Powering and connecting your business with the cloud

Powering and Connecting Your Business with the Cloud

“The Cloud” is not a buzzword. It is a fixture of modern business. It’s how you scale and future-proof, always able to handle the complexities of global business with cutting edge technology. Are you ready to engage, empower, optimize and transform with the cloud and unlock the on-premise handcuffs that are holding you back?

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Whether you’re exploring your options for new business platforms, or ready to get started, we are trusted business partners for some of the world’s most well-known brands. With over 25 years of experience with the Microsoft stack, we can help you understand all the capabilities Microsoft has to offer.

The intelligent cloud

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Focusing on client success

Focusing on Client Success

Our focus is on your actual go live, not selling software.

Culturally, getting customers live is at the center of everything that we do and talk about. Our focus is on great implementations.

Completing more than 220 successful go lives is a fantastic accomplishment.

We’ve spent many years translating these experiences into intellectual property called Sunrise 365 Quick Start that accelerates the implementation and increases quality. It’s a combination of software, templates, and project management tools that adds a lot of value for clients and it’s something you really can’t find anywhere else.

The tool and the quantitative dashboards help project teams stay on track and give executives the insights they need to keep projects on time and on budget.

Learn more about how we ensure successful Dynamics 365 deployments.

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Why we exist

Why We Exist

We exist to implement great ideas. We invite you to learn more about why we are a great fit to partner with your organization and watch more videos from our founder and President, John Pence. Also, be sure to explore how to have a successful Dynamics 365 implementation with our exclusive Quick Start methodology and cloud-based project management tool.

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Sunrise and Microsoft: A partnership since 2004

Sunrise and Microsoft: A Partnership Since 2004

We partnered with Microsoft to solve your business problems.

We partnered with Microsoft in 2004 when they first entered the ERP space, with the acquisition of Axapta.

Microsoft brought a unique combination of tools that had the ability to completely solve our clients’ business problems. From ERP to CRM, to all the day-to-day infrastructure, Microsoft really allowed us to bring a deep domain expertise of implementing complex business processes, with a huge and powerful platform, at the lowest cost possible.

Learn more about getting a tremendous value by partnering with Sunrise.

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CFO to CFO: The challenges of the job

Recently Venkat Bhamidipati, CFO of the Worldwide Enterprise & Partner Group at Microsoft, was interviewed about his role at Microsoft, his perspective on technology, the changing role of the CFO, and the challenges of modern business finance. His responses to several of the questions got us thinking about how Venkat’s beliefs echo how we here at Sunrise approach doing business. (If you’d like, you can read the full interview here.) These are some of the key takeaways and our thoughts from the interview.

Become architects of business value. Venkat says that CFOs need to balance “short-term accountability while still driving a long-term focus on growth.” Venkat’s quote reminded us of a recent Forrester Research video about the evolving role of the CFO regarding ERP. One great way to both control costs in the short term while laying the foundation for future growth is with a scalable, cloud-based solution. With such a solution in place, you only pay for what you need every month, instead of making a huge upfront investment in costly infrastructure. And, as the company grows, so does your system. That’s a win, win, win!

The next evolution for corporate finance? It’s Power BI. As a CFO, Venkat knows a thing or two about gettings things done. He sees technology as an enabler for faster decision making while increasing productivity and efficiency. With cloud-based business applications like Dynamics 365, Power BI comes standard, and you can whip up all kinds of dashboards to tell you exactly what’s going on with your business at a glance.

Don’t overlook the humble ROI. Venkat thinks a solid Return on Investment analysis can pay huge dividends when it comes to defining an organization’s priorities. “ROI analysis and discussion, taking into account all costs – direct and indirect – is a powerful way to level-set on what our group or divisional goals and expectations are, and the investments we make,” says Venkat. For CFOs, managing costs is key and plays into Venkat’s earlier point about balancing long-term growth with short-term investments. A cloud-based ERP solution, combined with a partner with expertise in your industry, can help keep costs down.

Stay customer-centric as a philosophy for growth. “I have always believed that a customer-centric approach to growing the business is best, where investing in business areas that lead to the most return and value for our customers is prioritized,” says Venkat. We couldn’t agree more. In fact, our president and founder, John Pence, has said that his goal for Sunrise is to keep and support clients for as long as possible. By listening to our clients and taking inspiration from the feedback we’ve been given, our offerings have evolved over time to include things like our exclusive Supply Chain 365 solution and global support.

