Sakata Seed Shops About, Sticks with Microsoft Dynamics AX to Improve Budgeting

As a growing company, Sakata Seed America knew it needed a budgeting system that could scale to meet the increasing demands of the company. This US company is a subsidiary of Japan-based Sakata Seed Corp., a producer of vegetable and flower seeds.

Sakata Seed America was already using Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to run its business, including supply chain management, production, quality management, and overall financial management. But the company knew that it needed to further develop its budgeting capabilities, which depended on pieced-together processes, including worksheets, spreadsheets, and hands-on applications.

"Budget planning and budgeting is a key aspect of every organization," says Rahul Mohta, a Dynamics AX advisor/trainer at Microsoft partner Real Dynamics, the company engaged by Sakata Seed America to perform a post-implementation review of its Dynamics AX environment. "Sakata had been doing budget planning and budgeting through a mix of [technologies and manual processes] like Excel and a lot of emails."

So, employees were duplicating and resaving their entries in multiple versions of spreadsheets, which in turn were sent via email, and finance was tasked with constantly updating and double-checking spreadsheets for errors.

To an extent, the company was already using some aspect of budgeting within Dynamics AX but as the company expanded globally, it needed a common platform - one that was user-friendly - that could offer one source of the truth, Mohta says.

Initially, the company looked at third-party budgeting solutions. But while those solutions might have had a depth of functionality, Sakata Seed America decided against those systems for a number of reasons, including lack of a good end-user experience, the ...