CASE STUDIES
Titan Fitness, an investment company that acquires and opens health clubs under the Gold’s Gym brand, plans to grow its chain to more than 60 stores over the next five years. Starting with five employees, they could rely on QuickBooks Online Edition, but in the company’s first two months of operation, it grew to hundreds of employees. Titan quickly realized they needed a solution that could handle rapid growth and be deployed quickly and cost effectively.
After researching several business solutions, Titan decided that Microsoft Dynamics GP had the muscle they needed to accommodate their growing business needs. Microsoft Dynamics GP automated their purchase order processes, enhanced their financial reporting capabilities, and allowed them to easily share relevant business information with their investors. With its built-in functionality and the ability to integrate with their central data warehouse system, Titan Fitness can quickly roll out Microsoft Dynamics GP to newly acquired gyms while ensuring that critical information remains centralized—all at an affordable price.
Current Energy, a leading energy brokerage firm, was expanding rapidly into new lines of business and geographic areas. Their growing business needed the ability to handle intercompany transactions, manage multiple lines of business, and gain real-time insight into their business performance. Their QuickBooks financial solution could not provide this functionality causing them to spend too much time recording transactions manually on paper and reconciling account discrepancies—limiting their growth potential. Current Energy realized they needed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to handle their growing needs.
After evaluating several options, Current energy confidently chose Microsoft Dynamics GP because of the ease of implementation and its ability to integrate with Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, which they used in their retail locations. Within a few months, Current Energy was up and running on Microsoft Dynamics GP eliminating their paper processes and greatly reducing the time it takes to manage their financial accounts. Now, with Microsoft Dynamics GP, closing their monthly financials takes two days instead of two weeks.
Erie Shipbuilding grew to command the largest dry dock on the Great Lakes within three years of entering the industry. During this time, they went from 50 to 150 employees. Initially they chose QuickBooks Enterprise to handle their basic accounting functions, but then found it could no longer provide the integration and insight they needed to handle the volume and complexity of their business. This was especially apparent in the area of payroll where correlating payroll information with project status was becoming daunting. As a result, they were unable to gather the insight needed into their productivity and profitability which was critical to their success.
It was the seamless integration between Microsoft products and technologies that drove Erie Shipbuilding to choose Microsoft Dynamics GP. They needed a solution that offered a wide variety of functionality that could integrate across their operations, including finance, manufacturing, project accounting, human resources, and payroll. Since implementing Microsoft Dynamics GP, they can accurately estimate new projects, proactively keep projects within budget, and share business-critical information across all departments. This allowed them to make better informed decisions and reduced payroll management from four to two hours a day, saving approximately 500 manpower hours per year.
CMS, a financial institution with 14 branch offices processing hundreds of daily transactions, lacked a centralized accounting solution. Each individual branch was using QuickBooks to maintain their own financial records—making company-level reporting virtually impossible. They needed a new comprehensive business management solution that could streamline operations at individual offices while providing enhanced consolidation, in-depth financial analysis, and internal security capabilities at the corporate level.
Working with their Microsoft partner, CMS was able to make a smooth transition from QuickBooks to Microsoft Dynamics GP business management solutions in a short period of time, drastically improving their accounting operations, security, and efficiency across the entire operation. Monthly reporting to consolidate the data and produce a single monthly close report previously took 12 hours to complete, and now with Microsoft Dynamics GP takes just minutes. The integration capacity and extensibility of Microsoft Dynamics GP has allowed CMS to automate many of its core business functions, helping them to import transaction data from all of its locations directly into Microsoft Dynamics GP. Automating their accounting functionality with Microsoft Dynamics GP has saved CMS approximately US$300,000 per year.