Zones soars from servers to the sky with Dynamics 365 cloud transformation

Zones needed to support scalable growth across different geographies and enhance efficiency while modernizing its core systems and ensuring consistent customer experiences worldwide.

Zones implemented a global digital transformation with Dynamics 365, migrating to Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Sales, which modernized their core systems.

The transformation enhanced efficiency, improved customer experiences, and set the stage for scalable, flexible growth, with significant improvements in shipping throughput and business operations.

Zones began in 1986 as a direct response catalog company selling computer hardware and software in the US. Today, it’s a single source for the support, acquisition, deployment, and lifecycle management of comprehensive IT solutions and services in more than 150 countries. Although the Auburn, Washington-based company operates at the intersection of innovation and IT, human relationships and expertise are at the core of its approach. In that spirit, Zones embarked on its own digital transformation, building on its long-standing partnership with Microsoft to enhance collaboration, communication, and efficiency across its global operations with Dynamics 365 Sales, Finance, and Supply Chain Management. "The company implemented a global digital transformation with Dynamics 365. Because of this shift, we can focus on being proactive. Effort previously required for maintaining the on-premises environment is now redirected to customer experiences and business value.” states Vikas Sachdeva, Vice President of Enterprise Applications, Zones.

“The company implemented a global digital transformation with Dynamics 365. Because of this shift, we can focus on being proactive. Effort previously required for maintaining the on-premises environment is now redirected to customer experiences and business value.”

Vikas Sachdeva, Vice President of Enterprise Applications, Zones

Setting the stage for scalable and flexible growth

Zones specializes in innovative IT solutions that help businesses the world over run smoothly. So, with the sunsetting of its Dynamics AX 2012 solution, Zones leaped at the chance to rewire its own motherboard. With the help of implementation partner Argano, Vice President of Enterprise Applications, Vikas Sachdeva and his team drove an end-to-end cloud migration with Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Sales, overseeing cross-functional teams across EMEA, U.S. and India. Zones not only gained a standardized, simplified view of business operations and ensured consistent customer experiences worldwide, it also enhanced efficiency and clarity today while setting the stage for scalable, flexible growth for tomorrow.

The company’s transformation was multi-layered. “We need to ensure that we can support the growth of the business as we scale across different geographies, and we think about it in layers,” Sachdeva explains. “Dynamics 365 customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning solutions are the core which manage all back-office operations and global supply chain activities.” The global rollout of the new platform marks the successful modernization of the core system, one of Zones’ biggest strategic achievements.

Sales in the cloud, all day, every day

Christopher Cox, Vice President of Enterprise Sales at Zones, cuts right to the chase: “In Sales, we use Dynamics 365 all day, every day. That starts from lead creation to opportunity management, order placement, order status, contact navigation, and customer assignments.” For Cox’s team, everything starts with their customer base. The ability to set up customer hierarchies and manage customer relationships in Dynamics 365 Sales is crucial.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales integrates Dynamics 365 Sales with Microsoft Teams and Outlook. Teams' presence indicators and Copilot opportunity summaries, simplify daily tasks and improve collaboration. Sellers can manage their activities in the Teams sidebar, eliminating context-switching, improving efficiency by facilitating real-time conversations, and enjoying quick access to customer information, opportunities, quotes, and customer details.

Opportunity and quote management is the sales team’s bread and butter. Eighty percent of Zones' customers are large enterprises whose opportunities are integrated with the company’s deal registration program, ensuring that special pricing and customized quotes are aligned. Sellers use hundreds of different programs to maximize discounts. Now, they can do it all on one user-friendly screen. “It’s much easier for us to search for products and manage opportunities,” says Cox.

A hub for product management

Ed Moninger, Vice President, Supply Chain Operations at Zones, describes Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management capabilities as “robust and scalable”. Zones’ catalog contains over two million SKUs and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management keeps track of them all, along with thousands of customer pricing agreements and complex pricing logic.

Organizing the catalog to ensure that the Customer Success Management (CSM) team and sales teams can execute the quoting and ordering process smoothly is a detailed, carefully curated process that used to be tedious and hard to manage. Products are entered in the product master as either standard or variants, which include varying configurations. Because products can be customized, Zones must support customer specific pricing as well as inventory visibility. Dynamics 365 enables Zones to track and manage granular customer information to serve global customers effectively.

