Migrating from Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations: A linen-maker's ERP unification journey

In 2018, Italian luxury linen brand Frette migrated from Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO) and Dynamics 365 for Retail (D365R) to unify its three divisions on one ERP system, have better insight into the business, and streamline customer service.

Founded in 1860, Frette bed linens can be found in many of the world's most prestigious hotels as well as on yachts and aircraft and in private homes. Frette linens even adorned the Titanic and Orient Express as well as the altar of St. Peter's Basilica.

The brand has three company verticals – wholesale and hospitality divisions that were running on GP, and a retail division running on Celerant, a retail system that included some inventory management, and point-of-sale system, says Ven Grimblatov, IT Project Manager at Frette.

We'd been looking to unify into one system – cleaning up the product master so the company has one vision of what the financials are and what the inventory levels are. Our goal was that our team would be working with the same item and not naming them differently in different systems.

Looking back

As he looks back on the project, Grimblatov says some of the biggest challenges the company faced were cleaning up the master data that goes into Dynamics, working with Frette's ISV partners to ensure that that they were up-to-date on the latest releases as well as all the testing and training. However, since the project team knew going in that it wasn't all going to be smooth sailing, they planned for those potential issues.

When we mapped our existing business processes, we went through sprints, going through the processes from start to end. Every sprint was one month of discovery with the second month of performing show-and-tell sessions where we confirmed with the users that everything was captured based on their requirements.

When it came time to determine whether to include add-ons or customizations in D365FO, the team first checked to see if Microsoft had a solution for the process to make the upgrade path easier, Grimblatov says. However, the team quickly identified some key areas where Microsoft wasn't able to provide a solution, such as for sales tax, payment processing, and EDI (electronic data interchange). That meant they had to look for ISV products.

EDI migration

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