Bossard fastens its future to innovations in the cloud with Dynamics 365

Productivity requires the right parts

In the industrial fastener business, every improvement, however small, can have a significant positive impact. From lowering the production cost of a coffee machine to the reliability of a train, fasteners play an important role. Similarly, adding efficiency of production, inventory, and design in any manufacturing process can increase company profitability. Bossard calls these incremental improvements “Proven Productivity”—which is also a promise to its customers. The Proven Productivity approach includes optimizing processes and reducing inventory to sustainably increase efficiency and productivity. Bossard is considered a pioneer in developing intelligent production facilities in line with Industry 4.0.

Pain points disrupted productivity

As the company grew in recent years also through acquisitions of complementary organizations around the world, its own internal productivity started to diminish due to the manyfold of IT systems. Leadership began assessing strategies and solutions to support Bossard’s evolving needs.

The company’s custom, in-house enterprise resource planning (ERP) system had worked well in the past, but adding companies and opening new locations was challenging as the legacy system aged. It had also become harder and more expensive to maintain. And it was never truly integrated with other software solutions, including an on-premises commercial finance system, let alone the siloed systems of newly acquired business units. By 2020, the company had 12 separate ERP systems, including SAP and Oracle applications, among others, with hundreds of integrations to manage. The application landscape was fragmented and unable to scale to meet the business’s near- and long-term needs.

Along with their ERPs, acquired companies came with their own established processes, reporting cadences, and success metrics. It was essential for everyone, at every location, to begin collaborating better through integrated workflows built around a central source of data.

Bossard leadership determined it was time the company implemented its own incremental improvements in its infrastructure. Their goals were to create one global template, harmonize processes, and centralize data to improve teamwork, realize efficiencies, and reduce complexities.

A solution built for business

Leadership was aware of the many IT solutions available, but uncertain which one met the company’s current needs and could grow with them. To assess options and determine the best path forward, Bossard turned to HSO, their implementation partner. After evaluating several cloud providers and platforms with HSO, IT leadership selected Microsoft Dynamics 365. It best met all their requirements, and with continuous Microsoft investments in the platform and future technologies, they were confident the solution would support future growth and expansion.

The project had four key goals:

1. One integrated solution: Creating a global standard business process combining legacy systems into a centralized ERP and moving to one global supply chain.
2. Actionable sales insights: Optimizing the sales process to allow growth of the business through enhanced management of accounts receivable and accounts payable, centralized forecasting, and improved intelligence reporting.
3. Customer focus: Increasing customer retention and differentiating products and services based on customer needs.
4.  Supply chain and inventory optimization: Reducing supply chain cost, cycle times, scrap, and order fulfillment lead time. Reducing and optimizing inventory through global stock management.
   
   

In 2021, Bossard began working with HSO on strategies, goals, must-haves, gathering employee feedback, mapping out data management and migration needs and other planning tasks. With everyone from the CEO to warehouse employees able to envision and understand the benefits of the coming changes, buy-in was universal.

Implementing change across countries and cultures

With any large technology project, change doesn’t happen all at once. It must be planned, socialized, tested, modified, and executed incrementally. Understanding this, the Bossard team established a five-year program for the digital transformation of the company’s technical infrastructure and business processes.

Change management on such a large scale is challenging—and it’s even harder if employees don’t feel heard. So Bossard formed a change management team to focus on how to achieve the best internal and external results. As the team visited Bossard locations around the world, employees shared their processes, unique challenges of country, industry, and work culture, and best practices that could be replicated in other places.

The open communication and collaboration resulted in One Bossard—a solution template that could be rolled out globally and easily modified for a location’s region, product, or business focus.

Successful solutions start with the end in mind

To go live in the new cloud environment smoothly and on time, Bossard and HSO teams developed a blueprint for the design and plans for testing, data migration, and integrations. Through regular working sessions and meetings, they shared guidance and suggestions to deliver optimal architecture, data security, high performance, and to mitigate any rollout blockers.

Because Bossard leadership had such a clear vision of the analytics they wanted, the implementation team designed for centralized master data management with export to Azure Data Lake. Interactions with the third-party Slim4 warehousing solution would use a combination of export from Azure Data Lake and Azure Synapse.

Bossard was already using Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing productively since they were rolled out between 2019 and 2021, with the support of implementation partner Wϋrth Phoenix. In mid-2022, with assistance from implementation partner HSO, Denmark and Sweden were first to go live with Dynamics 365 Finance, and Supply Chain Management. With Dynamics 365 end-to-end, all areas of the business are working seamlessly together. Marketing allows the team to focus on the right customer segments to build long-term relationships, and Sales, including LinkedIn Navigator, helps them manage lead-to-quotation processes which are then passed on through Finance for invoicing and Supply Chain Management for production. Having the system work well out of the box with the flexibility to customize for specific needs is a win.