When it comes to business decision-making, use all the tools at your disposal. To paraphrase Venkat, making effective business decisions is an art and a science. CFOs instinctively make decisions based primarily on quantitative, empirical data. This means having as much accurate data (in real time) as possible is crucial, as is being able to trust the data to sometimes make a decision based on gut instinct. “At the end of the day, I believe one should effectively leverage all tools and experience at one’s disposal in order to arrive at a well-informed, optimal solution or business decision,” says Venkat. Problem is, how can you quickly act on information (let alone trust it) when it’s siloed in a bunch of different places? Lucky for us, Dynamics 365 brings ERP, CRM, and BI together under a common data service — putting pertinent, actionable, trustworthy information at your fingertips. Plus, by bringing all your data sources together, you’ll save time – and every CFO knows time is money.

While we recommend reading the whole interview, these were the points that especially stood out for us. As a Microsoft Gold ERP Partner and one of the first Cloud Solution Providers for ERP, we see challenges as opportunities for relentless improvement — as do many of the CFOs we work with every day. By focusing on how we can help CFOs and other business leaders, we’ve been able to achieve over 130 successful go-lives in our key industries. If you’d like to see how Sunrise can help you, sign up for one of our live demos today.

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Howdy partner: Four questions to consider when choosing a partner

Howdy Partner:
Four Questions to Consider when Choosing a Partner

Picking the right implementation partner can be make or break for a project. Here are four things to ask yourself as you go through the selection process.

While digital transformation may be the buzzword du jour, the benefits an organization can realize by implementing a holistic, cloud-based solution are very real. And with the rapid advancement of cloud business applications, it’s easy to imagine that implementing a new solution may be as easy as downloading an app and tweaking a few settings. However, for most businesses, it’s a littlllllle bit more complicated than that. For example, the Enterprise edition of Dynamics 365 is based and built on Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM — both Tier 1 solutions. While the cloud allows for more frequent updates, more flexible licensing, the ability to drill down on actionable intelligence, and many other perks, implementations are still complex projects.

That’s why now, maybe more than ever before, it is so important to pick the right partner for your solution, industry, and vision. With over 20 years of experience being in the partner selection hot seat, we’ve noticed that organizations that ultimately end up having a successful implementation generally ask some of the same questions. Here are four of the top questions we’re asked by a client who is serious about transforming their business:

How well do you know the solution? This may seem like a no-brainer, but it comes up fairly regularly. A partner that has a deep understanding of the solution knows what works well vs. what areas might be better served with a best-of-breed solution. They can size up your business needs and give a realistic expectation of deadlines and costs. With speed and agility being critical components of any digital transformation, be sure to look for a partner who is keeping their own technology up-to-date. If their add-on solutions and applications aren’t ready when the base product updates, that means you’re going to be working with out-of-date software as well.
What do you know about _____ industry? Strictly speaking, a plumber and a heart surgeon both fix things — but you wouldn’t call a surgeon to fix your faucet. The same is true about partners. A partner that understands what makes your industry tick also understands what problems are keeping you up at night (and how to address them.) They know exactly where the solution works well for your needs out-of-the-box and where there’s a gap. One of the ways that Microsoft Dynamics is unique is that Microsoft understands that there isn’t a single blanket approach that works for every industry. By teaming up with partners who are vertically focused, Microsoft is able to offer a tailored solution that is great to start with and enhanced by a team of experts who know the industry and vertical.
How will you fit in with our business culture? Plans for digital transformation and growth usually come to life at the top, but they can be squashed pretty quickly on the way down if there is not internal buy-in from the rest of the company. A savvy partner understands this. They’ll work to adopt the culture of the client and meet with both the key decision makers and the everyday users to determine exactly how the solution should work. By engaging the folks who will be working with the software day in, day out, a good partner makes the employees feel a sense of ownership of the project — improving usage and adoption rates long after the last consultant is gone.
Will you be honest and show us some tough love? Showing tough love can be…well…tough. While all partners want to make their clients happy, for some, this attitude can lead the client down the primrose path. In an effort to please the customer (and sometimes due to a lack of industry knowledge) a partner may heavily customize a system to fit the existing way a client is doing business – even if that way isn’t a best practice. Experienced partners with a knowledge of the particular industry may be more confident in challenging a client to think past “how it’s always been done” to “how it should be done.” A digital transformation isn’t nearly as effective if existing bad practices and problems are simply recreated in new systems.

