Vic Air Supplies moves to the cloud with Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Several years ago, Vic Air Supplies, a family-owned HVAC company based in Melbourne, Australia, realized its legacy Arrow Financials accounting systems wasn't keeping up with the growth in the business.

The company, which manufactures flexible ducting and sheet metal and operates a wholesale division with more than 4000 products, had grown to employ more than 30 people at three locations. At that size, their legacy systems were strained, to say the least. And to further add to their digital woes, their trusted Arrow services provider was looking to sell off that line of business.

Vic Air's software partner, Melbourne-based Evolution Business Solutions (EBS), finally did sell off their Arrow business in 2015 to focus solely on Dynamics NAV, which it initially adopted in 2007, says Jonathan Martin, EBS technical director. And rather than move to another Arrow partner, Vic Air opted to stay with EBS and look into implementing Dynamics NAV.

Could Dynamics NAV hit the mark?

"We'd probably spoken to Vic Air for maybe a year of so about NAV as a product to replace Arrow and it was a big decision for them to make that jump," Martin says. "We offered Vic Air the on-premise model originally, when cloud wasn't really a defined model, but I think it was a little bit cost prohibitive at that point."

About 12 months later, EBS went back to Vic Air with a proposal for a cloud deployment. At that point the company decided to implement Dynamics NAV in the cloud, along with Office 365. EBS offers a managed service to its Cloud Easy clients on a per user/per month model, ...