In Displacements, New Dynamics Customers Driven By Microsoft Roadmap, Cost, Corporate Stability

Executives at Allgood plc, a leading architectural ironmonger in the United Kingdom, needed a way to run their business more efficiently.  But the company's legacy ERP system, Infor's ERP System 21, just wasn't rigorous enough to highlight inaccuracies in the business data, making it difficult for staff to monitor the business.

So the company, which supplies products to the construction industry in the UK, began an 18-month process to find the best product to replace its legacy systems, which was based on the IBM AS/400 platform. After that competitive process, Allgood decided to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX from eBECS across its entire business operation, from raw materials and production, to distribution and invoicing.  

"The maintenance costs for System 21 were too costly, as were the costs associated with an upgrade with the extra servers and services that were required," said Jan Dragosz, the Allgood's head of IT, who was brought in specifically to replace Allgood's legacy systems.  He chose Dynamics AX because of its low total cost of ownership, integration with other Microsoft applications, easy data access and high availability.

Dragosz credits the Dynamics AX system, which went live in 2007-Allgood started with AX 4 and upgraded to AX 2009 a year later-with reducing inventory by more than 50%, freeing up its people from unproductive work, and processing a greater number of sales orders.  

Allgood was one of several companies Microsoft highlighted at Convergence Europe 2009 last week that switched from a competitive product to a Microsoft Dynamics product.  

Dragosz said one reason he selected Dynamics AX was because of Microsoft's roadmap for the product. "I spoke to a number of people about ...