce back office costs. So costs not only from paying for multiple different software solutions, but then also paying for employees’ time to go and navigate between those multiple different solutions. And again, the system would essentially just connect your whole operations together, connecting your team across the operation as well.

So typically when I am talking to prospective customers or even customers myself, I typically ask them to qualify if Business Central is a good solution for them is, do they have multiple entities or multiple companies? And do you need to consolidate those entities? Systems like Business Central offer that capability to be able to consolidate multiple entities together. As I mentioned, having more timely insights to financials is something you might want to ask yourself as well. Are you getting that out of your current technology stack? Am I reliant on multiple manual process or Excel? Do you have paper-based systems in place? Are you using multiple different Excel documents? That not only can slow you down from an organization perspective as well as just be a security concern as well. And housing those Excel documents on a localized computer could also be a very much a security concern. Are my current financial systems not serving my needs? So are you guys looking for bank reconciliations of automated tasks within your systems? Microsoft Dynamics Business Central can help out with that, as well as if you’re experiencing significant growth. If you’re experiencing significant growth it might be time to look at an ERP solution like Business Central that can help grow for the future of your business.

With that said, now, I’m going to pass it over to Tony Qian to chat a little bit about Business Central the solution specifically.

Tony Qian (00:07:03):
Thank you very much, Paul. Hello everyone, my name is Tony Qian. I’m the cloud solution architect here at Microsoft, specifically for Business Central. So like Paul was saying, Business Central is the Microsoft ERP solution that we’re offering to those SMB and SMC customers. And Business Central right now in Canada is the fastest growing product, and it’s out-beating any other applications. And the reason why so many customers are choosing Business Central to start their digital transformation journey is because, like Paul was saying, at the core of Business Central is the accounting system, right? It allows you to manage your financials. If you have multiple entities you want to manage it, Business Central is the place for you to place all your accounting information into the system.

You can consolidate them, you can do intercompany transactions, all of those financial transactions that you want to have, it’s totally supported by Business Central. Because ultimately at the core of Business Central is the accounting system.

But also, other than the core financial, we also want to have our customers to adapt their digital transformation faster and work smarter. So with that being said, starting at the core finance, but later on when your company grows you want to add more modules to Business Central, we can totally do it. We have all those different modules like you can see here on the deck. You can manage your sales centre purchases, you can manage your post-sales customer service orders. You can even do a project management if you want to apply your project accounting to Business Central. Or the operation management, the inventory and warehouse management and the supply chain management.

So all of those modules, they reside in Business Central in different modules. So as company grows, if you think you need more modules you simply just add more stuff in Business Central, and that’s how Business Central helps your company to grow.

But other than all of those data functionalities with Business Central, one of my favourite functions of Business Central is actually being a part of the Microsoft family. Integrates with other applications such as Office, Excel, Word, SharePoint, Teams. You can totally just open up your Office 365 with Business Central to view your data, to work with your data, to collaborate with your team members. So everyone else can see what’s going on in the system and work on the same record.

And other than those Microsoft 365 applications, it also works with Power Platform, right? So think about if you ever need any kind of approval process, and if it’s a manual, you can totally use Power Platform to automate that, to automatically send out approval requests. Once it’s approved, automatically it goes back into ERP system and updated record. And other than that, it will also provide AI functionalities with Business Central. With the integration with Azure you can totally leverage all those AI models. You can even build your own AI model to help you when it comes to inventory or warehouse planning, or production planning. Right? So you can totally get all those insights based on your data and then make business decision out of that.

And one key thing of that is – is it’s not only about what Business Central can do, not only what Microsoft can do as a whole. You can also have all those different applications developed by partner like MNP. We have the AppSource, which is the place for you to find all those ready-to-use applications, add-ons. If you think that suits your business need you can literally just grab that solution and put it into Business Central. We now have more than 3,000 applications in AppSource. And numbers keep growing. So we understand that not every single business is the same. They all have their unique requirements. They have their unique industry need. And that’s a place for you to really find a solution for yourself, and then just add it to Business Central to even extend your Business Central’s capability and functionalities.

With that, I’m going to hand over back to Paul for a detailed demo. Hand it over to Paul.

