Te Pari beefs up its global business capabilities with Business Central

To support business growth, Te Pari knew they needed to take a close look at their technology.

“We were struggling along using old, basic on-premises systems. But we had to do something. We were opening branches overseas, our manufacturing had grown, and managing our inter-company transactions and inter-entity stock control was becoming a major problem for us."

Patrick Blampied | General Manager, Te Pari

"We’d actually started looking at ERP systems around eight years ago, because we knew we needed an end-to-end solution that could handle everything for us — from sales through to manufacturing and production.”

After identifying several Microsoft ERP solutions that would meet their business needs, Te Pari decided to instead first implement Dynamics CRM to manage their direct customer base — and to integrate it to an ERP when they were ready.

Fast forward to 2020 — and progress!

“For a variety of reasons, we never got around to implementing a new ERP,” says Blampied. “It was only in the middle of New Zealand’s first COVID lockdown, with all of our admin and sales teams working from home, that we had time to draw breath and focus on a new ERP.”

Te Pari entered into discussions with Topaz Solutions, a small Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central practice. They decided that Dynamics 365 Business Central, including some Topaz developed extension applications for banking, landed cost and consolidations, was the perfect fit for the business.

Topaz started Te Pari’s Business Central implementation in late 2020, with a go-live goal of February 2021 for its entity, and 1 April 2021 for New Zealand. Then, a month before the local deadline, Topaz announced to Te Pari that they’d been purchased by Fusion5.

While initially a little taken aback by the news, Blampied says that the remainder of the implementation was largely ‘business as usual.’ Te Pari continued to work with familiar Topaz faces, backed by Fusion5’s comprehensive support services.

Most importantly, Te Pari’s Business Central roll-out was still delivered on time, and within (if not slightly under) budget.

“We’ve been using it for around 12 months now, and we’re really seeing the benefits of using an ERP that we can actually scale with. We also have the transparency to see what needs to be done in the business, and when.”

Patrick Blampied | General Manager, Te Pari

Blampied says that Business Central has done exactly what Te Pari needed and expected.

“The move from the old on-premises environment to an online one has been surprisingly intuitive for our team; they’ve taken to it quite well. They especially like that when working out of the office there’s no need to log into remote servers, they can just open a browser and go — which is exactly how we wanted it to be.”

“One of our biggest wins so far,” says Blampied, “is that it’s so accessible for all of our users, and the ease of intercompany transactions is really good.”

Business Central has replaced the majority of Te Pari’s old processes with inbuilt modern best-practices, and Blampied reports that his team enjoys the more streamlined workflow which cuts down on effort and eliminates most manual tasks and workarounds.

Te Pari and Fusion5 have already ramped up Business Central’s capabilities with the addition of Dynamics 365’s Customer Engagement application.

The integration links Te Pari’s four entities (each with a different currency and pricelist) together into one Sales environment. Items from all four companies map to Products within CRM, with custom fields in both the CRM and Business Central applications. Actions are automatically triggered when new real-time data is received by the CRM from Business Central (using Virtual Tables and Dataverse technologies).

Blampied says setting up Business Central Supply Planning — giving them shop floor through to scheduling capabilities — will be Te Pari’s next big step.

Knowing Te Pari has a partner they can rely on and a system that can scale with the business has been a gamechanger for Blampied. 

“We can flex, change and grow on-demand with Fusion5’s support. We know we’re not going to break the system if we want to extend it — and our business.”

Patrick Blampied | General Manager, Te Pari