Established in 1987, Living Nature has carved out a firm place in the world of natural beauty products.

Committed to developing and selling a product range made without the use of synthetic preservatives or parabens, all Living Nature skincare products are also free of animal ingredients and made without animal testing.

Utilising some of the 85 percent of plants unique to New Zealand, Living Nature’s products represent a company committed to innovation as well as being conscious of a market looking for truly natural products.

With its head office and plant in Kerikeri, Living Nature manufactures and distributes products both locally and internationally, as well as generating healthy sales worldwide through its e-commerce website.

With turnover well in excess of $20 million and export sales increasing tenfold, the company has significant growth targeted over the next 3 years.

Legacy systems hamper growth
In 2007 an internal evaluation of the existing solutions supporting the company’s business processes highlighted the limitations posed to Living Nature’s planned growth.

Using two separate MYOB systems (Aurora and Retail), spreadsheets and other assorted legacy solutions, Living Nature’s potential was being severely restricted by the lack of integration, resulting in inefficiencies and an inability to keep up with ever increasing business and production requirements.

A wide range of ongoing issues were posed by the existing system. These included poor reporting capabilities, limited accounting capabilities (with regards to multi-currency and multi-company), lack of control of inventory and double entry of data.

A drive towards Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) meant Living Nature needed to put in place batch control, traceability and quarantine functionality. Along with this were specific requirements to have MRP calculations to replace the spreadsheet planning system, and the ability to handle the EDI requirements of new customers in Australia and New Zealand.

A checklist for success
Peter Pooran, Living Nature’s general manager – operations, was looking for solutions to all these issues.

“Overall, we needed to achieve improvements in efficiency across the board and have easy access to the right information to make better business decisions,” Pooran says.

“When we made the decision to move forward we developed a checklist which included multi-company and multi-currency, financial management, supply chain management, manufacturing, business intelligence, reporting, POS, EDI interface, call management and CRM,” he says.

“After defining what we needed, we put time into researching possible solutions and contacted potential vendors for demonstrations.”

Living Nature evaluated three solutions, and then selected Microsoft Dynamics AX in tandem with experienced implementation partner, Koorb Consulting.

“Dynamics AX had the closest fit to requirements with standard functionality for the overall cost,” says Pooran.

“Koorb’s proven experience with similar New Zealand companies, their strong team of consultants and a structured implementation methodology, as well the ability to offer local support, clearly made them the partner of choice.”

Koorb’s support methodology includes the training of super users within their customer’s ranks. Living Nature’s three super users assist and support the other 17 users.

Implementation
Living Nature implemented most of the modules available within the Dynamics AX Advanced Management Business Ready Licence, including Trade & Logistics, Master Planning, Financials, Fixed Assets and CRM.

The system was implemented with very few customisations.

An interface was provided to the Microsoft Retail Management System so that the stock held in the retail stores could be replenished automatically from within Dynamics AX, and also so that financial and end-user contact information could be held centrally in one system.

End customer contact information is made available to marketing via the Dynamics AX CRM module. After go-live, and as trading volume increased, the Intercompany module was added to support the sale of product to Australia.

EDI interfaces were initially developed to import Farmers department stores purchase orders into the Living Nature system – other stores purchase order formats have been added to the EDI interface from time to time.

Summary
Post implementation, Dynamics AX has more than proven itself.

Living Nature has seen clear benefits with much tighter stock and production control, vastly improved financial reporting, total capture of data and elimination of supporting spreadsheet activity.

Dynamics AX’s inbuilt functionality supports Good Manufaturing Practices (GMP), and with some modification enables better efficiency via EDI process and the resultant reduction in human error. Dynamics AX has also been integrated with RMS (Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System), the POS system in place at Living Nature’s retail outlets. “Dynamics AX is a great system solution for our business,” says Pooran.

“We’re fanatical about product quality and control of our production and supply chain, and a single integrated system which allows us to run our business efficiently and gives us the information to make decisions is exactly what we need. Dynamics AX delivers.”

For more information

Koorb Consulting
www.koorb.com

Nicholas Birch
nbirch@koorb.co.nz
Ph 09 361 1304

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