One Company's Journey to the New Microsoft Dynamics AX

Founded in 1947, Emile Egger & Cie SA, a family-owned Swiss manufacturer of centrifugal and propeller pumps, is in the process of working hard to transform the company, in part by digitizing its paper-based processes.

Currently, the company has 400 employees in 12 countries. Although most of Egger's affiliates are in Europe, it does have an affiliate in the US, as well as one in China and India, said Raphael Tagliani, the company's CIO, during a webinar hosted by MSDynamicsWorld.com and Avanade, Egger's implementation partner.

One of the challenges Egger faced was how to evolve from a number of affiliates into one group. As it stood, the affiliates were unable to access all the paper-based information stored in binders at the company's headquarters.

As a smaller company Egger needed a cost-effective solution that would meet its needs for a really good network - and that was the new Microsoft Dynamics AX, Tagliani said.

"We [had] to work with a solution that provided a functioning system across high-latency networks within a budget that was controlled," he said. "We also needed to be able to recruit a younger IT staff that will be working on our solution. So we have all the complexity of bigger corporation but we are smaller, which made us a perfect early adopter."

Joining the TAP program

Tagliani looked at other ERP solutions on the market but found that either their publishers had no plans for further development; or they used old-fashioned, COBOL-like code and fake SQL; or they were not ...