Lifetime Products: From the backyard to the big leagues with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management

Building trust and integrity in the global market

Founded in a Riverdale, Utah, garage in 1986, Lifetime Products has developed from a modest idea into a significant force in the global market, celebrated for its innovative, high-quality products ranging from basketball hoops to picnic tables to kayaks and more. The company has earned a reputation for innovation, quality, and employee empowerment, while enhancing family life with its durable products.

A core aspect of Lifetime’s culture is its commitment to a people-first ethos that promotes employee development and job satisfaction. “We are deeply committed to providing opportunities for our employees as the company grows,” says John Bowden, Chief Information Officer at Lifetime Products. Bowden emphasizes the importance of providing growth opportunities for staff, aligning with the company’s mission to deliver high-quality, affordable products through strategies like vertical integration, which allows precise control over product quality and costs. Richard Hendrickson, who started his career at Lifetime as a welder, is now Chief Executive Officer and President at Lifetime Products and is a perfect example of the company’s people-first approach. “This is my fun story, but it’s so common here at Lifetime Products,” he says. “We want to provide opportunities for people, and that’s the first line in our mission statement.” Lifetime is committed to creating opportunities for everyone involved in its operations. This mission extends beyond simply providing jobs for its employees and suppliers. It encompasses the families, friends, and customers who benefit from the company’s products.

Lifetime’s reputation in the industry is built on its drive for product innovation and customer satisfaction, underpinned by strategic expansion and diversification. The company’s commitment to quality, integrity, and internal growth has fostered global trust and a dedicated workforce, encouraging a culture of continuous improvement and ethical business practices.

However, Lifetime needed to address its previous on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, which was slow and increasingly complex due to multiple third-party software integrations, requiring extensive custom modifications. This also placed extra demands on the shipping and traffic departments, in addition to managing accounts receivable.

To address these issues and improve operations, Lifetime’s leadership decided to undertake a significant technological overhaul to achieve real-time reporting and better manage warehouse activities and batch label printing. This upgrade from Dynamics AX 2012 was crucial not only for improving the employee experience, but for ensuring the company could meet its growing business demands while maintaining its commitment to quality and efficiency.

Fostering trust and teamwork during migration

In response, Lifetime chose to migrate to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, a move that promised and delivered improved performance and greater employee satisfaction. The migration was structured to be highly respectful of employees’ time and contributions, emphasizing a people-first and business-first philosophy over a purely IT-driven project. Unlike previous transitions, this migration involved selecting key experts from various functional areas to work full-time on the project, forming the “Business Ready Team,” a group of internal champions. This tactic highlighted the significance of trust, not only within the team but also in Lifetime’s relationship with Microsoft, and was crucial for navigating the change management process effectively. “The trust is huge, especially from the IT side,” explains Sinahi Lopez, Global IT Functional Manager at Lifetime Products. “We tend to be a department where we come in, we make change, and we push innovation, and pulling in these individuals helped us bridge that gap of trust.” This expert-embedded approach helped prevent burnout and improved the quality of the migration.

To facilitate a seamless transition, Lifetime used the AIM from Microsoft Dynamics 365 program to migrate from Dynamics AX to the cloud. Extensive testing and development of new processes in collaboration with the FastTrack for Dynamics 365 team also ensured a smooth transition. Additionally, a feedback mechanism involving daily users helped refine the system to better meet operational needs. “We felt it was important to put our Business Ready Team members in a location that was exclusive to them so they weren’t interrupted by the business on a daily basis,” says Denise Wandling, Executive Vice President of Human Resources and Risk Management at Lifetime Products, who led the team. “It allowed them to work together as a team and build that relationship, and that was what was going to make this project successful.” Steve Clegg, Internal Software Development Manager at Lifetime Products, reflected on the cultural impact of the project. “This project actually mirrored that—it mimicked the same attitude we have on our production line,” he says, emphasizing the personal and professional growth opportunities it created for the team. Lifetime’s partner, Real Dynamics, provided leadership and guidance, using its Dynamics 365 expertise in migration and upgrades, which helped the company go live over a single weekend.

Setting new efficiency benchmarks

With the Dynamics 365 system in place, Lifetime began to see immediate improvements in its operational capabilities. “With our strategic move to Dynamics 365, we found that performance problems went away completely,” says Clegg. With the Planning Optimization Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, for instance, master planning calculations could be performed outside of the main Dynamics 365 system and its Azure SQL Database, dramatically reducing the time required from several hours or overnight to minutes. “The change we made using Planning Optimization has had a huge impact, reducing a process that used to take essentially 24 hours down to just 15 minutes,” explains Ted Esplin, Chief Operating Officer at Lifetime Products. This capability has enabled Lifetime to swiftly adjust to new demands and maintain up-to-date supply chain plans, a critical advantage in a fast-paced market. Additionally, materials requirement planning (MRP) time has been cut from an average of five hours to just 15 minutes, allowing the company to quickly adjust to changes in demand and operate in real time.

