Global manufacturer aims for 'ERP Evergreen' with expanding Microsoft Dynamics 365 deployment

The MCI Box | Source

Maersk Container Industry (MCI) began its go-live with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise (D365FOE) in December 2016, and the user base has since grown from 280 users to about 700.

What began as an IT infrastructure project at MCI became a full ERP replacement as the team concluded that their legacy M3 ERP solution had become a business liability, leaving users to fend for themselves with ad hoc spreadsheets to manage much of their work.

With locations across the world, MCI, which manufactures, sells, and services refrigerated containers, refrigeration machines, and dry containers to the global shipping industry, was a prime candidate to embrace the benefits of an Azure deployment of D365FOE. The company understood the problems of network latency, having hosted their old ERP in China for a global workforce. In D365FOE on Azure, they looked for a new location that offered a compromise for worldwide access, from primary sites in China, Denmark, and Chile to hundreds of international service providers, 3PLs from New Zealand to Los Angeles, and even ship to shore EDI orders arriving from the world's waterways.

They decided to run the solution out of one of Microsoft's US data centers, a decision that Microsoft officials speaks to the improvements in D365FOE, as that plan most likely would not have worked for AX 2012 with this kind of massive global schema. With D365FOE now live and seeing favorable adoption, the team faces another challenge: embracing continuous ERP updates from Microsoft without creating issues, exhausting ...