Aristocrat Technologies is an international provider of gaming solutions dedicated to supporting the global gaming market. Aristocrat provides players around the world with exciting and rewarding games of chance while supplying operators with state of the art systems and product service.

The company has been operating in the New Zealand market for 18 years and has a strong presence here, with about 80 staff and about a 45 percent share of the sales and service market for the country’s approximately 20,000 gaming machines.

Until recently Aristocrat Technologies New Zealand had been running a 14-year-old DOSbased ERP system that was clearly overdue for replacement.

The outdated system was frustrating for staff to use and not suited to generating the reports the business needed, says Donal Maguire, Aristocrat’s National Operations Manager.

“There was very poor visibility within our old system and the reporting capability was very poor as well,” says Maguire.

“Every time we needed a report we had to have it built by the provider so there were obviously costs involved with that and there was poor integration between our field service, sales and backof- house systems,” he says.

“What we also found was people generated their own databases and spreadsheets off to the side of the core systems. People were holding onto a lot of knowledge. So if someone wasn’t in on a particular day, not only could you not ask them a question, but you also couldn’t access their information because it was on their laptop or in their spreadsheet.”

The decision was made to migrate to Microsoft’s Dynamics AX ERP solution. “Dynamics AX seemed to be the right fit for what we do here,” says Maguire. “It had CRM capabilities, and it had all the standard ERP functionality – production, procurement, master planning, it was fully integrated with a service module.”

Adaptable Solutions played a key role in ensuring the implementation went as smoothly as possible, Maguire says.

“Adaptable came in and helped us, and trained all the line managers as we progressed through the implementation. So they were at our side day in, day out making sure everything went well – they were available for queries and help at the drop of a hat.”

Upgrading to Dynamics AX has transformed Aristocrat’s business operations.

“Now we don’t have people holding onto knowledge outside the system – it’s all in there,” says Maguire.

“Now if somebody is away from work, the business is no longer dependent on that person, where previously we were reliant on individuals being available,” he says.

“So our knowledge management has improved. We can report on absolutely anything we want to now. The query and the report building functionality in Dynamics AX allows us to review anything that’s in there and marry it to any piece of data and pull out reports based on that, rather than us having to go to some provider and say: ‘I need a report that has X, Y and Z. Please build it and charge me $10,000.”

Staff ’s accessibility to the system has improved while at the same time Dynamics AX’s security functionality means access can be managed to ensure only appropriate people have access to information. Dynamics AX’s CRM capabilities have also been a huge boost to Aristocrat’s staff productivity.

“It’s a fully loaded CRM package so we can calenderise all our meetings and see all the interactions with customers, the status of various quotes, the sales pipeline and do analysis on it,” Maguire says.

“It’s like the old saying ‘you only know what you know’ – and we didn’t know any better until we got this system. Now we can see the potential in CRM is just phenomenal. It’s not something that was utilised to any degree of effect in the past but now we can fully see where we are with our clients, the status of projects and campaign. Based on that we can deliver to customers expectations. We can see what the customer has experienced in the past, where the blockages or pains have been and we can address them and rectify them.”

Dynamics AX’s product configuration module, Product Builder, has also provided considerable efficiencies for Aristocrat through the sales and manufacturing process.

The company has around 20 different games available at any one time and three or four different cabinets in which they can be housed. Add to this the different denominations of play and different jackpots that can be associated with each machine, and there are literally tens of thousands of possible combinations of machines that could be built.

These possible iterations have been distilled down to about 40 products Aristocrat’s sales staff typically offer customers and Product Builder solves the previous headache of compiling specific machine requirements when an order is placed by stepping the sales rep through a dialog-box product building process.

“Now you go into Dynamics AX, pick one model, answer a couple of quick questions and all of a sudden your product is built in the background, as opposed to phoning up someone, asking them for the right part number because you’ve searched the system and you haven’t found it, and possibly they’ve being given you the wrong part number,” says Maguire.

“Product Builder eliminates error and makes the process easy to manage because it just flows right through the system from start to end. For us it is one of the key components of Dynamics AX.”

Maguire says as an implementation partner, Adaptable Solutions were invaluable in assisting him and the rest of the project team through the Dynamics AX rollout process.

“Adaptable Solutions were just phenomenal through this experience. Without them I don’t think it would have been as easy going. Not to say that it was easy going – all system implementations are heartaches and require a lot of work – but it could have been a lot worse without those guys onboard,” he says.

“Each of the Adaptable staff members involved was fully committed and there was full commitment from Adaptable Solutions as a company. They delivered every single time without fail.”