The migration to Dynamics 365 not only resolved the performance issues but also brought about a substantial transformation in how Lifetime manages its operations. The implementation of a new, real-time electronic data interchange (EDI) system streamlines processes and significantly reduces delays in order processing and shipping, reducing previous significant issues around chargebacks. “We are eliminating manual processes, and also working on several projects aimed at increasing the number of orders we can process without manual intervention,” says Justin Humpherys, Director of Sales Operations at Lifetime Products. “We expect to see significant improvements thanks to the capabilities provided by Dynamics 365.” Lifetime’s Warehouse Mobile App (WMS iOS) has also streamlined operations by allowing staff to access information and manage tasks directly on their devices. It automates label printing and order batching, reducing errors and improving efficiency, again reducing manual intervention. “Before implementing Dynamics 365, our process efficiency was around 30%," explains Humpherys. "We’ve already improved to around 40%, and our target is to reach 80%. The enhancements made with Dynamics 365 have enabled us to achieve these improvements.”

Achieving business goals while investing in people

Supply Chain Management has improved Lifetime’s ability to handle logistics and supply chain management more effectively, providing more strategic decision making and offering faster, more accurate data across different departments. The executive dashboard includes metrics such as month-to-date sales, open and shipped orders, on-time shipment rates for the past 14 days, sales growth year over year, and more. Each metric provides in-depth data, serving as a single source of truth the company relies on daily to guide its operations and strategies. “The executive dashboard is a direct result of the success of Dynamics 365,” says Bowden. “Each one of these areas has very, very deep ‘one source of truth’ data presented behind them, and the company lives and makes decisions off of this data on a day-by-day basis. The way Supply Chain Management has improved our data availability is really around the access of data. Real-time data from one source instead of it being disparate across the globe.”

Bowden explains how the company met its four high-level business goals with Supply Chain Management by establishing self-sufficiency, ensuring everything was well tested, and taking a people-first—not a technology-first—approach. “And then the fourth, which was a big bang for us, is how Dynamics 365 turned out, and that was with overall performance from both a productivity and a system standpoint,” Bowden says. By interoperating seamlessly in the systems at Lifetime, Supply Chain Management is strengthening the company’s ability to scale and manage growth without compromising speed or efficiency. Illumina Technology provided Lifetime with first-rate developers, helping the company uphold its high-quality development standards and meet very aggressive timelines. This has been especially crucial for an organization that values rapid response to market changes and prides itself on operational excellence. “We’re passionate about developing and providing our people with opportunities,” concludes Wandling. “Rather than reducing headcount, we’ve been able to reallocate our people into areas of need, optimizing our labor distribution.”

Looking ahead, Lifetime is planning significant advancements using Microsoft Power Platform. It will specifically focus on Power Automate, which the company is starting to implement to improve its shipping processes by reducing manual labor and the number of steps involved. The goal is to automate operations within Dynamics 365, where Lifetime has recently stabilized its systems. The company is excited about exploring how Power Automate can further be used with Microsoft Copilot to automate additional processes, like procurement and collections. “The capabilities we’re seeing for our future around Power Automate or Power Platform, and specifically around Copilot, are tremendous,” Bowden says. “I’m already spending a lot of time architecting how we’re going to do change management by reducing manual labor with all the Power Platform and Copilot scenarios.” Hendrickson agrees. “As we move forward and understand how to leverage AI and bring things in, I expect it to help us with better predictive machine maintenance issues and scheduling processes, which are very, very complex,” he says. “The speed of Dynamics 365 has already helped us do more with less, and we expect to continue getting a lot of great benefits as we leverage AI and the rest of the tools inside Dynamics.”

As Lifetime continues to build on these technological advancements, it remains committed to its core values of quality, integrity, and employee empowerment. The success of Dynamics 365 has set a new benchmark for operational excellence within the company, demonstrating a robust incorporation of technology and human-centric management as the company continues to lead in its industry with agility and forward-thinking strategies. “The great thing about Dynamics 365 is its flexibility to run out of the box without doing a lot of customizations,” says Bowden. “A lot of competitors of Dynamics 365 are rigid—they’re based upon old legacy ways of doing ERP.” He adds, “The big reason to adopt Dynamics 365 is the cloud and the power that Azure brings.”

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