Introduction

InterRadish is focused on customer enablement. Enablement can mean different things to different customers, but for us the goal is the same: give customers as much information, knowledge, and assistance to implement the D365 WMS as they need. Whether it means a fully staffed, large-scale implementation, or it means an assessment at some point of the customer’s implementation journey, we’re ready to help.

The latter is the case with our first customer case study, Brimborg ehf. Throughout this article, we will detail how we engaged with Brimborg, their decision factors on engaging with InterRadish and landing on the readiness assessment, our approach, the results, and where Brimborg is today.

We first met Brimborg as we do with many of our customers: organically at the DynamicsMinds Dynamics 365 and Power Platform conference in Portoroz, Slovenia (subtle plug for DynamicsMinds – highly recommend attending if you haven’t before). DynamicsMinds is the largest D365 conference in Europe nowadays and is a great place for customers to find partners with particular specializations, which is exactly what happened.

Brimborg ehf, established in 1964, is Iceland's largest integrated vehicle and equipment distributor, headquartered in Reykjavík. The company has experienced significant growth, expanding by 500% since 2000, and ranks among the top 50 companies in Iceland. Brimborg was attending DynamicsMinds with a purpose. Their goal was to aggressively upgrade their Dynamics AX 2012 R3 implementation to D365, and to learn as much as they can to see how they could be supported in this process.

As it so happened we as InterRadish held several presentations on warehousing topics at DynamicsMinds and Brimborg approached our stand after one of our sessions in order to figure out if we could work together. They are an extremely agile organization who wanted to perform the bulk of the upgrade to D365 themselves, but recognized they needed some guidance with regards to the WMS. The implementation had not yet kicked off but had a target go-live date of only a few months, so for both parties it was clear: InterRadish should perform a readiness assessment to determine how feasible the timeline is based on the organization’s current structure, operational processes, and existing implementation.

From site visit to report readiness the engagement was executed in only a few weeks and our message to Brimborg was clear: the timeline is too tight based on where you are and we do not recommend you proceed right now with your implementation. But by performing some organizational readiness tasks, you can be ready to kick off your implementation, and we’ll give you as many tools as we can for you to expedite that process.

Readiness assessment

Our approach to the readiness assessment depends on where our customer is in their implementation. In Brimborg’s case, they hadn’t begun yet. We needed to establish a baseline, and as is true with almost all of our engagements that means we need to visit the facility. Warehousing is a physical thing by nature, so we always like to get on site as soon as possible. Throughout a three-day site visit two of our team members were able to assess the operations and deep-dive the current WMS implementation to identify what we thought were the biggest risks and areas of concern for Brimborg to watch out for in their implementation.

During our first site visits to customers, we want to spend as much time walking through the facility as possible. Establishing a baseline understanding of the inbound operations, how the inventory is managed throughout the facility, and the outbound operations is essential, and it’s not something that can be conducted thoroughly in a couple of hours. Throughout the years we’ve learned there are a few areas which we should especially pay attention to as they often come up as the more complex parts of any implementation:

• What is the situation with the existing WMS and how customized is it?
• What does the existing application landscape look like, and are other 3^rd parties ready for an upgrade?
• Are the workers guided by the system or are they driving the process?
• Are the identified business requirements actual business requirements, or legacy system requirements?

Typically you can make a reasonable assumption with how customized the WMS is going to be by looking at the version of the WMS. If you go to a site who has been running Navision for ten years with no 3^rd party WMS and their operations are fairly complex or high volume, the WMS is going to be (heavily) modified. The level of WMS customization can tell you a lot about an organization (especially if you get into how it’s been customized), but primarily it tells you how they problem solve. Heavy customizations can indicate problem solving is IT-driven, while lesser, targeted customizations tend to indicate problem solving is operations-driven. In Brimborg’s case, the level of customization was quite low, but the customizations done to the WMS were impactful to the overall process. This meant that a deep review of these customizations was necessary, and they were mapped to more standard processes in D365. Moving away from tailor-made customizations to standard functions, even if they provide the same end-result, is always a tough pill to swallow for warehouse users.

In a system implementation for larger organizations it’s typical to find larger application landscapes. Integrations to other organizational tools as well as third parties both add complexity to the situation. What makes a potential upgrade even more tricky is ensuring that the integrated applications will play nice with the new system (and even further to that, when the project is treated as a simple upgrade rather than a complex project). In the D365 world we have the benefit of embedded solutions in the application layer, partner ISV models. While this gives customers more options on how to solve gaps, it also presents the challenge of ensuring the ISVs are ready to go with the upgraded version. In Brimborg’s case they were heavily reliant on an ISV solution which was not in a position to work seamlessly with the D365 WMS. This meant a tighter collaboration with the partner was necessary to ensure the timeline of the upgraded ISV solution matched Brimborg’s timeline for the implementation.

