Paramount Bed adopts Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its ERP solution for the next decade

Supporting a medium-term business plan by building a core system designed for the next decade

Paramount Bed started business in 1947 as a specialized manufacturer of hospital beds. Over the years, it expanded to operate aged care facilities and home care, with recent diversification focused on the healthcare field. The company currently manufactures, sells, imports, exports, leases, and maintains beds, mattresses, medical and welfare equipment, and furniture for medical and nursing care providers. Since announcing a decade-spanning medium-term business plan in 2020, business growth has surpassed forecasts.

Paramount Bed began upgrading its ERP to support corporate management, replacing its manufacturing-oriented system deployed in 1998 with Dynamics 365.

“Our group has grown with changes in our line of business and expansion,” says Yosuke Kimura, Senior Managing Director of Paramount Bed Holdings. “We have three operating companies in Japan alone: Paramount Bed, Paratechno, and Paramount Care Service, all of which Paramount Bed Holdings controls.” This growth resulted in an expanding number of challenges which the existing ERP couldn’t accommodate. Paramount Bed added separate systems for business functions not covered by the ERP, creating a core system comprising a collection of individually optimized subsystems.

“Because we designed and built each system for a particular job, every function was solid and user-friendly,” Kimura continues. “However, our users had to operate multiple system screens to perform a single task and regularly switched between three or four screens while working. And despite the ERP, we still had a lot of applications and approvals on paper. It was difficult to promote paperlessness because we couldn’t fully integrate the individually optimized systems.”

The enterprise decided the existing system could not support corporate growth to 2030 and began considering upgrading its entire core system, including ERP.

According to Kimura, “In 2020, we formulated Paramount Vision 2030—our medium-term business plan and vision toward 2030—dividing it into three phases. We took this opportunity to build a core system designed for sustainable growth over the next decade.”

For the consideration phase, Paramount Bed conducted a thorough upstream comparison of major ERP products. The company chose Dynamics 365, an integrated suite of business applications including Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.

Adopting Dynamics 365 for its stunning range of functions

Kimura explains why Paramount Bed chose Dynamics 365 as an ERP designed for sustainable growth over the next decade below.

“We first focused on a high suitability ratio, which is how far it covered the functions we needed. Our goal was to streamline over 50 subsystems by upgrading our ERP.” This included CRM functions, which only Dynamics 365 could address.

Customizing the internals of an ERP means higher workloads when upgrading, so the company chose a fit-to-standard approach for the project. This also led to emphasizing the suitability ratio, says Kimura.

After selecting Dynamics 365, Paramount Bed defined its requirements before launching a deployment project in March 2021. Basic design began in January 2022 after identifying further business requirements. Development proceeded from July to December of the same year. User acceptance tests began in January 2023, and the system launched in Paramount Bed and Paratechno in October. The rollout to all domestic group companies finished in 2024 with deployment at Paramount Care Service in January and Paramount Holdings in April.

The new system runs Dynamics 365 and data utilization infrastructure on Azure and connects to on-premises environments through the internet and Azure ExpressRoute.

Paramount Bed has used FastTrack for Dynamics 365 since starting basic design in January 2022. This free Microsoft service helps companies deploy, roll out, and apply Dynamics 365 with expert guidance, self-service tools, and resources based on the Success by Design framework. The service empowers companies to implement, deploy, and use Dynamics 365 faster and more confidently.

“New tools linking ERP and CRM functions were appearing while we were designing the system,” says Hisayoshi Asanuma, General Manager of Paramount Bed Holdings’ Information System Department. “Our deployment partner suggested FastTrack for more effective use of these tools.” Engaging FastTrack experts has resulted in a lasting support relationship.

“FastTrack experts have great technical skills and can discuss the finer points of use while also providing a broad perspective on all Microsoft products,” explains Asanuma. “They also suggested post-deployment points to consider, which made it easier to prepare the deployment plan. Also, because we were moving the entire on-premises core system to the cloud for this project, the extra security knowledge they provided was also invaluable. The service was so good that I wish we had used it from the requirement definition phase, not just from basic design.”

Completing all work from the Dynamics 365 screen and a leap towards paperlessness

With the shift to Dynamics 365, Paramount Bed now has an ERP covering a broader scope of business and the company has reduced its 50-plus systems to about 10. Workers can now complete tasks from order to shipment via a consistent user interface with Dynamics 365 instead of using multiple systems. The company is also working on initiatives to visualize the variety of business data stored in Dynamics 365 using Power BI, which will help middle managers and frontline employees make decisions.

The new system has also boosted efforts towards paperlessness. “We have significantly reduced paper usage, saving 30,000 to 40,000 sheets per month,” says Asanuma. The cost of managing the paper and an ever-decreasing storage space were bigger problems than the actual cost of the paper, he explains. “We need to meet document management requirements to comply with ISO9001 and J-SOX, which takes substantial effort. With Dynamics 365, we needn’t worry about these tasks and securing storage space as much.”

System administration workloads are also lower. For example, enhancing a system's performance used to require a lot of effort to determine all related systems, but the scope for attention is much narrower now. Dynamics 365 also allows users to export data required for closing the books for the fiscal year to Excel files, eliminating the Systems Department’s task of inputting SQL statements into the ERP to extract this data.

However, according to Kimura, “The transition to Dynamics 365 has not progressed perfectly and we still face challenges.” One such issue is user expectations and feedback toward fit-to-standard. “Being individually optimized, the previous systems provided great user satisfaction, but with fit-to-standard, we needed to tailor operations to the system,” he explains. “Many employees gave blunt feedback on this.”

To ease the concerns, the company conducted more interviews with users. Based on the feedback, Paramount Bed began developing new add-on functions using Power Platform and other technologies in October 2024.

“The ability to develop these add-ons without touching the ERP internals is another key feature of Dynamics 365,” says Asanuma. “This minimizes the impact of upgrading Dynamics 365. And engineers feel attractive about the availability of general-purpose development tools, such as Power Apps and Power Automate, for their extensive versatility.”

Paramount Bed plans to create a template system for overseas use after increasing user satisfaction with new add-ons, expanding the service to international offices and group companies over the coming years.