Feed manufacturer and distributor I'Anson Brothers is a family-owned has been operating out of its base in North Yorkshire for more than 100 years. A recent technology overhaul has seen the company introduce a sequence of innovations that are helping it to thrive in the 21st century.

As an independent consultant, Andrew Birch was invited by the I'Ansons board to review its accounting and admin systems in 2003. "The chairman had met someone who told him about Navision and he felt the company might be missing out on what the wider world of technology had to offer," says Birch. "So they tasked me with reviewing their requirements and assessing available products."

I'Ansons turns over £20 million a year buying and selling animal feedstuffs and manufacturing and distributing several of its own brands around the world. As Birch explains, production planning is "a nightmare" complicated by high order volumes, short lead-times and physical storage constraints. The previous system, a specialist feed industry program running on the DEC VMS operating system, struggled to keep up with the company's invoicing and management reporting requirements.

Birch evaluated products from the likes of Sage, SAP, JD Edwards and Exchequer along with the Microsoft Dynamics suites Navision (NAV) and Axapta (AX). A five-year strategy was developed, starting with the replacement of the ERP solution. Birch's final recommendation was to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX, supplied and supported by Sense Enterprise of Nottingham.

The I'Ansons board, which includes fourth generation descendants of the company's founders, enthusiastically embraced the stratergy. "They didn't have anyone responsible for day-to-day IT, so we agreed that I would continue to provided support and advise during the transition," says Birch.

Birch joined the company full-time as information systems manager. The combination of his enthusiasm and imagination with an ambitious, no-nonsense board and the latest software has produced impressive results.

"We used the software upgrade as an opportunity to reform the entire IT infrastructure and went to Microsoft Windows, Exchange, Office and SQL Server," Birch explains. "We went from one extreme to another in a three-month period and introduced a site-wide fibre-optic backbone and VoIP telephony."

The three-month implementation programme might not be something an IT consultant would recommend to a client, but Birch credits the relatively new Microsoft ERP suite for making the transition possible without major disruption to I'Anson's financial and production processes.

"Dynamics AX is a near perfect product from a technical perspective," says Birch. "Sure it has its share of bugs and flaws, but architecturally it has the potential for change and adaptation - far more so than any of the other products we considered."

Dynamics AX is a younger application than its NAV sibling, and while it lacked some simple features that other products support, other aspects made it a good match for an the agricultural feed supplier.

"We buy grain from farmers and often do the accounting for them – known in the industry as 'self-billing'. Levies have to be applied to these bills and then VAT is applied to the levy. This generates negative input tax transactions in our purchase ledger. The net effect reduces the amount we claim, but we have to produce documentation for VAT and audit purposes," explains Birch, "We thought no system, other than one written specifically for agriculture, would handle this requirement”.

Dynamics AX is able to handle multiple tax rates, rules and authorities on each order line. "We set HGCA and PGRO as tax authorities with different payment rules and then applied VAT to them. Dynamics AX handled the deduction of the levy and negative input tax transparently with no need for code changes, delivering our self-billing functionality almost immediately," he says.

Birch does not count himself a programmer, but after a two-day training course, he is able to make minor changes himself using the system's built-in toolkit. "User interface changes are easy and the Morphx interface technology means forms effectively draw themselves. Simple changes to the interface can provide big benefits."

Birch estimates that I'Ansons has increased its order processing capability by 10%, while reducing the admin team's size from nine to four, simply through time-saving changes to the on-screen forms and application work-flow.

"We can identify a situation and think up a fix, and someone from Sense comes in for a day a month to make and deploy any modifications. For a minimal cost we can make changes within a few days that will impact the bottom line," he says.

The application's flexibility also had other benefits - for example to handle reporting requirements to comply with industry regulations. During one inspection, I'Ansons was told it needed to store some additional information about in-bound loads of materials. "We were able to edit a screen and deploy it in live usage before the auditor left site - at no extra cost," says Birch.

