Ultimation migrates to Dynamics 365 Business Central, guided by Peritos

Ultimation Industries, a major US conveyor manufacturer, had been using Sage for its customer relationship management (CRM) system. Ultimation’s business was growing exponentially, though, and the company found its existing system increasingly difficult to use. The on-premises CRM didn’t allow any customization or automation, and Ultimation was taking hundreds of hours each month to process thousands of financial tasks. Peritos mapped the client's requirement to the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and showed that it requires no upgrades, while remaining fully customizable and capable of transaction automation.

Customer Challenges

Founded in 1988, Ultimation has decades of experience designing and building assembly line automation equipment. It has been a leader in conveyor technologies for nearly 30 years, and the company's conveyors and patented technology drive the business. Ultimation’s legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system lacked modern cloud features, so it was forced to expend significant efforts on manual efforts, including upgrades.

The Sage system didn’t allow Ultimation to automate key tasks, and it was missing core features, including drop shipments, partial receiving, advance payments, and bank account reconciliation. Because Peritos had successfully guided and supported many previous ERP implementations, Ultimation sought the Microsoft Gold partner's help in managing those pain points.

Partner Solution

Dynamics 365 Business Central was a natural choice for digitally transforming Ultimation’s on-premises environment to take advantage of Microsoft cloud capabilities, and Peritos carefully mapped each of the equipment maker’s requirements. Business Central enables prepayments and bank account reconciliation as out-of-the-box features, and Ultimation’s drop-shipment tasks were easily tied to both Dynamics 365 sales and purchasing processes.

In addition, the customer was delighted to discover that it could tightly integrate Business Central with Microsoft 365 tools such as Outlook and Excel. Peritos also demonstrated the value of adopting Business Central to fostering the client’s growth.

Customer Benefits

Ultimation now incorporates drop shipments, bank account reconciliation, and bulk payment-matching in Business Central and no longer relies on its Sage CRM system for those tasks, saving significant time. The manufacturer is also able to free up substantial time by using Business Central configuration packages for bulk uploading and by no longer performing manual upgrades to its legacy on-premises system or on manual bank reconciliation. Further, reports generated by Power BI quickly show stakeholders areas that require their focus. Security has also improved through integration with Azure Active Directory and adoption of multifactor authentication (MFA).

“Managing tax was a cumbersome task and we always use to do it outside of the legacy ERP system. While, after migrating to Business Central and with the Avalara tax extension we deployed, it was much easier to focus on just processing the order while the tax part was taken care of automatically.”

Richard Canny, President, Ultimation