Integrated order management

The sales process at Zones involves multiple channels and includes opportunity management, quotes, approvals and product configurations. Roughly 300,000 orders flow every month into Dynamics 365 through direct sales online and through integrations with customers’ procurement systems, such as Coupa, SAP Ariba, and Oracle PeopleSoft.

Before Dynamics 365, creating configured quotes required significant manual work. Today, quoting tools used by OEM hardware partners like Dell, HP, and Microsoft are integrated with Dynamics 365. Zones seamlessly creates and manages quotes, and an automated workflow allows the CSM and sales teams to view activity and place orders accordingly.

When an order is received, platform rules govern the order processing flow, ensuring validation and approvals by the CSM team. Depending on its complexity, the order might require approval from departments such as sales or finance. After the order is validated and approved, it moves to the fulfillment stage, where the supply chain team takes over and ensures timely delivery.

At least 70% of orders need in-house value-added services such as special labelling or configuring hardware. Work tickets are downloaded from Dynamics 365 into a homegrown solution that tracks light manufacturing and product configuration.

“Within 30 days of implementation of Dynamics 365, we saw improvements in our shipping throughput higher than it ever had been.”

Linda Marbena, VP & GM, Technology Solution Centers and PMO, Zones

Other operational benefits

Optimized planning

With over two million SKUs, material requirements planning processes used to take several hours to run, limiting their frequency. Now, thanks to the Planning Optimization Add-in for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, master planning runs in just a few minutes and can be run multiple times a day, ensuring planners can react quickly to changes in demand.

Warehouse efficiencies

Zones uses the Warehouse management module in Supply Chain Management to enhance storage capacity, improve order consolidation, and make operations more productive at its warehouses. Previously, product placement relied on manual decisions or institutional knowledge. Now, rule-based slotting in Dynamics 365 ensures products are stored logically, maximizing warehouse picking efficiency, and streamlining put-aways. And, says Linda Marbena, VP & GM, Technology Solution Centers and PMO, Zones “we’re producing a higher volume of orders than our baseline. Within 30 days of implementation of Dynamics 365, we saw improvements in our shipping throughput higher than it ever had been.”

Visibility equals speed

The biggest benefit, according to Michael Guarino, Vice President of Global Logistics at Zones, is the enhanced visibility in the new system. Before, paper-based processes led to delays in updating transactions and limited visibility into inventory and order status. “Today, teams know exactly where inventory is and the status of each production order, from order placement and approval to release and fulfillment across departments,” he said.

Zones moved all business intelligence reporting to Microsoft Azure Synapse, cutting the daily report refresh time from 10 hours to two, making near real-time analytics available across the business in all locations.

Improved customer experience

Zones has enhanced customer experiences without increasing resources. "The company implemented a global digital transformation with Dynamics 365. Because of this shift, we can focus on being proactive. Effort previously required for maintaining the on-premises environment is now redirected to customer experiences and business value,” says Sachdeva.

The sky’s the limit

Overhauling the company’s ERP and CRM systems was a huge undertaking. The guiding principle was always to look after the customer first. “You always risk some potential customers because it can take three to six months to normalize after a massive rollout like ours, but we didn’t see a drop,” Guarino says. In fact, Zones has seen substantial pipeline growth.

Sachdeva agrees that the implementation enhanced the overall customer experience. “Customers see that Zones is investing in systems to meet their specific needs, which has helped strengthen our relationships with them.”

Executive leadership support and a thoughtful change management approach focused on close collaboration with the business. Embedding technical leads in business functions and acknowledging the challenge of a complex system overhaul fostered cohesion. Business teams participated in testing and validation to ensure that the final product met business needs. “You can deploy systems all day long, but if you don’t do it the right way and enable people and processes, you don’t get the outcomes that you’re looking for, choosing the right partners, Microsoft and Argano, was a key part of our journey” says Saad Ayub, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Zones.

As the global rollout continues, with India and Canada up next, Zones is taking advantage of its success to pave the way for more Dynamics 365-driven automations. The company plans to leverage AI capabilities to supercharge business operations with tools like Copilot for Sales and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Focusing on continued innovation ensures that Zones is equipped to meet evolving challenges with confidence.

“We are proud of being part of Zones’ Dynamics 365 success story,” shares Yogesh Kasat, Principal, Argano, “and we’re thrilled to see the impact the adoption is making on business processes and customer satisfaction.” Kasat credits collaboration with Zones’ Digital team with the project's success.”