Quick win - integrated document scanning
Birch's own ingenuity has taken the I'Ansons ERP system into new territories, most notably a paperless technique for handling purchase invoices and other physical documents. "We wanted to start scanning and archiving purchase invoices, but at the time, buying a £20,000 document management system wouldn't give us a payback," Birch explains.

"Instead, we invested in a Lexmark all-in-one printer/copier/scanner and a software suite with built-in scripting and bar-code recognition capabilities."

The IS manager admits that it was a string-and-baling wire project, but in little more than half a day he worked with a Sense developer to make the necessary changes within Dynamics AX. These included generating barcode labels to attach to documents and setting up an import routine from the device's scanning function back into the internal AX document handling system. Incoming emails and document attachments can also be associated in the same way.

The Lexmark scanner saves incoming invoices as TIFF images. The files are bar-coded and logged into a new data table within AX, where they are archived against transactional records.

"Now we archive every paper purchase invoice received electronically," says Birch. "After the purchase invoice is received, it's never touched again. That's saved hours and hours of filing." The system has also helped during the annual audit by giving auditors rapid access to the documents they require.

Sales order processing has also been streamlined, thanks to a small extra investment in a folding and envelope filling machine. Using the Dynamics AX toolkit, I'Ansons devised a batch routine that at the end of each day groups invoices for its different feed brands into batches and prints them out onto different stationery.

"Now it's 10 minutes' work rather than two hours for two departments and the invoices go out the same day as the products. It's the tiny little things that spiral up into big savings," says Birch.

Another modification has had positive results on order processing, where a new routine checks the status of an account at the time of order. If there is a problem, it alerts the credit controller for that account by e-mail.

"You're in a much better position to negotiate before you send an order so if there's a payment issue, the controller can ring up and negotiate - or if necessary cancel the unreleased order. A small modification to flag issues up front rather than sending the the load and then chasing payment has cut debtor days considerably."

Dynamics AX and the new Lexmark printer/scanner have also been adapted to improve access to reporting on the shop floor. The ERP's production module can generate requirements for orders going forward.

"The software splits the report out by product type. It's quite complex to run, but we have programmed simple shortcut buttons on the Lexmark interface for 'AX reports'. Users can choose which products they need to run calculations for and the 'magic photocopier' prints the report back out," he says.

"That saves time. They can print complex reports from Dynamics AX themselves from the shop floor as simply as they could produce a photocopy. There is no need for training or knowledge of the underlying Dynamics AX"

Always on the look-out for new enhancements, Birch wants to get a more accurate handle on stock control. "You're putting feed into sacks that can be out on a vehicle for delivery quicker than you can enter the production into the system," he explains. The current project centres around integrating process control systems to report production to Dynamics AX in real-time. Once achieved, I'Ansons will be better able to quantify its in-process costs and raw material usage more accurately.

Another project is underway with the company's financial director, Hugh Clark, to create a set of key performance indicators using the Analysis Services data cubes and Reporting Services module built into the SQL Server database system that drives Dynamics AX.

I'Ansons is trying to build a management dashboard that ties financial KPIs to production and transport KPIs, Birch explains. "Our chairman, Chris I’Anson, has the knowledge and experience to be able to walk into the factory and sense from the sounds and activity if something isn't quite right.

"We're trying to translate that family knowledge and experience into KPIs and traffic lights so that if the indicators are green, we know everything is OK."

The I'Ansons chairman also owns a PDA and is very keen to be able to access these KPIs on this device. Support for Windows Mobile in Dynamics AX makes this feasible and Birch says his ambition for the end of this year is that instead of coming in to see how things are going on the factory floor, the chairman will be able to check progress from a few green lights on his PDA.

"I've made it pretty clear how much I like Dynamics AX, but I'Ansons really bit into it," says Birch. They recognised there was a need for change - and they embraced it. They've pushed the requirements and are driving the product forward in a way I didn't think possible when I first saw their VMS system sitting in the corner of the office. IT's at the core of the business now and the demand from all users within the businesses is ever increasing. We have some tough challenges ahead but with the investments we made, we feel well equipped to face them."