Microsoft spotlights Sunrise customer Frette and their Dynamics 365 deployment
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.
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.
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.
As the SVP of Global Business Development for Sunrise Technologies, Cem Item brings nearly 20 years of experience in business systems experience in the textile, apparel, footwear, home furnishings, retail, and consumer goods industries. He offers a deep supply chain understanding in manufacturing, distribution, and retail operations with knowledge of ERP, CRM, POS, and BI systems. For Sunrise clients with operations across North America, Europe, and Asia, Cem provides thought leadership and guidance throughout the evaluation process of Microsoft Dynamics 365, business system strategy and a vision for digital transformation.
Over the years, we’ve had hundreds of successful go lives with consumer brands, manufacturers, and distributors. With that many implementations under our belt, we’ve been able to gain a different perspective on how modern, cloud-based, business applications better manage complex operations. Even though our clients have very different products and processes, we see the same industry challenges over and over. The good news is we’re able to solve them with modern ERP and CRM applications. We were inspired to share some of the common challenges we see (and fix) after our recent joint presentation with Ultra Consultants. You can watch the recording here to learn more and see a quick overview demo.
Complex Operations Are Cumbersome to Manage With Outdated Legacy Systems
So why do so many organizations try to battle the same challenges with outdated technology? Nearly all businesses have faced the same evolution of technology over the past few decades. Moving from no packaged software to point applications that couldn’t do it all, companies have ended up with a patchwork of integrations and homegrown solutions. As businesses became more complex and global, the Frankenstein infrastructures continued to get more custom, and more painful to manage. Most commonly, we see these legacy systems have a really hard time managing:
Does Your Organization Currently Utilize Technology that Meets Your Operational Needs?
Poll results during the webinar found that 63% of organizations were dealing with friction created by legacy systems. Every organization will likely come to a digital transformation crossroads in which they will be forced to upgrade or implement new enterprise technology to better manage the organization’s complexities. More than 50% are considering the cloud because of the advantages it provides. Curious about how the cloud may benefit you? Check out our cloud eBook for more details.
If you’d like to see a demo of how Sunrise and Microsoft Dynamics 365 can solve some of the challenges outlined above, you can watch the webinar recording here.
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.
Before joining Sunrise Technologies, Annie Graziani spent 15 years working in the NYC apparel industry with a primary focus in organizational management and operations. Her ability to manage at the most senior level as a COO and at a detailed level overseeing day to day operational objectives to meet company-wide initiatives is one of the reasons she is such an asset to the Sunrise team. Additionally, Annie has had experience implementing Microsoft Dynamics as both a partner and a client, giving her a unique perspective and understanding of the rewards and challenges of modern business applications.
The past few years have been rough on consumer brands and retailers, but it isn’t all doom and gloom! If your company has survived to see 2019 with a fan base that loves your apparel, footwear, accessories, cosmetics, or whatever it may be, you’ve got to be doing something right. However, industry trends suggest that you’ve still got to fight to thrive in the coming years. This means working smarter, savvier, and more strategically than your competitors.
What does it take for a brand to survive?
So, how do you make sure that 2019 is a great year? Brand leaders know what it takes to grow and thrive for the long term:
It’ll be even easier if you’re not fighting an uphill battle with continuous friction created by legacy systems, stagnant business behaviors, and short-sighted thinking. This is a great time of year to look inward, reignite the excitement and highlight continuous improvement efforts to make sure you’re able to build value and grow with your employees, vendors, and customers on board. You’ll especially want to watch out for these common roadblocks we see that can make it challenging to meet your goals:
Now that technology has leapfrogged ahead, there is really no excuse to maintain a Frankenstein legacy environment. The time to tackle your legacy technical debt is now. And chances are, you’re probably already aware that any organization still using a combination of disparate, on-premise, or outdated systems is basically operating on borrowed time. These systems can create a huge risk — both in terms of a system failure, exposure to malware attacks, as well as reduced revenue resulting from unreliable data, time spent on manipulating reports needed to make informed decisions, and broad operational inefficiencies. It can also make it harder to implement necessary improvements to deploy omnichannel retail initiatives.