Paul Duffy (00:11:21):
Perfect. Thank you Tony for that. Yeah, Now I’d like to introduce Chris Hansen on our team at MNP here. He’s going to take you guys through a demonstration of Business Central and specifically around dimensional accounting, reporting, and walk you through a little bit about multi-entity consolidation and inventory and production as well.

So Chris, I’ll hand it off to you. Take it away.

Chris Hansen (00:11:51):
Thanks Paul. Hi everyone. So my name is Chris. I am a Business Central implementation consultant here at MNP Digital. I am going to show you three of the areas that Paul and Tony have been talking about. But more the how it’s actually going to be working for you in Business Central.

So, here we’re at the home screen. This is where you’d be – you’re welcomed every time you log in. Some quick navigation, anything you see can be clickable. And then there’s a handy-dandy search bar up here if you need to find anything.

So the first thing I want to talk about is dimensional accounting. So if you’re coming from a smaller accounting software package, something you might be experiencing is a very large chart of accounts. You might be looking for lots of detail in your reporting, and you might not be able to get it without a very large chart of accounts. So what Business Central does is something very smart where it uses dimensions. So instead of having five different GL accounts, one with each program. You can have a dimension that’s just a program and then have one GL account.

So, it makes it very simple for users because they have a very simple chart of accounts, and it makes it very powerful on the reporting side because you’re able to flip your data much more easily and in different ways. And it can integrate very seamlessly with Power BI.

So, to show you where the dimensions are, you just use the search bar, and you can see here we’ve got our dimensions set up. And these can be tailored to whatever you need. In this situation we’ve got area, business group, customer group, department. And then within each of these dimensions we’ve got our values. So whatever you need to flip your data on, you can do it that way.

The second thing I want to show you is how easy it is to add additional companies. So within Business Central it is incredibly simple to add new companies and integrate them together. So just simply search for companies. You can see here we’ve got our list of five companies. If you want to add a new one it’s literally just a click of a button and you’ve got a new company. To integrate them, you just have a quick setup, a wizard leads you through it. And then you just – you’re able to send transactions between the two companies back and forth. So if you have one main company that purchases on behalf of another company, instead of doing the transaction twice you can simply do it once and the main company, send it to the other company and be done.

The third thing I want to show you is on the inventory side. If you’re looking at bringing your inventory into your system, Business Central is a great place to start because it’s a very scalable thing on what you need. If you just want a list of your inventory and you want to track it in the system, it can do that. If you want to create production BOMs (Bill of Materials) and have your warehouse workers assemble things and produce things, then you can do that as well. So just clicking into an item here, there are many fields for you to set up, and track. This is all optional. So if you just want to do a number description, track your inventory out and in, it’s very possible. Or you can see here we’ve got some automatic – some replenishments set up and planning. And all of this is depending on what your needs are and what you need.

The last thing I want to show you quickly is just this production BOM, which is just the last step you could go to in the inventory process here. So, if you’re getting more complex operations, you can go as deep as you want, and that’s really what I want to show you. So with that, I’m going to pass it back to Paul to continue the presentation.

Paul Duffy (00:16:05):
Excellent. Thanks Chris. Perfect. So now I’d like to introduce our client and Microsoft Business Central user, Paul Austin-Menear. And Paul, [00:16:30] do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Nanoleaf?

Paul Austin-Menear (00:16:35):
Sure, thanks Paul. Appreciate it. So my name is also Paul. We’ve had these conversations before where too many Pauls in a room makes for a confusing conversation. I’m an operations VP at Nanoleaf. My role really centres around helping teams architect and build out solutions that support productivity and allow them to do more with the resources that they kind of have at their disposal.

Nanoleaf is a community, you know, we’re Canadian, we’re headquartered here in Toronto. Our GHQ is here with research and development folks with marketing folks, sales folks, logistics and operations folks. I’d say that about half of our global workforce is here. We began our life as a Kickstarter company, of all things, for people who are familiar with that corner of the internet, back in 2013. And our cofounders are from UofT, they kind of said to themselves, “This’ll be a fun summer project. You know, let’s design a lightbulb and put it on Kickstarter and see where it goes”.

Well we kind of overshot our target within a few days, and to such a significant margin that they all kind of said to themselves, “Hey, maybe there’s something here. We should probably quit our day jobs.” And they did. And they founded Nanoleaf.

