Viridor tears down silos and drives improvement with Microsoft Dynamics 365

A time-bound imperative for a new ERP system 

Building a new digital platform for unified business operations became essential for Viridor when, in 2020, Pennon Group sold the business to KKR, who recognised the strategic value of Viridor’s UK recycling and residual waste management services and expected growth opportunities. 
 

The Viridor team began the ERP project in January 2021, working to a hard deadline. A solution had to be in place before the end of the transitional service agreement (TSA) with Pennon in January 2022. 
 

“We needed to move swiftly, so we needed an out-of-the-box solution that would meet the needs of our business,” explains Bryan Howarth, Head of Business Solutions at Viridor. “Comparing different vendors and solutions against our need to get an ERP system in place quickly and at the right cost, it became clear Microsoft Dynamics 365 was the best fit for our needs.”
 

Achieving a rapid and successful rollout

“It wasn’t that we’d come with experience of Dynamics 365,” explains Bryan Howarth, “the team’s background was mostly with other ERP systems – so choosing Microsoft Dynamics was somewhat of a leap of faith, even though we were convinced it best met our needs.” 
 

Despite being new to Dynamics 365, the team implemented Dynamics 365 across the whole of its Finance, HR and Procurement operations, going live in November 2021. 
 

Bryan Howarth adds, “It’s not often that you hear of an ERP solution being delivered ahead of time and under budget, but our rollout of Microsoft Dynamics 365 had a month to spare and was delivered under budget.”

A supportive partnership with Microsoft

“It’s not just about the technology – although that helped,” Bryan Howarth explains. “Our success was built on the team we had, the sponsors we had internally, the governance we put in place and the support we had from Microsoft.”  
 

The Viridor team were impressed with the structure put in place by Microsoft during the project delivery. The support offered and the pleasure of working with Microsoft’s technical experts enhanced the project team’s experience. 
 

“Some ERP vendors can be very hands off – not so with Microsoft. They showed a lot more willing and engagement. It was very refreshing,” says Bryan Howarth. “It felt like our project was more of a collaboration rather than us simply buying a product.” 

Integrations with other business systems

“We’ve felt valued as a team of people, as a business,” agrees Ian Mairs, Business Finance Director at Viridor. “Microsoft has been very proactive. Microsoft hasn’t been afraid to roll up their sleeves and steer other stakeholders.” 

Knowing that they had such support behind them gave the Viridor project team confidence that they could overcome any obstacle. For example, integrations with OPL, PTC, Alloc8, Prism, Anaplan and Reedsoft have been implemented. However, the team expects to streamline these further. 

“The point of ERP is that you have fewer solutions,” states Bryan Howarth. “With Dynamics 365, we’ve already reduced our interfaces by around 50 percent. We’ve got a cleaner estate with fewer legacy solutions. This means a vastly reduced support burden – allowing our teams to focus on value-adding activities, like development and improving processes.” 

In this way, Viridor is leaning into the Microsoft technologies to deliver a better service at the same time as reducing overheads. 
 

The benefits of having a modern ERP solution in place 

Given the timebound imperative to get a new system in place, successfully switching to Microsoft Dynamics 365 was a benefit in and of itself.  

Bryan Howarth says, “We have seen those innate benefits of having a solution we control ourselves, a solution that we can change fairly rapidly, a market-leading solution that can be supported by almost anybody. It gives us a standard platform that we can work on, develop and grow as our business develops” 

The fact Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based, evergreen solution has further reduced the support burden for the IT team. Bryan Howarth adds, “We estimate a run cost reduction of around 25 percent.” 
 

Delivering tangible, measurable improvements

Beyond this, the business teams have reported many additional benefits of using Dynamics 365 over the previous legacy solution. 

For example, restructuring associated with the sale of the business meant the size of the accounts receivable team shrank from twelve people to five. Yet the change of system has enabled the team to continue to function effectively. It’s just one example of how Viridor is using the Microsoft technologies to achieve more with less. 
 

“We can cope with the workload better because the accounts receivable processes have been so streamlined using Dynamics 365,” explains Clare O’Reilly, Business Solutions Functional Lead at Viridor. “Our invoicing processes used to be incredibly clunky. Now, instead of a five-minute process going into six or seven different screens, we just go into one screen and it’s done in less than two minutes. There’s a lot of things like that which have been quick, easy wins that help us to manage the workload better.”

Leveraging the wider Microsoft ecosystem

One of Viridor’s compelling reasons for choosing Microsoft Dynamics 365 was its integration with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. Bryan Howarth says, “There are lots of good partners out there who understand the Microsoft stack that can help support, so you have the confidence of that ecosystem around you too.” 
 