Digital transformation – despite its buzzword status – is a game changer that isn’t going away anytime soon. And like any game changing advancement, there will be some organizations that take on the challenge and succeed and others who fail. Picking the right partner who has a deep understanding of the solution, your industry, and your vision for what you want to become all tip the scales in your favor to end up in the “Success” column.

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Engage, empower, optimize with the cloud

Years ago, it was fairly common for enterprise-level companies to build their own power plants – as crazy as it may seem today, in some cases that was the most cost-effective solution to a critical need. Once local energy providers were able to catch up and provide cheap, easy power these business owned power plants shut their doors for good.While these ambitious building projects were business critical at the time, they also sucked up precious time and resources. After connecting to the main power grid, these resources were able to work on other projects to help the business innovate and grow.

We are in a similar period of change, when monolithic, on premise business application (ERP, CRM, BI, etc.) implementations are on the decline and more business are moving to the cloud. In fact, it is estimated that by 2020 less than 10% of enterprise installations will be packaged software. Clearly, at this point the question isn’t “Why cloud?” but “Why not cloud?”

Still not convinced?
If you are in the 39% of organizations that aren’t focused on moving from on premise to the cloud, you’re putting yourself at risk of extinction.

Consumers are demanding more omni-channel capabilities and a unified experience across every business interaction, and the only way to (reasonably) achieve this is through the cloud. One of the biggest impacts the cloud can have is by providing deep, actionable insights at every level of the organization. In fact, 86% of companies that implemented cloud-based tools that encouraged collaboration and a wider use of data, saw improved productivity and 70% saw better sales. Knowledge really is power!

Not just any cloud
The key to making the most out of your move to the cloud is not just settling for any old cloud. While it can be deceptively easy to implement some business applications in the cloud, by approaching the move in a piecemeal manner, brands can sometimes set up a perfect storm of cloud silos…and find themselves in the same disjointed mess as when the services were on premise. Cloud services that are deployed in different clouds still require integrations. And each integration is something the IT team has to maintain and represents another opportunity for something to go wrong.

So be smart and consider an intelligent cloud which leverages a common platform to run key business applications. When the solutions that make your business tick are pulling from a single platform and database, you instantly decrease the number of integrations and increase the speed of doing business. Additionally, this intelligent structure ups the productivity factor exponentially. Imagine a member of your sales team being able to proactively engage a prospect or customer, armed with a 360° view of their most recent purchases, their wish list, and a suggestion of what to recommend next based on inventory availability and buying history – all from a single screen.

That’s just one example of what an intelligent cloud offering, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 can do for your organization. In fact, under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft has created a clear vision of how businesses will transform to embrace this new, connected future:

Learn More
Nadella also suggests that there are three key areas where organizations are primed to make digital transformations with the help of the intelligent cloud: engaging customers, empowering employees, and optimizing operations.

In our latest eBook, Powering and Connecting Your Business with the Cloud: How Intelligent, Cloud-Based Business Applications are Leading a Digital Transformation we explore how transforming each of these areas can help companies innovate and grow like never before.

Don’t wait until it’s too late to take the next step in your digital evolution — your competitors sure aren’t. With the ability to start with just the licenses you need and add more as you go, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a smarter, easier, or more cost-effective way to prepare your brand for the future.

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8 reasons to get excited about Microsoft Dynamics 365

When we saw Sunrise founder, John Pence, quoted on a Microsoft blog post aimed at getting partners excited about Dynamics 365, we were inspired to share why we were excited for folks in apparel, footwear, home furnishings, consumer goods, retail, manufacturing, and distribution to see what was new in Dynamics 365.

First, it’s worth pointing out that if you hitched your wagon to Microsoft Dynamics AX and wonder what happened to it and why it’s now called Dynamics 365 – you’re not alone. The good news is there isn’t anything to worry about! The product you love hasn’t gone anywhere. In fact, it is the foundation behind the next generation of cloud business apps. You can read more about that transition here.