Changing the game

In the new end-to-end process, approved quotations flow into Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management for fulfillment activities, and ultimately to Dynamics 365 Finance for billing and accounting functions. Bossard’s sales team has visibility into each step in the customer journey, allowing them to focus on customers, better predict inventory, and source products efficiently. Says Aruanno, “They can see the demand of an item and what happens in the warehouse. The team operates using just one form, which was not the case before.”

With the new Dynamics 365 solution, enriched with components of Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents, everything is connected and integrated, and these end-to-end workflows are transforming Bossard. 

For example, when an online inquiry is received, Power Automate creates a task in Dynamics 365 Sales, relevant departments are notified, and customer requests are processed faster than ever. The new integrated flow has been especially helpful to the sales and warehousing departments across locations.

A game-changing option has been the ability to transfer parts, items, and materials to where they’re needed within the company. This capability was made possible by centralized data and a unified system of naming and numbering in Dynamics 365. Coming soon users will be able to see exactly what’s in stock at every location and make efficient use of it before reordering or producing more.

True transformation delivers value to everyone

The impact of the company-wide transformation has been felt globally—and it’s only just begun. After the initial go-live in June 2022 in Sweden and Denmark, Singapore followed in April 2023. Malaysia and Thailand followed at the beginning of October 2023. In 2024, France, Canada, Mexico, and the US will come online. Feedback from both employees and leadership has been very positive.

With Dynamics 365, integrated data, and harmonized processes, the benefits are tangible for key areas of the business.

Sales

• A holistic view of customers, projects, payments, sales pipelines, inventory, and warehousing is allowing Bossard to be more customer-centric instead of primarily product-centric and is driving greater efficiencies throughout the organization.
• A smoother transfer from prospect to contracted customer and improved shipping date accuracy gives customers better experience and more confidence in Bossard.
  
  

Warehousing

• Better insights into product demand and forecasting help make sure the right items are produced at the right time in the right place.
• End-to-end tracing of products using global item master numbers from production to warehousing to shipping, along with built-in task tracking, makes the supply chain more efficient.
  
  

Finance & Operations

• Seamless integration of revenue-impacting actions from all departments gives finance teams a 360-view of the business.
• Improved (and more affordable) data security and governance ensure compliance with local, regional, and international privacy regulations.
• Increased value-add activities and projects through automation and insights that reduce manual administrative tasks.
• Modern dashboards and workspaces allow employees to easily track their progress and open new tasks.
• Improved audit capabilities and detailed insights are reducing effort and the occurrence of errors—essential since Bossard is a listed company on the Swiss Stock Exchange.
• Centralized supplier data decreases the workload of maintaining information in multiple places and improves data quality.
• Expanded collaboration and knowledge sharing between teams and locations is made possible in shared workspaces, documentation, and best practices.

Change and growth bring refreshing visibility 

Even with only 15% of the implementation complete, the new integrations between departments are already having a positive impact. The company’s shift from product-centric to service-centric is well underway. Increased visibility into stock, sales, and invoicing is finally connecting the dots in real time for everyone.

The change has also had its challenges. “It's a bit painful at times,” says Aruanno. “It forces us to follow the steps, to be consistent and to improve our internal processes, because everything ultimately goes to finance. You see all the mistakes that have been made in the past, and we also see areas where we are weak in the process, because whatever you do, it has an impact on finance. So that's been eye-opening but is also now a big advantage.”

As a publicly traded company with global reach, financial controls are important at Bossard. The sometimes-painful process is a prescription for better governance, controls, and compliance that Bossard leadership knew the organization needed—and now has with Dynamics 365. Finance has up-to-date visibility into better information flowing throughout the month, not just at month-end. All operations run seamlessly with faster analytics, efficient reporting, and an on-demand view of data across the company.

More productivity plans in the pipeline

As more locations come online, Bossard looks forward to expanding use cases to take advantage of all the capabilities of Dynamics 365.

“We are very excited and feel the pressure to keep the pace,” says Aruanno. “Things are coming really fast from Microsoft and technology in general. We’re happy to be taking this journey. Our objective is accelerated profitable growth and the only way to achieve this is through automation and technology.”

The Bossard Group is excited about the potential of Dynamics 365 copilot AI for exponentially improving the company’s capabilities and efficiencies. A new implementation team is eager to begin preparing for these not-so-distant additions to their processes. Bossard’s commitment to “Proven Productivity” will serve customers, and its business, well into the future.