As the Midwest’s number one resource for buying and selling plastic resins, Discover Plastics has years of experience in virtually every facet of plastics sourcing and manufacturing. From procurement and recycling to injection molding, the team members know that by understanding their customers’ needs, they can deliver exceptional service. That is why each team member’s goal is to know what a customer’s specific current and future requirements are and whether they need a special formulation of resin or standard virgin, regrind or reprocessed resin. Managing that information is key to the company’s ongoing success.
While their old manufacturing and accounting system had served them well, Discover knew they needed to make a change as their system was no longer supported by the software developer. As a long term client of Business Automation Specialists of Minnesota (BASM), Discover Plastics had been through a software implementation with BASM previously when moving off their proprietary DOS based system. As the time came to make another change, Discover and BASM worked together to determine that Microsoft Dynamics NAV was the next logical choice.
It was important to Discover not to lose any of the functionality they had with their old system. According to company President, Lamar Detert, “At any given time we have two to three million pounds of resin on the floor, a portion of which is recycled. Knowing what inventory we have by weight, lot, color and other factors; such as how much of a particular lot was committed, lot costs and lot specific pricing, is paramount to our success.” With the business growing, company executives also wanted to take advantage of the latest technology to keep them ahead of the curve and their competition.
“When we first looked at a new system years ago, we looked at a number of companies,” recalls Lamar Detert. “I was particularly impressed with BASM. They not only understood what we needed from a software standpoint, but also understood how to use it to streamline our business processes. That implementation was a huge success and helped catapult our business into the new millennium. BASM has supported our accounting and manufacturing system needs ever since. Turning to them to help us with this next step was the obvious decision.” According to Melissa Reichenbacher, Implementation Specialist with BASM, “Moving from the system we set up for Discover years ago to Microsoft Dynamics NAV was a fairly streamlined process for us. We were intimately familiar with the way Discover worked; their processes and their needs, so we were able to recreate the customized features from their old system into NAV, but the new system also gave them expanded capabilities.”
Melissa continued, “The huge success with this conversion is that the implementation came in at 49% of the quote. Discover fully took advantage of all the tools provided by BASM such as remote and recorded training sessions. They then spent the time needed in the NAV system going over and validating information and replaying training videos. During this time they developed system and process procedures, and subsequent training sessions became more and more concise.”
Thanks to excellent project management on Discover’s side, and BASM’s training philosophy, the Go-Live had no glitches. Questions that would normally come up during Go-Live didn’t because of Discover’s diligence ahead of time testing and learning the system. In fact, Discover chose to do dual-entry for 6 weeks, making sure the transactions were exact in both systems. “They’ve been self-sufficient ever since,” stated Melissa. “In fact, Discover was 64% under-budget on their Go-Live 60 day support.”
“We are very thankful that we decided to implement NAV,” stated Lamar. “It’s very easy to use, very reliable, and we never have the types of errors we had on our old system. We can create our own custom reports in NAV and no longer need to have BASM develop them for us. This was a great move for us and it went so smoothly thanks to BASM and hard work from our team.”