You know, fast forward through the next decade or so, we’ve really been focused on innovation, and we’ve been focused on creating products that people love that work in the home environment, lighting products like the one behind me. Smart home products. And our biggest challenge has been keeping up with hockey stick growth. And that’s an enviable position to be in for a lot of folks. But let me tell you from experience that when you’re on the inside of that kind of change, rapid change, it’s really painful. So we’ve been continuously playing catch-up, and our move to an ERP system, like Business Central, is a part of that journey to stop playing catch-up and react a little bit more quickly, and beyond that proact to market conditions and opportunities.

Paul Duffy (00:18:30):
Excellent. And Paul, early in the presentation we spoke about Business Central and signs to moving to Business Central and when it would be ready for companies. What made Nanoleaf consider, digital transformation and sort of trigger that right time to migrate to a solution like Business Central?

Paul Austin-Menear (00:18:54):
Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s a really great question. You know, not to put it to the Microsoft folks too much, but I’d always thought about the Microsoft brand as very corporate, very enterprise, very kind of large and big. So I hadn’t given their software solutions a whole lot of thought over the years. Now what really kind of was the impetus for us to consider a move to a larger system was partly growth and partly fragmentation and consolidation in kind of the safety services industry that provides logistics packages, and operational support packages and accounting packages.

We actually went through two inventory management systems, best in breed systems they call them, over the course of two years. The first one that we used was bought by another company and sunset. We turned that into another company’s inventory management system and it was backed by a much larger company financially. So we thought to ourselves, “Hey, this is going to be a good thing. They’re going to pour resources into developing this IMS over time” and we’ll base kind of our core logistics infrastructure on it.

Well, a year after the acquisition of that second product it was also sunset. So for us the equation kind of came – kind of became, “Hey, what are we going to do next? Are we going to look for another best in breed system that is purpose built, that’s small, that’s a SaaS model from, you know, some innovative start-up, which is a valid decision? Or are we going to fast forward what without we know we have to do eventually and source ERP to prepare for kind of the next leg of growth? And maybe we’ll do that a little bit earlier and save ourselves the headache of going through another cycle of implanting and re-implementing when that IMS system or that accounting system gets sunset.

So that’s really what kind of pushed us to move to Business Central. And kind of going back to my thinking about Microsoft as a bit of a big company enterprise brand, with Dynamics BC that turned out not to be the case. I found it to be very accessible and a very friendly system to work with. Not what I would have assumed at all before this journey started.

Paul Duffy (00:21:00):
Excellent. And then after you realized, those best in breed systems weren’t working and you decided on Business Central, what did that decision look like? How was the process of going through that?

Paul Austin-Menear (00:21:15):
Yeah. That’s another good question. So we did our homework. We looked at five or six different ERP solutions. Three of them were ones I’m sure everybody on this call has heard of. And then a couple of others were purpose-built by smaller vendors that are very specific in a niche to our industry.
Ultimately what it came out to at the end of the day, there were two things where Business Central really stood out and kind of influenced our decision. Well three things actually. Number 1 is the partner network. You know, when you implement Business Central you’ve got a great Microsoft partner behind you no matter where you are in the world. There’s a certification program to actually be able to work with this tool and resell it and work on the implementations. So you’re kind of guaranteed a whole lot of expertise from your partner. Not just product expertise but also business expertise, because this is a financial accounting system at its core.

The second thing that really influenced our decision was the risk/reward return profile for Business Central over time. We kind of took a look at it and said, “All right, with these capabilities and with the ability to also extend Business Central into other parts of the Microsoft product family that we already use like Microsoft Teams and Power Automate, Outlook, all of those kind of existing tools, we can actually save ourselves quite a bit of labour time by improving the productivity profile of all of our labour hours across our entire network.”

The third thing that went into the decision was the ability to customize and to extend and build on top of the core system ourselves with our own engineering resources. The culture at Nanoleaf has always been one that’s very oriented around builders and makers. You know, aside from our products, the back office folks like myself who work on the business were very keen on building our own solutions to little problems and really fine-tuning and white-gloving our entire system so that it supports our business in the way that we need it to. Business Central is perfectly aligned with that kind of goal. You know, the development architecture behind Business Central, if you have developers and engineers that are kind of going to extend the system is really good. The infrastructure needed to support Business Central on the backend is all hosted. So you don’t have to worry about cloud instances. You don’t have to worry about putting your time into maintain the infrastructure. You can just build code units, deploy them within the Business Central environment and let them go, let them start doing their work.

