One hundred per cent locally owned, The Bell Tea and Coffee Company is New Zealand’s oldest and most renowned tea company. In 2006, the company expanded further with the acquisition of Burton Hollis, which represents the Gravity, Burtons and the Burton Hollis coffee brands.

Today, The Bell Tea and Coffee Company produces a range of well-loved tea brands, including Twinings, and roast and ground coffee for the supermarket and hospitality channels. It also manufactures a variety of other food products, including soups, jellies and powdered beverages. Despite this diversifying of products, the volume of the company’s business remains in tea, with manufacturing sites based in Auckland and Dunedin.

Stepping up to 2009 with Koorb
Phil Cullen, support services manager, has been with the company for seven years. When he first joined the iconic company, it was running CBA, a DOS-based financial package, so part of his mandate was to implement a more modern and comprehensive solution, to facilitate growth and efficiency. Microsoft Dynamics AX3.2 was selected, and implemented in 2004.

The Bell Tea and Coffee Company originally planned to upgrade to AX4 in mid-2008, but decided to wait. However, following a change in Dynamics AX partner to Koorb Consulting, it had a renewed confidence in what could be achieved and so decided to move directly to AX2009.

This confidence was born out of Cullen seeing Koorb acquire – through the addition of new consultants – both new customers in the food industry and said consultants’ valuable experience. Koorb has the strongest FMCG credentials of all Microsoft Dynamics AX partners in New Zealand.

“This was the compelling reason we moved to Koorb – their sheer depth of FMCG knowledge, and the confidence we had in what the company and their team could deliver,” says Cullen.

Many at the company, including Cullen, had considered an upgrade as challenging a process as implementing a new ERP. Previous project plans proposed to them had considerable complexity behind them – with up to five stages, as each service pack between AX3.2 and AX2009 was uploaded and implemented. This was to take many weeks. It was not a prospect they looked forward to.

“We’d delayed the upgrade until it was literally a couple of months away from AX2009 coming online. So, we discussed this with Koorb and, given the additional functionality the new upgrade promised, we decided to move directly to AX2009.

“Koorb had a reassuringly painless approach, telling us, ‘Here you are now, we are going to get you to there – and you don’t need to worry about the in between bits.’ So we decided the time was right.”

Koorb’s abbreviated project plan promised the final transition from AX3.2 to a live version of AX2009 (following testing) within just a few days. After an initial scoping process, in February 2009, a test environment was set up at the company in the beginning of March, with the upgrade due to go live by April 6.

Testing time
Testing was a critical issue for project-owner Cullen. “Even though we had four weeks to test AX2009, trying to find the time when everyone was so busy anyway, was difficult. I had a key user from each part of the company who was requested to work through a list of actions to test the new system, but it’s hard to pull people away from time-critical tasks and get them to concentrate on a new system.

“In an ideal world, we would allocate a set time period per day and a list of tasks to be worked though by allocated people. But the reality is that there are few companies in New Zealand of our size that wouldn’t find that an onerous or expensive process. You can only do your best to work through as much as possible within the time-frame.”

After stopping processing transactions with all journals, the system was ready to be upgraded at 4.30pm in the afternoon on Friday, April 3.

It's all yours
“I rang our consultant at Koorb at 4.30pm on the Friday,” says Cullen, “and said, ‘It’s all yours’. The project plan was that the upgrade would be completed by mid to late Sunday. Instead, they rang me at 12.30pm on Saturday to tell me it was finished.

“I said, ‘What do you mean, it’s finished?’ So, I logged in from home, ran a few reports, did a little bit of checking and they were right, it was! We went in on Sunday to run more comprehensive testing – ran the debtors and creditors, ran the stock valuation, and it was all working. We’d had an annoying long-term $5 discrepancy between our debtors and general ledger, which had proved impossible to rectify – and even that was fixed. We really were elated at the results.”

By 11.30am on Sunday morning Cullen and his team were able to sit back and relax with a cup of tea. “Having gone through the upgrade from CBA to Dynamics AX, and the sheer amount of work involved, we had the expectation that this would be along the same lines. We anticipated it as being as major as a new implementation, but were, thankfully, proven to be wrong.”

To ensure that any go-live day issues were addressed immediately, Koorb placed a consultant in house at the company on the Monday.

“Their consultant was on the spot to fine-tune any issues as they were discovered,” says Cullen. “It was a great hands-on approach by Koorb. We could have done it by phone, but this was an instant way to iron out any last minute minor bugs, and we really appreciated it as part of their upgrade strategy.”

New look future
Dynamics AX2009 has a completely new look and feel. However, the underlying modules are very much the same as the previous version. For The Bell Tea and Coffee Company, the move to AX2009 has overcome several issues with AX3.2, especially relating to inventory costing, as well as signalling the time to progress other projects.

Cullen and his team had accumulated a list of desired modifications while AX3.2 was in operation; however they put these to one side, preferring to action them once AX2009 was in place. Along with implementing these modifications, will be the integration of a new service-management module with Microsoft Outlook. Following this, they have several other existing modules to reassess and to gauge their respective levels of efficiency, with a view to improving their ongoing performance.

One mission-critical module is the company’s blending system – designed to run with AX3.2. It was essential that it continued to perform with AX2009. Cullen and Koorb took the upgrade as a timely opportunity to revise and improve this crucial module as a separate project.

Response to AX2009 within Bell Tea and Coffee Company’s team has been positive. “I think the move from AX3.2 to AX2009 is not a huge change in terms of business process. Like anything new, users just need to get used to it and accept working a little differently and embrace the changes,” says Cullen.

“For example, the searching is even easier than before. You can build huge amounts of favourites which act as shortcuts to actions, reports etc that you carry out frequently – without having to even go into the main system. This is a very popular feature.”

For more information

Koorb Consulting
www.koorb.com
Nicholas Birch
nbirch@koorb.co.nz

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