From paper and spreadsheets to a real-time ERP in agriculture
Greenfield ERP for a farming operation of around 8,000 hectares: in under a year from paper and Excel to real-time processes and audit-ready accounts.
Challenge
The operation farmed around 8,000 hectares of owned and leased land, yet ran the business mostly on paper documents and Excel sheets. Stock, lease contracts, goods receipts and sales were kept separately from one another, and reliable figures arrived only after a considerable delay. Month-end closes were laborious, stock counts were snapshots, and an audit by external auditors was not possible on that data.
Then there was the ratio of land to people: an industrial-scale operation was run by around 30 users. The team could not afford duplicate data entry or manual hand-offs between systems; processes had to be lean and automated wherever possible.
The third challenge was the group structure. The group consisted of numerous companies with different roles: land-owning companies, operating companies and a service company providing services to the operating units. Externally, processes, responsibilities and transactions between these companies had to be kept strictly separate. Internally, the same team handled all of it and needed to do so with minimal effort, despite intercompany flows that were at times closely intertwined. A standard ERP alone would not have been enough: land, leases and the processes around the weighbridge, warehouse and processing do not exist in any standard system.
Solution
I led the project as a greenfield implementation of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2, from the requirements workshops through design and development to acceptance testing and go-live. Less than a year passed between first contact and go-live.
Where the standard ended, I developed dedicated industry modules tailored to the processes of industrial-scale farming. Weighbridges, fuel stations, mobile devices and tills were connected directly, so data is created where the work happens instead of being typed in afterwards.
For the group structure, I automated intercompany transactions, synchronized data between the companies and mirrored processes. A sales invoice in one company automatically becomes the mirrored purchase invoice in the other, and the same applies to journal entries, payments and other intercompany transactions. The required separation therefore creates no extra overhead. Further optimizations and module extensions followed in the years after. In the medium term, the complexity of the structure led to the merger of the group companies, which I also handled at ERP level, as I did the two version changes up to Business Central.
My role
- Project lead for the entire ERP implementation
- Requirements workshops with the business departments
- Design and development of the industry solutions
- Acceptance testing and go-live
- Integration of third-party systems and tax authority interfaces
- Support through the merger and the upgrades
Industry modules built
- Land management
- The farmed land as master data in the ERP, the reference for quantities, costs and analysis.
- Lease management
- Lease contracts with terms and conditions and their settlement, in the system instead of in lists.
- Inventory management
- Goods receipts, stock movements and stock levels, posted as they happen and available for analysis at any time.
- Sales
- From order through loading at the weighbridge to the invoice in one continuous flow.
- Production
- Production processes with consumption and output, adapted to the way the business works.
- Group and intercompany processes
- Automatically mirrored documents between the companies: one company's sales invoice becomes the other's purchase invoice, and likewise for postings and payments.
Integrations
- Weighbridges: weighing data flows straight into the documents
- On-site fuel stations
- Mobile terminals and barcode scanners
- Barcode printing
- Cash registers
- RO e-Factura: electronic invoices to the Romanian tax administration
- SAF-T: digital reporting of accounting data to the Romanian tax authorities
Project timeline
- 1
Greenfield implementation
Dynamics NAV 2009 R2: requirements workshops, design, development, acceptance testing and go-live, in under a year from first contact.
- 2
Expansion in the following years
Further optimizations and module extensions during live operation.
- 3
Merger of the group companies
Consolidating the companies at ERP level, as a consequence of the complex group structure.
- 4
Upgrade to NAV 2017
Version change from 2009 R2 to 2017, including the custom industry modules.
- 5
Upgrade to Business Central
Move from NAV 2017 to Business Central, today's platform.
Results
- Audit-ready for the first time: audits by renowned international audit firms became possible
- Around 30 users run an operation of roughly 8,000 hectares, without duplicate data entry
- Intercompany transactions run automatically and stay cleanly separated between the companies
- Month-end closes and day-to-day work in real time
- Stock counts and stock levels in real time instead of snapshots
- Purchases, sales and stock movements are posted as they happen
- Requirements planning and detailed purchase planning
- Reporting to investors and management at the push of a button, automated at fixed intervals
- Cash-flow planning and contribution-margin analysis based on real historical figures instead of estimates
- Far less effort preparing reports and KPIs, with much deeper insight
- Strategic decisions based on demonstrable trends instead of gut feeling
- End-to-end traceability from the weighbridge to the invoice, without manual re-entry
- Tax reporting obligations (e-Factura, SAF-T) are met directly from the ERP
- A merger and two upgrades with the same point of contact, with no loss of process knowledge
Takeaway
The real gain was not the software but the data foundation: for the first time, management could rely on demonstrable figures instead of estimates, towards investors, towards auditors and in its own planning. And because analysis, development and support stayed with the same person throughout, the process knowledge survived the merger and the upgrades.
Let's discuss your ERP project
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