So you know, for us that eliminated the need to staff, like, a fulltime infrastructure engineer, which is a pretty considerable cost savings for anybody who’s familiar with that space.

Paul Duffy (00:23:56):
Excellent. And you kind of touched on a couple of things obviously on the finance side, which has been a theme throughout the presentation today. But also on the automating of business processes and stuff like that internally and being able to layer on other solutions. Can you talk a little bit about towards that? And what you guys did at Nanoleaf to make things more efficient?

Paul Austin-Menear (00:24:22):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we’re a global company. We have currently implemented Dynamics in two of three of our major market areas. So we’re kind of fully engaged in it here in North America. We’re fully engaged with it in Europe. Our operations in APAC and Oceania, we’re still going through the implementation process.

But just to kind of touch on something that Chris showed in the demo, the dimensional accounting and the chart of accounts, you know, when he said with kind of smaller accounting packages that are maybe cloud based and SaaS based, to do really, really detailed analysis of your expenditures and your revenue groupings. You have to have, like, tons of GL accounts in your chart of accounts. And for us that was absolutely true. We had a global chart of accounts that was social media like 3,000 GL accounts. And for anybody who’s doing analysis on that, financial analysis, that’s absolute madness. We’ve eliminated all of that with Business Central by applying dimensions to two different transaction sets, and being able to do the same kind of financial analysis without having a massive chart of accounts, it’s a big time save on the analysis side.

So to bring it back, though, to Paul’s question, you know, what have we done to kind of improve the productivity profile and use automation and kind of the tools that are available to improve our business, there’s a bunch of stuff that we’ve done. We’ve built our own integrations directly to our warehouse partner, we use 3PLs (third-party logistics) that are API enabled. So we directly connect Business Central to those warehouses, and we get inventory data piping back into Business Central in real time. Same thing with shipment records, same thing with sales records.

We’ve set up automations where the posting of a shipment record triggers an invoicing cycle and creates metadata other documentation that we have to submit to partners for invoicing purposes. It’s really led us kind of make our system – our selling system order life cycle management highly automated and highly effective. You know, now our people instead of entering data manually, which for anybody who’s kind of done that role, it’s a really kind of soul-sucking task at times. We’ve transformed from that kind of a team to a team that is really maintaining watching troubleshooting and using their brain power to creatively solve business problems. And for us, for our people, that’s where I want us to be. You know, I want all of our people to be using their energies to solve creative problems instead of doing data entry. And this entire stack of Business Central plus Microsoft products has really enabled that for us. It’s been quite transformative so far.

Paul Duffy (00:26:53):
Excellent. And just finally here, who’s benefited the most from the installation of Business Central today? Like, what department or what user groups, and can you speak a little bit about them?

Paul Austin-Menear (00:27:08):
Yeah, that’s another great question. So for all the folks who are from Nanoleaf who are watching, my apologies on picking favourites. But I would say that so far our logistics and operations teams have seen the most benefit from implementing this system. Which is kind of counterintuitive. You would think that finance groups would be seeing the earliest, largest initial benefit. But in our case that’s not so. We’ve realized a lot of improvement in our operations through automating and through improving our business process and our automation processes with sales logistics and operations.

The finance folks, you know, even though they haven’t had as much love from me and my team as they could have had, they are going to get more love in the near future. We’re planning on bringing some of the improvements that we brought forward to benefit that work. You know, we’re connecting Power BI to Business Central. So not only can we do that really involved financial analysis directly from data coming from the chart of accounts in Business Central, but we can also dump out data to Power BI to do more involved analysis and to visualize information that will help drive insights a little bit quicker than spending, you know, like an afternoon or a weekend or a couple of weeks kind of manipulating spreadsheet data in Excel to come up with something that’s meaningful.

Paul Duffy (00:28:30):
Excellent. Paul, is there anything else you’d like to add before we move on to questions from the rest of the group here? Happy to have you add anything else to the presentation. Other than that we can move on.

Paul Austin-Menear (00:28:48):
Yeah, you know, happy February 1st for everybody who’s in Canada with us. I hope you’re not too cold like we are here in Toronto. And really appreciate you kind of showing up to have a chitchat with us. But yeah. Let’s move on to the questions. I’m kind of interested to see what folks have to talk about.

