11 March 2010

To compete more effectively and profitably in a challenging market, InFocus made a strategic decision to outsource its manufacturing operations and reduce overhead. The company chose Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to facilitate the change.

Based in Wilsonville, Oregon, InFocus is a leader in the digital-projection market and a globally known brand. Display systems and digital projectors from InFocus help people present, collaborate, and learn in conference centres and meeting rooms around the world.

In 2007, faced with rising manufacturing costs and increasing global competition, InFocus made the strategic decision to undergo a significant business transformation. In doing so, it shifted from a publicly traded company with 900 employees to the 400-person private business it is today. In addition, the company decided to outsource all of its manufacturing operations.

To facilitate and support the transformation, company leadership decided to completely rearchitect the IT environment to better align with the changing business. They sought to replace the existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with a new solution that was a better fit for the now smaller and more streamlined operation.

“Our Oracle environment was workflow driven and highly customised to support a much larger enterprise that did its own manufacturing,” said Nina Palludan, vice president of operations and CIO of InFocus. “And, because those workflows involved roles that no longer existed in our organisation, we constantly had to switch between roles in the system to keep the workflow moving and simply get our jobs done.”

Although a new ERP system would support efforts to streamline operations and better manage the bottom line, InFocus leadership saw deploying a new customer relationship management (CRM) system as an opportunity to simultaneously drive increased revenue. This opportunity would transition sales staff away from mere order-taking functions to a more strategic role that could help proactively deliver on the company’s sales initiatives.

The integrated Microsoft Dynamics solution has made our people more independent and empowered.

Nina Palludan, InFocus InFocus decided to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “We were particularly attracted to the flexibility of the Microsoft Dynamics products and their five-year road map,” Says Palludan.

Ease of integration between Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM also played an important role in the decision, because the company would gain the ability to create a single repository for all its operational and customer information on a common Microsoft SQL Server database. “The biggest win for us is that we could pull all the once-disparate information together into a central system, and then use that data in demand planning and forecasting, which, in turn, lets us run a more efficient operation,” says Palludan.

To implement and provide application management for the solution, InFocus turned to the expertise of Avanade. Because of InFocus’s strategy to simplify operations and control costs, the implementation of the integrated solution, including Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, took the form of a hosted software service. A provider of managed software services hosts the solution for InFocus.

On the operations side, the Microsoft Dynamics RoleTailored interface plays a key role in facilitating the productivity gains the company sought after changing its business model. Specifically, InFocus is taking advantage of the RoleTailored user interface of Microsoft Dynamics AX to align the solution functionality and information people most frequently need to their specific roles in the organization.

“We were able to align Microsoft Dynamics AX to the job functions and workflows that we needed so that it reflected the much leaner organisation that we had evolved into,” says Palludan.

Ease of use also played a key role for the sales team; sales staff were quick to adopt Dynamics CRM. After providing their input, they had a stake in the success of the implementation and were able to take advantage of the solution with two widely used tools: Microsoft Office Outlook and their mobile devices. As a result, the company was able to create a single repository of all customer information and interactions without requiring sales staff to perform information management duties outside of their day-to-day roles.

InFocus uses Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 to connect business information from the integrated solution of Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM to other applications. In this way, InFocus provides electronic data interchange (EDI) to third-party logistics vendors and offers dealer-specific product-locator tools, which draw on account information from Dynamics CRM. The company also uses Enterprise Portal in Dynamics AX, which is based on Windows SharePoint Services, to provide key reports and other information from the ERP system to on-site and mobile employees through the company intranet.

InFocus also uses Office SharePoint Server for product life-cycle management, a function that the company will integrate with the project module in Dynamics AX in the near future.

“We’re now able to source data from a single repository,” says Palludan. “We don’t have to build a separate repository or extract or transform the data. In the future, we’ll use Web Parts in Office SharePoint Server that draw on data from Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM to give customers the information they need.”

Business results show that InFocus’s strategic changes successfully relaunched the company. InFocus has maintained the same level of revenue even with a much smaller organisation; this means that following its transitions, the business is much more profitable. “The integrated Microsoft Dynamics solution has made our people more independent and empowered,” says Palludan. “Employees are much more motivated and collaborate more closely. They now can find the information they want, when they need it. That’s much better than sending an e-mail message to a colleague and waiting as long as 24 hours for a response.”

In the sales department, where staff once spent 20 to 30 per cent of their time consolidating information for reporting, InFocus has reduced the administrative overhead associated with this task by 20 per cent. At the same time, with support from Dynamics CRM, the team has been able to sign more than 70 new strategic accounts as it pursues the company’s sales initiatives.

“Our sales associates now can manage win-loss scenarios and learn directly from each other,” says Palludan. “Managers have insight into the productivity of field sales and can provide that team with the tools they need to succeed in new initiatives. And, training new sales staff members is easier than ever. With Dynamics CRM, new employees can be effective in a very short time.”

“The switch to a business infrastructure based on Microsoft technologies helped us reduce annual IT expenses from $5.4 million to $1.9 million,” says Palludan. “Our use of Microsoft Dynamics AX will provide a full ROI in less than 24 months, which is significant for our business. Implementing this solution was the right decision for many reasons - two of the most critical being increased productivity and large cost savings.”

“Microsoft Dynamics AX has the flexibility and scalability to support our business through growth and continuing change,” says Palludan. “The solution’s open architecture, application integration framework, and ability to integrate with third-party tools and other Microsoft technologies are extremely important to us.”

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