Team play brings Nova Steel into Microsoft Dynamics 365 world

Nova Steel, Inc., a Corona, Calif., manufacturer and distributor of heating and cooling duct work and related components for both the commercial and residential sectors, had an IT problem. Having grown substantially since its inception in 1995, the company found itself with a patchwork of on-premises software components that was hard to maintain and hard to operate. Most of all, it complicated efforts to grow.

AXMentor, a San Diego-based Microsoft partner, helped to confirm Nova management's belief that its infrastructure belong

ed in the cloud and supported the company's strong interest in adopting Microsoft Dynamics 365.

"When we got involved with Nova, we saw them running a few versions of Epicor and a lot of the processes weren't being used optimally," said AXMentor sales and marketing manager Amir Khoshniyati. He said Nova Steel chose Dynamics 365 because of the flexibility it provided.

"They were evaluating a few products but Dynamics 365 was the finalist on their short list," noted Khoshniyati. One reason for its appeal was that it could live in the cloud, saving the company on infrastructure costs. "They really liked the flexibility and the ability to add applications and users as you go as well as the capability of scaling up and down," he said. Nova Steel was also appreciative of the reporting capabilities and other out-of-the-box capabilities such as Power BI available with Dynamics 365, he noted.

Three ERP versions that did not communicate

Brian Donohue, senior project manager at AXMentor, said the move to Dynamics 365 was timely.  Nova Steel was dependent on Epicor, which existed in three versions within the company. "The issue with ...