Paul Duffy (00:29:03):
Cheers Paul, and thanks for your time. And yeah, with that said, happy to open it up the audience to see if anyone has any questions. Please feel free to post them in the Q&A section.

So I see one question that’s popped up here regarding a NAV installation that somebody has gone through. It looks like they’re on 2018 an on premise solution. And how complex would the shift be to move to Business Central, considering that you’re on a current version of NAV, moving over to Business Central is a lot easier if you’re moving over from, say, like another ERP solution of similar size. So we have, like, data migration templates that can be used to pull in your data from your previous installation into your new installation.

In terms of you have some other questions here about – would it be a totally new implementation? It all depends on the version that you’re on of 2018, and if we’d be able to transition your data over accordingly, if you have any customizations done to it. And yeah, you ask about time and costs and happy to take the conversation offline to discuss your business and then what the costs would be around that. There’s also, I think, promotions from Microsoft to move from an outdated version of NAV onto Business Central as well. So happy to discuss some of those discounts and promotions as well.

Regarding Xero, you have another question here regarding the Xero Accounting system, how difficult is it to move to Microsoft Dynamics? Again it all comes back to your business and how you guys are structured today and how you have your data structured and – yeah, if you actually even have the people and process in place to move to a Business Central. So happy to have an assessment or discuss with you and your team to see a better potential migration and then if it would be a good fit for you guys.

Paul Austin-Menear (00:31:23):
I can add some flavour here Paul, because we actually did this. We used Xero for our global accounting operations before moving to Business Central, and the one thing I will say about moving from that cloud-based bookkeeping system to Business Central is the more that you understand what you need to get from your data, your financial information beforehand, the better off you’re going to be positioned. So if you have a really good handle on what you need from a finance perspective that’s the biggest barrier.

In terms of migrating all of the data itself, it’s actually very straightforward. In Business Central there’s a tool called configuration packages. So you can set up customized configuration packages that map to different areas of Business Central. The GL and other financial aspects is a part of that. So what you really do when you migrate from Xero to Business Central, is you export all of your relevant data from Xero, your customer lists, your vendors, all of that kind of information. You migrate your chart of accounts. And then in Excel you just kind of restructure that information into the format on the configuration package in Business Central. It’s a very straightforward process and it’s a very powerful way of doing this. And from personal experience it was very straightforward and we were quite pleased with how that worked.

Paul Duffy (00:32:43):
Excellent, thanks for chiming in there, Paul, and that, but yeah, the configuration packages and worksheets, we can transfer your data over pretty seamlessly on Excel.

I see another question here form a professional services company that is looking to move to Business Central it looks like, and they’re asking about the project operations module and if it’s good enough. That’s a great question and something that I should highlight as well. If you’re on Microsoft site, considering the amount of products that they have around running your operations from Project Ops, Business Central, Microsoft Dynamics AX or Financing Operations, now, it’s called. You can get a little bit confused on what modules are actually available on the Business Central stack. So Project Operations is actually a full separate solution outside of Business Central.

So in terms of assessing if it’s right for your business or not, it all depends on what you’re looking for. Business Central has a lot of Project Ops functionalities, such as jobs and the capability to track projects time and resources and expenses. So, you may not need to scale up to a Project Operations solution. You may be able to cover that off with Business Central. Business Central also has a full accounting system baked in, where Project Operations doesn’t have that module built into it.
So again, I think it’s more of a conversation to understand your business and what solutions would be your best fit, and MNP specifically, actually deploys Project Operations as well as Business Central and a bunch of other Microsoft solutions. So happy to go through an assessment with you to see what would be the best fit.

Tony, do you have anything to add to this question?

Tony Qian (00:34:45):
No, I think you’re definitely spot on, on this Project Operation module within Business Central. I think it’s definitely going to be the starter for you to try it out. It also has all those project accounting concepts embedded. So it’s definitely a good module to manage your project accounting, manage your project work.

The only caveat I’d say, because it took me a little bit of time when I first touched this module, the module is called Jobs, but ultimately it’s a project management module.

Paul Duffy (00:35:20):
Excellent. Thanks for chiming in there, Tony. With that said, it doesn’t look like there’s many other – oh. There is another question here.

