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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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.

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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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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5 fast facts: Why Sunrise Technologies is the Microsoft partner for you

Is a new ERP like Microsoft Dynamics 365 in your future? Consider this…your mother was right…picking the right partner is important. Basing your technology and implementation selection on budget or location alone, without considering industry experience and pre-built solutions, can have you headed straight towards an over budget, overly customized, headache of a deployment.

At Sunrise, we believe that every morning’s sunrise is an invitation for relentless improvement that will support a brand’s growth into new product lines, channels, and global markets. Challenging business as usual with a fresh approach to ERP, CRM, and business intelligence on a single platform requires us to go far beyond just making technology work.

It is critical that we deliver our clients real solutions that can help you:

Grow your business globally
Tighten the links of your supply chain
Expand across multiple channels
Lower your overall costs

Microsoft has recognized our achievements and ability to deliver real industry solutions with a number of awards. We have been Retail Partner of the Year, Distribution Partner of the Year and members of the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and President’s Clubs that celebrate the top partners worldwide.

Beyond this proven track record of delivering real industry solutions, here are 5 reasons you can trust Sunrise as your partner for a lifetime.

1. We speak your language

No other partner knows your industry as well as Sunrise. With over 22 years of experience in ERP and BI, and hundreds of successful industry focused go-lives, it’s no wonder we have a reputation for knowing our stuff. You’ll have a more productive system evaluation, deployment, and ongoing support with our team of Microsoft certified specialists. This vertical focus on manufacturing, distribution, and retail offers deep expertise in consumer goods (textiles, apparel, footwear, accessories, home furnishings, furniture, cosmetics) and other discrete products has allowed us to streamline our implementations with our exclusive Sunrise 365^TM solutions.

2. Hit the ground running

With an industry partner, you’ll get to value faster with less customizations. You’ll be able to start with a system that’s ready to go with industry solutions built for Dynamics 365. Our exclusive Sunrise 365 solutions immediately deliver industry best practices and speed up implementations with pre-configurations, a business process library, and advanced supply chain capabilities.

The Sunrise 365 solution family is consists of and supported by:

Quick Start 365 – Accelerate new implementations and upgrades
Supply Chain 365 – Add game-changing processes and reporting
Business Intelligence – Empower every level of the organization with embedded role-based dashboards
Global Support – Brands are global, and so is our 24×7 ongoing support

3. Ready for the cloud

Cloud is a strategy to minimize costs and speed up business agility. By 2020, only 10% of business applications will be on premise and our customers are quickly adopting the Microsoft cloud solutions. Many partners are resisting this change but Sunrise is far ahead of the pack and gaining more momentum every day. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and a high performing Cloud Solution Provider with tons of cloud projects underway, we’re ready to handle the future and our industry solutions are ready too. Sunrise has never missed a product update from Microsoft, so we’re able to offer the latest and greatest on day one. In fact, since Dynamics AX moved to the cloud and became Dynamics 365, several version updates have been released from Microsoft and within a week, our solutions were updated as well.

4. Local (but global)

Headquartered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Sunrise has regional offices spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. No matter where you are in the world, count on Sunrise to bring industry expertise to the table, everywhere you do business. It’s important that we are a global company because it helps us better serve our global customers. Sunrise is headquartered Winston-Salem, North Carolina with regional offices located in Dallas, Texas; Salt Lake City, Utah; Xi’an, China and Lugano, Switzerland. Most of our team is remote and we even offer internally managed, offshore development services that pass lower costs onto our customers.

5. Pay-as-you-go support

Projects don’t end at go live. Information systems are living and breathing, constantly changing and evolving with the business direction. Why hire freelance consultants or expensive full time staff when you can leverage Sunrise Global Support? This is an a favorite service among our customers because they gain a cost-effective support umbrella with 24×7 coverage across North America, Europe, and Asia. Let our team maximize your investment in Dynamics 365 or Dynamics AX for a lifetime, freeing up your team for more business critical initiatives.

Other Resources
We aim to be your one stop shop for Microsoft cloud solutions with value-added services and products that help reduce the total cost of ownership of business applications. We have been partnered with Microsoft since the beginning because its solutions empower employees to embrace change and enable businesses to thrive with better decision making.

Download the PDF here.

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Why Sunrise? 5 reasons you can count on Sunrise

Why Sunrise? 5 Reasons You Can Count on Sunrise

Trust Sunrise to implement the last ERP you’ll ever need. This factsheet outlines 5 reasons you can count on Sunrise Technologies to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 and support it for a lifetime. In a nutshell, we speak your language and have exclusive industry solutions so you can hit the ground running. Plus you’ll enjoy the affordability and elasticity of the Microsoft Cloud, and a global consulting and support presence. See the backside of the factsheet for a quick overview of our industry solutions.

Our commitment to clients

Our Commitment to Clients

Our promise to support you long after go live.

We’ve always believed in long term relationships. And long after go live, you can count on us as an extension of your IT team.

You’ll receive access to 24×7 support, made possible by our team of functional and technical team members all across the globe.

Learn more about our support services

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Time is money: How we decreased our expensing time by 96%

At Sunrise Technologies, we help our customers every day along their journeys towards operational efficiency and excellence through the use of technology. However, we don’t always take time to examine our own internal practices through periods of extreme growth and success. It’s easy to just keep rolling along and ignore our own advice.

For many years, we struggled with a very manual process of putting our consultants’ expenses and receipts together for our customers. As the company grew from 10 consultants to over 70, our process became a huge burden. We were spending roughly 4 man-days printing, compiling, checking, and scanning receipts. 70 traveling consultants can produce over 2,000 receipts in a 2-week billing period!

If you’re a current Sunrise customer, you already know that we recently took the plunge and implemented the Concur Expense Management solution. Concur made life so much easier for all involved. Our consultants can now take photos of receipts with a mobile app provided by Concur, which also reads the receipt using OCR technology and inputs the critical information into the app such as the vendor, date, and total. The app enforces company-wide policies for attaching receipts and submitting reports. Back in the home office, we can now review and approve all reports online, with the reassurance that the software is mandating a matching receipt image. No more printing and compiling!

However, our MOST important consideration in this decision was our customers. In fact, if we couldn’t make this transition seamless and easy for our customers, we would not have done it. We needed a clean and efficient way to bill the expenses back to the customer and to provide a detailed report of each consultant’s expenses, including receipts. Concur delivered the functionality we needed to track billable expenses and receipts per customer.

The final expense report needed to be functional, but it also needed to look nice and represent the craftsman-like quality that our customers expect from us on a daily basis. We opted to use MicroStrategy to generate these documents for us. Our internal MicroStrategy consulting team was a joy to work with and they got the project done quickly.

The end result is amazing! MicroStrategy runs automatically during each billing cycle to generate, compress, and post the final reports on an internal server, which was already in place to house our expense reports for auditing purposes. Now we simply attach those reports from the server into our normal email to the customer. The process impact to the customer is minimal.

On average, our consultants went from spending 90 minutes on expense reports to only 30 minutes! Concur was easy to learn with its intuitive user interface, and is very convenient to use while traveling. This is a huge win when we consider that our consultants are typically working on these reports on the weekends. In the home office, we completely eliminated our dependence on paper and greatly reduced the time spent preparing the expense reports. Our customers now have an end report that’s easier to read and has the look and feel of other Sunrise documents, thanks to MicroStrategy.

We look forward to the next step in our journey towards improvement….stay tuned!

Topic: Partnership