The seamless integration across the Microsoft stack is helping the Viridor team to deliver new efficiencies and potential for process improvement. While rolling out Dynamics 365, the Viridor team has implemented a Data Lake on Microsoft Azure and has been exploring the potential of the Microsoft Power Platform, especially Power BI and Power Apps. 
 

“Automation across the accounts payable and accounts receivable functions, with the tactical use of Power Apps, has saved us at least 400 hours per month,” estimates Bryan Howarth, “This supports our drive in becoming a more efficient and effective business.” 

“This is just the start,” continues Bryan Howarth. “With Dynamics 365, we have an efficient platform we can grow as our organisation develops. We’ll be folding other Dynamics 365 solutions into our platform, including CMMS, performance reviews, and other HR tools. We also plan to integrate Plant Engineering Maintenance leveraging the integration of data across our Dynamics 365 solution so all important information to drive business and sustainability decisions is in one place.” 
 

Improved reporting offers new potential

Reporting has already been enhanced across the business. “There’s now one source of data, so that means a reduction in reporting times,” explains Bryan Howarth. “And we’re able to use that data to look forward and drive decisions, rather than what we had previously which was all rear-view mirror stuff.” 

Business users have especially been involved with – and impressed by – the reports produced in Power BI around training compliance and for Accounts.
 

“If you want to upskill yourself in Power BI or other Microsoft skillsets, you can do that quite easily using lots of Microsoft online self-learn resources. That’s another benefit of using a single ecosystem as well as all that interoperability,” comments Bryan Howarth. 
 

“People across the business are doing some really good work with Power BI,” he continues. “They are surfacing information that we didn’t have prior to using Dynamics 365. In Accounts, HR and Procurement, we estimate a 30 percent reduction in effort when delivering regular reporting packs. We have more and better information, with less effort involved.” 
 

Flexibility opens the door to new controls that reduce financial risk 

The benefits Viridor has already achieved are not limited to the impressive efficiency savings and productivity gains. It is also using Microsoft Dynamics 365 to drive new process improvements, especially around compliance and risk management. 
 

“One of the biggest wins is the level of control we have in Dynamics 365. We have much greater flexibility, so we have been able to put internal controls into place specifically to manage risk,” states Clare O’Reilly.  
 

As a result, Viridor is proactively planning system and organisational controls reporting ahead of forthcoming regulatory compliance demands. It is also in a better place to address risk. Clare O’Reilly adds, “Because of the controls that Dynamics 365 has enabled us to introduce, the number of items on our risk register has reduced.” 
 

“The solution we have now is a lot more effective than what we had previously,” Bryan Howarth agrees, “We’ve put a whole host of changes through in the last six months that we just couldn’t have done on our old platform.”

Eager adoption helps to unify effort

Across the business, teams have used the adoption of Microsoft Dynamics 365 to drive process improvements, better communication and unified information and reporting – breaking down silos as they do so. 

“Good governance is the thing that ties together our business performance with our social agenda and our sustainability agenda and makes it work,” emphasises Edita Adamcikova, ESG Manager at Viridor.  

“The whole business can only move forward if it has functioning processes,” she continues, “The system running behind delivery is the important first step to a well-embedded, integrated ESG strategy and practical governance. Dynamics 365 has brought all this information together in a unified way so that communication of information and risk is fully intertwined with all our people, right up to board level. ESG runs through everything – and we’re better placed to achieve our ambitious sustainability objectives now.” 

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem is our toolkit to progress,” agrees Ian Mairs. “Now we’ve laid the foundations, it’s time to reap the benefits.”
 

A platform for future  

This is just the start of our journey with exciting plans to drive value for Viridor by bringing further processes into D365, including engineering plant maintenance and stores management, employee performance reviews amongst others.  

“We have more to do, but we can now see the opportunities and the art of the possible,” agrees Bryan Howarth. “Microsoft Dynamics 365 has given us a platform in a complete ecosystem on which that we could build and deliver. It’s certainly enabled us to consider more innovation. With Microsoft there is a lot more flexibility, and we certainly felt their pioneering spirit. It was ‘how are we going to make this work?’ rather than ‘you have to do it like this’. We are no longer constrained by the platform we’re on.”  

Edita Adamcikova agrees, “We have been given the freedom to live more in our creative brains instead of bothering with administration tasks that are exhausting. We have more energy and enthusiasm for innovation that can benefit the company and our communities.” 

She adds, “The work of Bryan’s team and the support of Microsoft has been excellent. We’re now operating in the twenty-first century. Finally, the company is streamlined. It feels like we’ve made a real difference as a whole business and brought the company together as one team. It’s a culture change, but it is a change which is underpinned by Dynamics 365. And that’s a big “Yes! Hooray!’.”