Summit North America Preview: A growing dairy business looks to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations for next-level performance

Editor's Note: MSDW is a media sponsor of the Summit North America 2019 event.

Before there is ice cream or yogurt or low fat milk, there is butter fat. And dairy industry businesses face unique challenges in optimizing the use of that butter fat, along with the other elements of milk. For the Tillamook County Creamery Association in Oregon, geographic expansion across the country has led to the decision to improve their support of dairy-specific manufacturing, finance, and other requirements by migrating from Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO).

Robin Finnell, Continuous Improvement Coordinator at Tillamook, will be at the User Group Summit North America, October 15-18 in Orlando, Florida, and spoke with MSDW about her organization's migration efforts and how Summit plays a role in their use of Dynamics 365.

Upgrading the dairy operation from NAV to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations

Finnell first got involved with the Tillamook County Creamery Association over 10 years ago. The Association was an early adopter of Dynamics NAV 2009 and she helped with the implementation. In parallel with her work with the Association, Finnell also leads the Portland AXUG chapter and the SIG for FDA regulated manufacturing. Tillamook is already in stores as far east as Colorado and Texas, and now, as the association is expanding to the east coast, the need for additional scalability has led them to migrate from NAV to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO). Their expected go-live will happen over Labor Day weekend.

We do dairy balancing which is really interesting – breaking milk down into base components like protein, butter fat, water and other solids. We have to pay our patrons based on those percentages. How much butter fat is in the milk is key. The more there is, the more we pay because it's good for ice cream and it goes further when we're skimming out the milk or the cream. Those types of data points were areas we weren't able to manage as well in NAV.

Also, from a food manufacturing standpoint, being able to trace things the way we'd like for potential recalls, we were [only able to do in NAV with manual, time-consuming processes]. There are a lot of considerations in migrating to D365FO, but mostly for us would be the ability to explode the milk down to the base components. It's something that is unique to dairy, so other dairy manufacturers nderstand the implications, but other industries don't. The partner we have has a dairy vertical that they built for AX and D365 and we're really excited for being able to implement that. The piece our partner built has been in use in AX for several years. I'm excited about that for our costing and payments.

There are several things within cheese and how we run our formulas and how we make our cheese blocks that are going to be really good. We were really excited about catch-weight, but we haven't got it where we want it yet. That will be one of the challenges for us and other cheese companies in implementation.

At this year's Summit event, Finnell will be presenting a session with a colleague focused on "cleaning your closet" before moving to D365, which will offer recommendations to other users around a new implementation.

Make sure you're not customizing going into a new implementation. Definitely map out your business processes and make sure how you do it is as close to best practice as you can get it. Look at your partner and ask 'Why do we do it this way?' Ask people on the floor the reason why they [follow a particular process]… Is an extra step worth customizing for? Don't be afraid to push back about how something is done. You don't want to challenge someone with 20 years' experience on the floor [but you have to].

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