Tony Qian (00:35:53):
Sorry if I may go back to the previous question about the NAV on-prem migration to Business Central line. So first of all I think Paul was doing a great job explaining what the migration going to be like. You can use different type of tools to move the data from your current NAV on-prem system to Business Central online.

I just want to add one more thing on top of that is Microsoft is also promoting, I think Paul briefly touched about that promotion. We are kind of reducing – we’re offering a huge discount for people who want to move from the previous version of NAV or maybe GP, to Business Central online. We’re having a huge licence deduction for you guys and we are eating the cost. So it’s really good – so definitely have a chat with MNP to talk about the offer, how you can benefit from that offer.

In terms of whether it’s going to be a new implementation or not, I really – like Paul was saying, it’s really depending on your business model. It could be a full implementation if you are growing, that you want to consolidate different companies, you want to re-engineer your business process, right? Sometimes they may not necessarily be – implementation because Business Central already has a migration tool where you can just run it with Business Central, it will connect with your NAV on-prem system and bring data to Business Central online to save you a lot of cost. So there are so many different options out there. Definitely have a chat with MNP to talk about what’s the best option for you.

Yeah, thank you, Paul, that’s the only thing I wanted to add.

Paul Duffy (00:37:27):
Yeah, no problem. The last question I have here is – Paul and his team have a technical background and I think they’re talking about Paul Austin-Menear and Nanoleaf. How would he – or the other Paul see Business Central working for a company like ours that has no tech background? They said that they’re dirt movers, heavy equipment, etcetera. And as techy as they get it’s – they have knowledge of, like, Excel spreadsheets and stuff like that.

So yeah, just Paul maybe I can tap you in here as well. But from an MNP perspective, when we’re going through an implementation, we always ensure we’re training our customers on how to use the solution from the ground up. So form basic interface usage of the solution to actually going through and understanding how it maps back to their business specifically. And then set up the training from a role-based perspective. So we’ll train the Super Users one way, and then the lower level users on the system another way and make sure that they can get up to speed and are comfortable with the system before we actually deploy and go live on it.

But Paul, I’ll kick it over to you to add some more flavour.

Paul Austin-Menear (00:38:45):
Sure, hey Norma. You know, I love the dirt movers. You know, bless you guys. There’s lots of construction here in Toronto and I have some exposure to your business from a previous life.

What I will say about our kind of leverage of really, really the technical aspects of Business Central is that it kind of ties back to that culture of builders and makers. You know, we love technology and we love our toys. And the reason that we kind of seek to use Business Central in this advanced way is because we – because we want to and because we can.

Now that doesn’t mean by any shake of the wind that you need to do what we do to get a lot of value from Business Central. That’s not the case. It actually works very, very well out of the box, especially as a financial command and control system. Which is – you know, it was our core need, but we just want to do more on top of that.

And so for you folks, you know, you’ve got a lot of – I’d imagine you’ve got a lot of heavy capital assets on your balance sheet. And really your needs probably revolve around accounting and financial control and reporting and all that. You know, it’s a great tool for that.

If you also already use Excel, there’s also something else really cool that’s built into Business Central. You can open a lot of the documents that are in Business Central like, in your web browser, into an Excel spreadsheet and work with them in an Excel spreadsheet and then save them and have the data saved back into Business Central. So for your team, if you’re kind of used to working in Excel, that’s a pretty powerful feature to be able to do that. And we’ve started using that extensively because our logistic folks are the same. You know, they’re used to living in Excel day in and day out, and they really love that feature. I think that you probably would too.

Paul Duffy (00:40:30):
Excellent. Thanks for chiming in there Paul. With that said, we’re just about at the end of the webinar here, but I wanted to hopefully continue the conversation with some of you, if of interest. And let you know that we have a couple of offers out there to do a free two-hour assessment of your operations. And that could be if you’re moving from Xero to Business Central, QuickBooks or Dynamics GP. Or even an older version of NAV. So happy to continue that conversation further and offer up a free two-hour assessment.

Furthermore, again, as a reminder, today is February 1st, but on the 15th we’re going to be having another webinar discussing Power Platform and how you can extend Business Central utilizing that. And then on March 1st we’ll be running through CDAP and funding opportunities that you could potentially leverage for Business Central or for other software solutions as well.

With that said, thank you again so much for joining our webinar today. It was a pleasure, and appreciate all, Tony and Chris for supporting me throughout it. Look forward to the next one and have a great day, guys.