Atlanta-based ATLANCO® was founded in the late 1950s and has been one of the leading suppliers of personnel equipment, material, and uniforms to the military, law enforcement, and public safety markets. Originally known as Atlanta Army Navy Supply, the company has grown from a regional distributor of military surplus items to over 1,000 employees with manufacturing operations and partnerships in Honduras, Indonesia, Korea, China, and the Dominican Republic.To the many thousands of police, firefighters, EMTs and military personnel who use and depend on its products daily, the names ATLANCO®, 5IVE STAR GEAR® and TRU-SPEC®; have become synonymous with quality, innovation and service. The company's extensive range of products can be found on its website and in licensed retail locations nationwide, and since 2000, it has been using Microsoft Dynamics AX to manage operations with Sunrise business intelligence solutions.

Altanco's New Partner of Record Successfully Upgrades them from Microsoft Dynamics AX 3.0 to 2009

Atlanco Puts Microsoft Dynamics AX Data to Work with Sunrise Business Intelligence Solutions

Atlanco Extends the Value of Microsoft Dynamics AX with BI, Dashboards, and Visual Insights 

• Needed an apparel industry expert to support the upgrade from Dynamics AX 3.0 to 2009
• Data was stored in multiple silos across different platforms with no single version of the truth
• Employees had limited visibility into data about sales performance, order fulfillment, and customer trends
• Too much time was spent creating spreadsheets, which lacked visual insight
• Departments were using disparate data sources, creating confusion

• Sunrise offers system agnostic business intelligence solutions for its Dynamics customers
• MicroStrategy offered a mobile, platform agnostic solution for building dashboards and apps
• Sunrise offered a quick and agile deployment methodology that would put solutions in the hands of users quickly
• Sunrise offered a strong blend of product expertise and industry capabilities

• Replaced data silos with a single business-language-oriented schema across multiple data sources
• Took control of the business with access to the same metrics across departments
• Moved from reactive, manual reporting to proactive insights, predictive planning, and data-driven workflows
• Standardized calculations and formatting, eliminating manual effort and improving accuracy
• Delivered feature-rich visual experiences on any device and platform
• Enabled data-to-decision and decision-to-action initiatives
• Realized full revenue potential of brands by being able to rapidly respond to market changes and trends

By 2013, ATLANCO had already been through two other business intelligence solutions that were implemented to deliver visual insights from Microsoft Dynamics AX and other legacy systems.

Outside sales representatives had limited graphical visibility into data about their regional sales performance, order fulfillment statuses,and customer trends—and they couldn’t access data out in the field. Meanwhile, the IT team was strained to support requests for reporting, so often business users would take matters into their own hands and create their own spreadsheets. At all levels of the organization, people were spending several hours manipulating information on their own, creating unintentional consequences and erroneous intelligence that lead to poor decision making.

ATLANCO decided to update its business intelligence solution for a third time with the help of its longtime Microsoft Dynamics AX partner, Sunrise. In July 2014, ATLANCO launched with 4 role-based dashboards
designed to help executives, account managers, customer service and even customers manage their day-to-day tasks. The new capabilities provided better access to sales and order information, and one version of the truth. Now finance, operations, service, and sales all speak from the same metrics and this includes consumption from the web, mobile and Excel.

As more phases rolled out, other business users were enjoyed their own revenue-impacting success. The CFO can now monitor aging customer receivables in a new visual and remote way, without relying on IT services to deliver the information. Executives and sales now have a graphical view of current and historical top sellers, and can experience a rich data discovery and analysis experience by region. And they even deployed a trade show app to help to help collect orders offline as well as put a powerful tool in the hands of buyers to help them make better decisions. As the momentum grows and iteratively builds on earlier releases, visual insights cross more data sources, provide predictive experiences, and enable BI-driven workflows.