Jacksonville, Florida USA – (October 23, 2009) – Natura World has selected Zap’s Zap Business Intelligence for Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution to add to its competitive advantage, and help manage growth.
The Canadian mattress manufacturer is growing exponentially through constant innovation and its fun approach. The company has recently tripled its staff, expanded its manufacturing facilities from 40,000 to 150,000 square feet, while also acquiring two new companies in the height of a recession.
Natura relies on Microsoft Dynamics NAV as its primary business system. Around 20 staff use NAV to handle financials, sales, purchasing, manufacturing, administration, and inventory. The company’s Tech Xprt, Blair Fleming, explains the reporting challenges that Natura faced. “We had five daily NAV reports to monitor the business, but due to our growth, our NAV data was changing constantly,” Blair said. “Every time a new product was added or a new category was set up, it became difficult to work with NAV reports, including having reports fail. Developers had to make constant adjustments, and when a new report was required, that was an instant $1,500. What we really needed was a more dynamic way to report and analyze our data that could keep pace with our fast growing company."
"When I saw Zap’s Business Analytics, I kept asking ‘what’s the catch’, ‘what’s the security in the back end’, ‘what am I restricted from doing’, and ‘when would I have to rely on the vendor to make changes’? After some due diligence, I discovered it truly was transparent and everything it was made out to be, so we decided to go ahead and implement it. The case for return on investment was strong, as we could gain a quick win by turning on the comprehensive analytic reports, dashboards and scorecards versus investing in building and maintaining reports with other technologies, as we’d done previously.”
The first priority was sales analysis to provide senior management with highly flexible analytics, such as sales by item category, product category, and measuring profitability and margins over time. “Previously we’d been quite restricted in what we could analyze, and how we could analyze it, but Zap’s Business Analytics gave us the freedom to analyze by any piece of data, and slice-and-dice the business from any angle.” The next priority is inventory analysis, to provide valuable insight for production planning.
As for longer term plans, Blair said that Zap’s product roadmap was another factor in his solution choice, and that he is already excited about future functionality that Natura could use to become smarter and more streamlined in its use of information.
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