Now, on to the eight reasons you should be excited about Microsoft’s game-changing intelligent cloud platform.

“The powerful ability to combine the business process data from Dynamics 365 with Power BI, PowerApps, Flow, and Office 365 and deliver a creative solution that really delights the customer gets us all very excited. That’s what it is all about, creating something new that is truly better than anything our customers have ever experienced before!”
– John Pence, President and Founder of Sunrise Technologies, Inc.

1) Seamless Integrations with a Unified Platform

While many organizations are already excited about moving to the cloud, they forget that using multiple cloud solutions can lead to many of the same problems as traditional systems. Only Microsoft has all the pieces for an intelligent cloud, giving you access to a plethora of business applications and analytics tools to deliver you an affordable, value-driven, end-to-end solution on a single platform. You can run your business and make better decisions at cloud speed, and since it is all built on a common data model it’s easier to integrate, deploy, and manage for the long term.

2) Industry and Role Specific Extensions in AppSource

Microsoft AppSource is a new place to research, discover, and try apps built for Dynamics 365 at your own speed. You’ll find solutions like Sunrise’s Supply Chain 365 solution which was built to help improve forecast netting, apply industry best practices, provide advanced analytics, and streamline operations execution. This fast-growing marketplace was launched in July 2016 and there are currently more than 100 solutions available to support your journey to the cloud.

3) Added Value from Cloud Solution Providers (CSP)

Every customer wants one throat to choke and simplified billing. Working with a single vendor is just easier! And it’s possible to achieve this if you work with a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). As a Tier 1 CSP (in the top 3% of all partners), Sunrise can be your one-stop-shop for all Microsoft Cloud Solutions, Global Support, and billing. That means you have one vendor to call when you need something and you get one bill for all Microsoft and Sunrise add-on services. Plus, like any cloud platform, you have the flexibility to scale users up and down as needed.

4) Productivity Where You Need It

Dynamics 365 brings together the power of Microsoft’s productivity tools (Office 365, Yammer, Skype for Business, OneNote, etc.) with structured process and transaction driven applications like ERP and CRM. By marrying collaboration and productivity with business processes, users can see context where old siloed systems stopped short. For example, sales teams can easily see available-to-promise inventory on hand, while planners can forecast more easily based on open opportunities in the pipeline. What’s even more exciting is that Outlook is smart enough to recognize the context of email threads, automatically linking to referenced sales orders and highlighting KPIs right in the interface (no add-ons required!)

5) Start with What You Need

The new cloud model lets you start with the edition and applications you need so you don’t have to deploy a mammoth ERP and CRM project with a timeline that would make Methuselah feel faint. You can start with the financials-only capabilities of the Business Edition, and as you grow, you can move to the Enterprise edition to gain more power over managing an integrated supply chain, warehouse, ecommerce, and retail operations. The fact of the matter is you have a unified platform that has all the productivity, business process, and analytical tools at your disposal to turn on and off as needed.

6) Built-In Intelligence and Advanced Analytics

Dynamics 365 brings advanced analytics to your fingertips with Power BI, Cortana Intelligence, Azure Machine Learning, and IoT offerings. No other system provides more access to easy-to-use intelligence tools. As we like to say, “the more you know the faster you grow.” These tools make it possible to make smarter decisions faster by embedding intelligence into everyday work (Finally! One version of the truth for everyone.) At all levels of the organization, employees will have real time visibility into accurate data they can trust to help them do their job better.

7) Mobilize Any Business Process or Data

With the power of the common data model, Flow, Power BI, and PowerApps, you can create and extend any business process or data set on the go. Power BI dashboards and reports, and even the full Dynamics 365 interface, are available on any device and browser, making working from anywhere a breeze (and the perfect excuse to get out of awkward family dinners.) Even better is that when you combine the universal workflow engine of Microsoft Flow and the mobile app builder found in PowerApps, you’ve got the power to make some real magic. Make a tool for the shop floor, warehouse, retail floor, or field sales to simplify any task and mobilize processes.