Data is the backbone of an organization. How do you expect to make decisions about what products to sell, at what price, and to whom, without reliable information? Retailers are making huge investments into technology and infrastructure to support their brands. Using systems and reliable data to facilitate fast decision making is critical in remaining competitive. If you can’t deliver on your brand’s promise while others are relying more heavily on technology to steer the ship, it’s likely your brand is going to fall behind.
Sunrise’s founder and former CIO of a major consumer brand always says:
Think of technology as the mainstream with little side streams that come and go. Microsoft is always going to be the mainstream.
Any CIO that chooses to deviate from the mainstream is taking a risk that the vendor will not be around to innovate and support the product long term. Microsoft will always be relevant as smaller competitors continue to be acquired or go out of business. And with a budget of over $1B annually dedicated to R&D, Microsoft’s focus on continuously improving its business applications
You know that delivering the right inventory to everyone, everywhere is critical. In order to do that effectively, we’ve found it’s best to keep your inventory as close to a single pool as possible; channel-less. The more inventory is segregated for wholesale, ecommerce, brick-and-mortar, and pop-up events, the more challenges you’re likely to have ensuring that the right product is at the right place at the right time. Make it easier for your organization and drive to eliminate the room for error.
Good news! You no longer need separate order management, point of sale (POS), warehouse, and retail replenishment systems now that a single, intelligent platform is a viable alternative. One example is Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain integrating seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Commerce. It’s time, now more than ever, to consolidate the number of solutions, minimize the dependency and expense on point-applications, and truly plan for the future by enabling unified commerce and all the benefits available in a long-term platform approach.
You know your business best, so don’t let your business applications dictate how you run your legal entities. While it sometimes makes sense to approach your business as separate entities, it should be your decision – not your software’s. With more and more companies viewing global expansion as increasingly critical for long term survival, you’ve got to have a solution that can handle the complexities of multi-legal entity structures, multi-currency, multi-language business, as well as adapting to the various regulations found in other countries. Your systems should enable and support your growth, no matter how far you plan to expand – not inhibit it.
There are very few companies that manage a fully integrated supply chain within the bounds of the company ownership. But just because you’re working with OEM suppliers or contract parties, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t model your full supply chain. You can add value and gain insight by having a global view of your entire supply chain. The companies that set out to add more value and help suppliers cut costs are the ones that win in the end. Leaving it up to a third party to give you the best value doesn’t cut it anymore. Gain the visibility you need to remain competitive and relevant to your supply chain and, ultimately, your customers.
To get the most value from your IT department, free them from being at your managers’ beck and call to create and run reports so they can focus on building your business infrastructure for growth. By allowing your users to create and view reliable reports that enable better quality and faster decision-making helps to democratize the ability to run useful reports, at your users’ fingertips. This frees your IT department so they can keep their eyes on the ever-changing, cutting edge of technology and bring even more value to the business users. Today, it’s easier than ever to manage and access big data, dashboards, and machine learning at every level including real-time business reporting. You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t start taking advantage of these advances. In fact, in his recap of NRF 2019, Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst, Brendan Witcher, said “Data is the 2019 competitive weapon for retail — if you don’t have a data strategy, you won’t have a successful digital strategy. You cannot create great experiences for customers whom you don’t understand or manage a business that you can’t properly evaluate.”
It’s easy to assume that all clouds are equal and therefore the deciding factor is price. However, this isn’t the case. When choosing a cloud-based business solution, it’s important to consider things that may incur ‘hidden’ costs, like the flexibility to fit your industry requirements vs the increased cost and time to custom-build a solution. It’s also important to think about how your users will adjust to a new system. By combining Office 365 with Dynamics 365 ERP and CRM, users can see serious productivity gains while using a familiar interface. While those factors will never be in a price comparison chart, they are just as important as licensing and usage fees.
