One Platform, Three Countries and Same-Day Project Profitability, Using Dynamics 365

Our client, a global test engineering leader, was running a five-year acquisition plan on an ERP that could not keep up. Here's how they unified Canada, the U.S., and Mexico on one cloud platform, and gained same-day cost and profitability visibility on every project, anywhere in the world.

The Situation

In two decades, the company went from three people to a 400-person global enterprise serving globally 1,000 companies with leading test and quality assurance solutions and services. Growth was the goal, and the problem.

Their ERP was aging, and with multiple legal entities across multiple countries, every inter-company transaction added risk. Highly customized projects ran on fragmented systems, which made consolidating costs slow and unreliable.

For a business with a five-year plan to acquire across the U.S. and Europe, the situation was untenable: they could not scale on a platform they could not trust.

Their organizational structure and evolving client needs required a more nimble and decentralized approach, involving complex coordination across international branches.They needed a strong ERP to support their growth and their vision to be the first global player in their industry to seamlessly assist clients worldwide.

What Was At Stake

For their finance team, the problem was visibility. There was no clean line of sight into project cost or profitability, and financial statements took too long to produce and couldn't be fully trusted when it mattered most — at the point of decision. 

Operations faced a different version of the same issue: coordinating highly customized projects across international branches was a daily struggle, and while the company's talent was global, its visibility was not. 

For IT, the risk was structural. A legacy system was nearing end-of-life, supported by only a thin bench of internal experts, and every new legal entity added to the platform raised the stakes further.

This wasn't a system you optimize. It was one you replace before it breaks.

The Solution

The client chose the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations cloud platform and successfully migrated its entire operations in Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

Talan came in as ad hoc support and ended up rescuing the implementation. Using our Core & Site methodology, we realigned the program and fueled the go-live — built so the client could own their system, own their transformation, and run it themselves.

The Results

Same-day project profitability, worldwide:The new Project Module tracks cost and profitability for every project in detail, from anywhere, the same day. Decisions that used to wait on month-end now happen in real time.

Financial statements leadership can act on: Accurate, consolidated, always current. The quality of decision-making improved across the business.

A platform built to absorb growth: One cloud system, always updated, with internal champions trained to run it. After go-live, the client expanded the deployment to Mexico and Europe — with Talan as their advisors, not their crutch.

“Talan has proven to be an excellent partner with a lot of flexibility, experience and expertise, and has adapted to the situation and Averna's team as if they had been with us from the very beginning. We particularly appreciated the presence of the Talan employees at our company… they were appreciated as much for their great expertise as for their personality… they were part of the Averna team.” 

— VP Finance

The Takeaway

A legacy ERP doesn't fail all at once — it fails as you grow. This client replaced theirs before it cost them a single acquisition, and now runs three countries (soon more) on one platform they control.

If your ERP can't keep up with your growth plan, the time to move is before it breaks, not after.