8) Power to Differentiate Your Business

The cloud-based Dynamics 365 offering from Microsoft gives you the power to enable digital transformation faster than ever. Think of it this way: the difference between using Dynamics 365 and a more traditional system is like the difference between driving a sports car and a tank. The unified systems of intelligence found in Dynamics 365 let you easily pivot the business as new information or trends emerge. It’s easy to pick up so users feel empowered to perform to the best of their ability. It’s fast, flexible, and beautiful. You just won’t get the same responsiveness with a mammoth system and bolt-on ‘solutions’ that don’t talk to each other and take a fleet of people to maintain. With Dynamics 365 you can easily speed past your competition while they continue to plod along.

Dynamics 365 is light years ahead of any other Tier-1 solution and sets a high bar for any future of business applications that try to catch up. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared his vision for Dynamics 365, we couldn’t have been more excited about the opportunities it created – and we hope you’re just as excited too.

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5 reasons why our consumer brand customers choose Microsoft Dynamics 365

Our customers in apparel, footwear, textiles, home furnishings, and consumer goods manufacturing continue to face numerous industry challenges, especially as production becomes more decentralized and complex, and expanding global supply chains make it difficult to manage and maintain product control. While all of these issues are not going away, our customers are learning to embrace change and turn these challenges into opportunities.

One way they are doing this is by investing in ERP technology like Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is ideal for helping brands gain greater end-to-end control and the visibility with built in customer engagement (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) capabilities. This cloud solution puts the levers needed to drive greater profitability in the fingertips of users at all levels of the organization, on any device, anywhere.

Here are the top 5 reasons why our customers choose Microsoft Dynamics 365:

1. Multi-dimensional item management

With no customization required, Microsoft Dynamics 365 natively handles style, color, and size complexities. Sounds simple but anyone who has tried to fit this concept into the typical “part number” item technique of a traditional ERP solution knows this is a big deal. The system comes with item number (think style) and four additional dimensions. This allows for multiple size scales, configuration dimensions like packaging, in addition to the standard color and size requirements. This concept extends also to every type of item such as raw materials, roll goods, cut parts, and findings. Each type of item can employ a different configuration of dimensions, which is exactly what this vertical needs in an ERP system. Plus, our exclusive Supply Chain 365^TM extension adds transaction matrices across much of the system simplifying usability.

2. One Solution to Manage a Global Business

In today’s market, almost all consumer brand manufacturers are doing business in multiple countries and regions across the world. Because of this, the supply chain has become much more difficult to manage while maintaining costs and customer service. One huge advantage of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is that it can support global business processes from a single cloud solution. Multiple currencies, time zones, languages, and compliance with multiple banking and reporting standards can all be managed from one solution, helping to provide consistency and standardization across various business entities around the world.

3. Unified Commerce Across Channels

Whether it’s through retail, wholesale or eCommerce, most brands today use multiple channels to sell their products. Due to this increased channel complexity, companies need to be able to manage and optimize the supply chain and inventory across these channels more effectively. Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrates multi-channel selling directly into the ERP solution and even includes a built-in Point of Sale (POS) and eCommerce engine so our customers truly see a complete view of their customers and eliminating the channel silos of the past. Wholesale, retail, and e-commerce live side-by-side within the application, intelligently sharing inventory, customer information, and supply chain visibility. This concept provides a powerful platform to service the customer in an integrated manner that optimizes a company’s resources.

4. Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration

The supply chains of brands are difficult to model. Global in nature, with multiple levels of manufacturing required, they stress the capabilities of even the most robust ERP solutions. Microsoft Dynamics 365 really shines by handling complex supply chains out of the box. From a sophisticated multi-site model that handles lead time variation, different vendor sourcing models, and multiple raw material suppliers, Microsoft Dynamics 365 can keep up with the demanding needs of our customers. And with our Supply Chain 365 extension, our customers also enjoy advanced forecasting, planning, allocation, execution, and analysis capabilities.

5. It works like a Microsoft product

Last but definitely not least, the product works like all of the other Microsoft products that are familiar to our customers. This speeds up training, makes users comfortable with the system, and leverages the tools they already use in Office 365 like Excel, Word, Office, Skpye for Business, and Exchange. In the end, this saves our customers money and insures a low total cost of ownership.

Interested in learning how Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you? Contact our team or watch these videos to see a quick overview.

Industry: Fashion