It never hurts to start discussions and gather information about estimates, resources, and timing as early as possible. Even if you’ve got a plan and a platform in mind, you’ve still got to get your manager, your peers, and your team members on board. And they will all have opinions, varying by seniority, role, and past experiences with different software solutions. Not to mention, the range of emotions from excitement to fear need to be carefully managed. Everyone has a different opinion about what the path forward should look like, so your best bet is to start the process early. Also, if you’re expecting to have something in place by the next holiday season, you’ve got to start now.
Third party consultants and vendors have their time and place and in some cases can be extremely helpful, but selecting the right one for your business is key. You can easily get steered in the wrong direction by a software expert who doesn’t know your industry. They can lead you to solutions that are actually not actually applicable to your unique style of business, don’t really solve the problems of the industry, and/or require excessive customizations to get the system to work for you.
Growing your brand is hard enough– you don’t need your systems working against you. To keep pace with your competitors, let alone the sheer pace of change, you need a solution that can keep up. Yet, studies show that companies only change their business systems every 7-10 years. If you’re in that camp, and you’re thinking about making a move in the coming year, be smart about it. Point applications strung together with costly interfaces used to be your only choice, but not anymore. Following our tips is a great start, but to get the most out of your investment, make sure you pick a totally integrated solution that allows you to scale and grow as needed while fulfilling your brand promise to your customers.
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.
With all the challenges facing furniture makers today, how can companies stay committed to craftsmanship while growing their brand?
Since Sunrise is headquartered in North Carolina, we are surrounded with reminders of the home furnishings industry. We even have the world’s largest chair. Everyone knows that mid-April and mid-October are terrible times to host out-of-town guests, as every hotel, restaurant, and highway is packed with the 80,000 people attending the High Point Furniture Market (or just “Market” to the locals). And yet, even though the home furnishings industry has such a big role in the economy, both locally and nationally, it is facing increasingly tough challenges.
There are the historical issues, like rising costs, and the ever-present desire to cut costs and increase profitability, but new concerns are working their way into the mix. The effort to keep costs low and profits high has led to increasingly complex, global supply chains.
Changing buyer behavior means potentially expanding into new channels, providing value-added service to brick-and-mortar locations, and an emphasis on exceptional customer service. These challenges are all part of the everyday conversation for furnishings executives – and it’s a lot to keep up with! This is especially true if the organization’s foundational technology is outdated or no longer a good fit for this more complex operational environment.
We’ve compiled nine of these common challenges (and their solutions!) into a new, interactive eBook. Each page addresses an issue that can put a strain on business operations, the underlying technological infrastructure, and ways to address them – before they impact the bottom line. Get your free copy today!
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.
When it comes time to deploy a new ERP solution, which is best? Waterfall, agile, or something in between?
We all know that ERP implementations are tricky things. From 2012 to 2016, 55% of implementations exceeded their planned budgets and 66% took longer than planned. But…why? ERP isn’t exactly a new concept and you’d think, by now, there’d be a consensus on the best, easiest, and cheapest way to implement. Clearly, that isn’t the case. While there are many possibilities for these troubling statistics, let’s consider one that shows up in nearly every result when you Google “why ERP implementations fail”: project management. And more specifically, how best to approach an implementation timeline. Should you go waterfall, agile, or something in between?
Waterfall approaches have traditionally been favored by companies with simpler, static business practices. It’s easy to see why this concept is alluring. Project owners have a strong belief that they understand how their business works, so why not just get all the planning for each process out of the way and get going already! But, as the name suggests, once you start going down a waterfall, there’s no going back up – at least not without extreme effort and pain. In fact, the more complex a technology project is, the more wasteful it is to write exhaustive requirements upfront.
A waterfall approach also doesn’t handle change very well and issues seem to most often appear at the very end. So, any expansion of scope, any process that didn’t make it into the initial planning, any deviation at all from the original plan is going to end up costing you. You also run the risk of finding out in the CRP (at which point go-live is imminent and most of the budget spent) that there are critical problems with the system that must be addressed. Finally, waterfall processes often assume that both a problem and its solution are contained in the same area. Well, you know what they say about assuming things… This operation-centric approach struggles to encompass multiple divisions involved in any given business process.
