Moneysworth & Best works smarter, drives agility with Dynamics 365 Business Central

No small challenges

Established almost 40 years ago in Ontario, Canada, Moneysworth & Best Quality Shoe Care is a family-owned company that provides a comprehensive assortment of shoe care products to retail stores across North America and beyond, from shoeshine stands to leading big-box and online retailers.

“Our mission is to provide customers with a comprehensive range of shoe care products, while promoting the importance of caring for and repairing your shoes,” says Maral Nalbandian, Director of Marketing at Moneysworth & Best Quality Shoe Care. “We take great pride in delivering this service with world-class reliability and dependability.”

Running a small to midsize business doesn’t necessarily make the business challenges any smaller. As with many family-run businesses, leadership and key employees at Moneysworth & Best often wear multiple hats, are never truly off the clock, and can struggle to equalize time spent working versus personal life.

To allow for greater work-life balance and to keep up with changing markets, multiple business relationships, high-volume and multichannel transactions and complex workflows, Moneysworth & Best replaced on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) software with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The company uses its new centralized, cloud-based operations and customer engagement platform to optimize finance, supply chain, inventory, distribution, sales processes, automate manual activities, enhance visibility and collaboration, and free company leadership from having to micromanage day-to-day operations.

The answers are in the cloud

After years of on-premises operation, Moneysworth & Best knew the cloud would provide the simplest way to reduce costs while improving agility, enabling remote working, and ensuring it always had the most up-to-date software solutions. The company worked with VOX ISM, a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to first deploy the core ERP functionality in Business Central and then move on to customer engagement capabilities of the cloud-based platform.

“With Business Central, we can provide solutions for each of our teams,” says Ms. Gulesserian. “We have all the traditional ERP tools, in addition to solutions to help marketing, sales, the warehouse, and IT—and whatever else we need going forward. We had a training lead for each team to support the transition and VOX ISM also helped us overcome hurdles and make changes seamlessly.”

With ERP capabilities across finance and operations, Moneysworth & Best also uses the warehouse management module to build faster, more efficient, and more transparent processes across the organization. In doing so, the company has been able to streamline a range of operational workloads, including supply chain management, inventory, barcoding, and shipping.

The company has also extended Dynamics 365 using the Microsoft Power Platform. With Power Apps, Moneysworth & Best built a simple and effective restocking app for its retail partners to help streamline ordering and fulfillment. The company uses Power BI for reporting and analytics, providing a single source of truth to the finance, marketing, sales, supply chain, and warehousing teams through easy-to-understand dashboards.

The right tools at the right time

With the help of VOX ISM, Moneysworth & Best deployed Business Central and its various add-ins in just three months, placing familiar tools and comprehensive business data at the fingertips of its employees and leaving business leaders more time to focus on growth. As turns out, the company centralized its operations data and workflows and enabled efficient remote working at just the right time. With remote access to Dynamics 365 and apps like Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online, Moneysworth & Best built a vital communications lifeline at a time when everyone had to work remotely in response to COVD-19.

“Cloud-based ERP and email have been a tremendous help during COVID-19, and Microsoft Teams suddenly became the app that nobody could live without,” says Paul Gulesserian, Operations Manager at Moneysworth & Best Quality Shoe Care. “It couldn’t have come at a better time.”

Work smarter, get it done, and go on vacation

Moneysworth & Best has used the easy-to-deploy, simple-to-use Business Central platform to provide better visibility into operations, inventory, supply chain, sales, and every other area of the business. The company can now react quickly to changing markets with cloud-based tools, work smarter with various integrations, and perform better with real-time insights into what’s happening around it.

“The biggest advantage of Business Central is the amount of information we can access,” says Linda del Giudice, Sales Executive at Moneysworth & Best Quality Shoe Care. “We’ve used it to streamline every process, and now any member of our team can utilize and update information in real time.”

With instant access to information, company teams have improved forecasting—something that proved vital amid the unpredictability of COVID-19, when the company needed quicker visibility into what was necessary to satisfy customers’ needs. “Dynamics 365 has given us better transparency, and I think we collaborate much better now as a result,” says Ms. Gulesserian. “Everything happens so much faster now, regardless of how many moving parts or people are involved.”

Moneysworth & Best plans to incorporate more Dynamics 365 and Power Platform functionality, including the AI in Power Automate, to help drive further efficiency improvements. For now, though, the company’s owners can enjoy a more efficient workplace and the work-life balance they craved.

“When we’re on vacation, or even just away from our desks, our staff still know that we can be available to see exactly what they’re seeing in the office or the warehouse,” says Mr. Gulesserian. “With that capability in Dynamics 365, you can be anywhere in the world and stay connected to your team.”

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