How guided is the process in the facility? A user-guided process indicates a heavy reliance on the workers, and can typically indicate the workers have deep knowledge on the processes, have worked in the facility for a long time, and are going to be reluctant to change. It also indicates a high-level of flexibility is needed in operations. A system-guided process indicates that there are defined rules that have been translated into the system (which means there’s either a heavily customized or a top-tier WMS) and adoption of systemic processes will be simpler. In Brimborg’s case, the process is highly variable and requires a lot of flexibility, and is therefore very user-driven. Because of this, there were customizations in place supporting this – something we always try to avoid.

On top of these, we see the same two challenges with almost every customer we interact with:

• Lack of process documentation.
• Lack of a structured WMS implementation timeline.

Developing and maintaining process documentation internally is a critical step before beginning an implementation. Yes, it’s incredibly useful for the partners to use as an established baseline of the processes, but it’s also more than that. The process of building the documentation is itself a discovery tool for the organization to realize what its processes actually are. This helps to bring management and operations closer together before the project starts, not during requirements gathering (where you typically see it).

When customers set out to start an implementation there’s always a target go-live date in mind. Maybe it’s even fixed. While most partners like to work the other way around (start with the detailed project plan and set the fixed date from that), many are used to working in the manner wherein the date is already set. And most of the time partners can make that work. The exception is when the timeline is aggressive – there you need to ensure you establish a strong, detailed project plan early on, something that was missing in this case.

Results of the assessment

Over a couple of weeks, our team prepared a report to be delivered and presented to Brimborg with our findings. The main message, loud and clear, was don’t start your project yet. You need time and you need to structure your implementation approach differently. While there was plenty of data to review, to ensure that the stakeholders of the project were engaged and our message was clear, our report was structured as such:

• Executive summary.
• Review of our approach.
• Define the current state.
• Highlight three key-risk areas.
• Detail out risks by severity: high, medium, low.
  • Provide an actionable recommendation for each risk.

The report itself was actually delivered in two forms. Firstly, a long-form report providing much more detail into different standard D365 functions the organization could use, process changes, suggestions to redesign integrations, and much more. This long-form report is intended for the project team to refer to prior to or during the eventual implementation. Secondly, the presentation-form report, aimed to deliver the message.

In any case the details of the report delivered were and are always structured in such a manner that the customer can take these recommendations and work on them themselves. Our goal is enablement – we want to enable Brimborg to get to a position where they will have a successful, on-time D365 WMS implementation, with or without InterRadish’s assistance.

Since the report was delivered, Brimborg has restructured their project timeline in order to derisk the implementation. They are also already working on resolving a number of the risks identified and is on the path of a successful implementation.

Conclusion

“Last year, Brimborg, one of Iceland’s leading car importers and dealerships, embarked on the journey to upgrade from AX 2012 to Dynamics 365. At the Dynamics Minds conference, we connected with InterRadish, and soon after brought them on board to consult specifically on our warehouse module,” said Kristin Thordardottir, responsible for the D365 rollout at Brimborg.

“InterRadish conducted an in-depth on-site visit and delivered a thorough readiness assessment. Their report clearly outlined critical risks and provided us with a solid go/no-go recommendation that helped shape our roadmap. Since then, we've been actively working to address the identified challenges, and thanks to InterRadish’s insights, we feel confident in our path forward. We’re aiming to be ready for the upgrade later this year, and we’re grateful to have had InterRadish as a trusted partner in this process.”

The readiness assessment in this case was used to determine how ready was the customer to embark on their D365 WMS implementation. But it can be used at any point in an implementation:

• Before the project, to ensure you’re starting on the right path.
• After requirements gathering, to ensure the level of detail you’ve captured is requisite for the complexity of your project.
• After design, before you start building your modifications to make sure you’re customizing the right way.
• Before you go live, to avoid any critical issues you may encounter.

And in any of our readiness assessments, while we have a standard approach, the exact format of the report and deliverables change. Every implementation is different. We wanted our readiness assessments to be able to capture that. As well, to provide as much value as we can based on our experience without having to fully engage our team. We know most customers at these points in their projects have established budgets and partners, and can’t bring on another partner (even if they want to) to assist with a complex WMS rollout. That’s why our engagements exist like they do: to allow us to enable you as the customer and your partner to succeed with or without us.