Waterfall deployments do have some positive aspects. For one thing, expectations are set early on regarding deliverables, making planning and designing more straightforward. Additionally, there are relatively clear benchmarks to measure progress. Finally, for businesses that don’t have many internal resources or stakeholders that are in different physical locations, after the requirements phase there is little need for input from the client until the very end of the project. But these benefits rarely outweigh the potential risks in moving forward with a waterfall approach.
On the other hand, a traditional agile implementation approaches each business process iteratively and considers how multiple business units may impact any given process. Instead of finding issues at the end, they can be addressed during multiple rounds of testing and design. For a more complex and dynamic business, an agile implementation gives the company more opportunities to ensure that the software accurately represents the business both at the outset of the project and at the end.
An agile approach isn’t without its own challenges. Although it is almost always better to have more input from the business at each stage, traditional agile deployments require a high degree of involvement, someone who is completely dedicated to the project, and teams that are in the same physical space. For many organizations, this is simply not possible for a wide variety of logistical, practical, and who-only-does-ONE-thing-in-their-role-anymore reasons. Additionally, because of the frequent reprioritization of a traditional agile deployment, it’s possible that not every sprint would be complete by go-live and it can be hard to track progress.
That leaves us with a hybrid approach that takes the best of both methods. A hybrid method defines the work upfront, borrowing defined phases of development and high-level requirement setting from the waterfall approach. Frequent iteration, testing, and cross-divisional engagement are added from the agile method. Combined, businesses can take advantage of a clear project roadmap with concrete, achievable phases where progress is easy to track, yet still flexible enough to accommodate any unforeseen challenges or changes to the business. All while exposing and engaging end users to the new solution for as long as possible (another well-documented key to implementation success) through frequent, but not all-consuming, check-ins.
This hybrid approach recognizes that any project with the scope and complexity of an ERP implementation is about more than just developing software. It’s about addressing broad operational concerns and transforming the business, so it can tackle challenges today, tomorrow, and years from now.
Ultimately, each method has its own pros and cons and it is up to the organization, along with a trusted partner, to determine which method is the best fit.
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.
Download the ebook to get 9 actionable tips to help solve the most common problems faced in the furnishings industry.
Whether your furnishings business is manufacturing, distribution, retail; casegoods, upholestry, or textiles – or a mix of all of the above, there are unique challenges inherent in the industry. These are just a sample of the problems we cover in this interactive eBook.
Home Furnishings may be the definition of a multi-dimensional product and are almost always configurable. With thousands of potential combinations, you’ve got to have an intelligent management solution.
With long lead times and a complex supply chain, there’s little room for error when forecasting demand. Intelligent allocation is a must to avoid unhappy customers and a ding to the company’s reputation.
To grow and compete, many furnishing companies are expanding to new channels – far better for customers but can be a corporate nightmare if each channel is running in a silo. Bring them together to provide a true omnichannnel experience.
Sunrise Technologies is a global, gold-certified Microsoft Partner specializing in the implementation and support of Dynamics 365. Sunrise also provides exclusive extensions and capabilities in key industries – apparel, footwear, consumer goods, and home furnishing companies with manufacturing, distribution, and/or retail operations.
Let us help you implement your great ideas today.
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There are a lot of gloom and doom stories about retailers in the news recently. However, this is just a symptom of changing times and consumer expectations — not a death sentence for existing organizations. With the help of new technology and the cloud, retailers still have a chance to strengthen their brands, increase revenue, and optimize operational efficiency. In this eBook, we cover:
With the help of new technology and the cloud, retailers can strengthen their brands, increase revenue, and optimize operational efficiency. The cloud is the critical ingredient needed to build a competitive advantage to ensure your retail brand stands the test of time. Fill out the form above to gain access.
61 % of growth-oriented businesses are focused on moving from on-premise to cloud solutions to better engage customers, empower employees, and optimize operations.
61 % of growth-oriented businesses are focused on moving from on-premise to cloud solutions to better engage customers, empower employees, and optimize operations.
61 % of growth-oriented businesses are focused on moving from on-premise to cloud solutions to better engage customers, empower employees, and optimize operations.
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Save time and gain instant value when you deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 with Sunrise industry extensions.
