Microsoft platform to support MegaGroup’s buy-and-build strategy

Frank Kalff, Business Development Director at MegaGroup, is Program Manager on the customer’s side. Frank: “To a large extent, the migration to Dynamics 365 is a 'must', a mandatory project that we can postpone no longer. But at the same time it gives us the opportunity to build a new foundation and to harmonize and standardize our processes and systems. With our new buy-and-build strategy, our new application platform is going to be the standard for current and future parts of the company. We need better and faster reporting and insights, across the whole organization. At the moment, this is quite a challenge, since various companies in our group work on their own systems. Therefore, this program is in a sense a necessary evil and it's an opportunity.”

Dynamics 365 is a cloud-based solution, which emphasizes the need for standardization. Frank: “As a company, we were pretty spoiled with our on-prem AX system, because we had a lot of customizations. But when moving to a cloud-based system, we need to stay as close to the standard as possible, otherwise we won’t be able to manage the ongoing updates. But again, we see this as a chance to harmonize and to make our IT-application landscape future-proof.”

When companies move from AX to Dynamics 365, this has quite some consequences for their data warehouse. In addition, there is the complexity that until the go-live of the second business release, relevant data will still be coming from the old systems as well as from Dynamics 365.

Albert: “We had two challenges to meet MegaGroup’s reporting requirements. First, we had to build a new data warehouse and set up an intermediate data layer that can support reporting from multiple applications, as well as new businesses that will be implemented on D365. Second, we had to ensure a smooth data migration process that would allow us to control data quality and that we could run for each roll-out.

With the HSO Data Validation Framework, we established an automated data migration process that can be repeated as often as necessary. The Data Validation Framework manages data quality too, ensuring clean and validated data on the front-end. The Framework uses SQL within the connectivity Studio from To-Increase (also known as BIS), which gives the customer a lot of flexibility and the tooling is easy to use by people who are already familiar with SQL.”

Frank: “The Data Analytics part of a project like this is definitely something you have to take on from the start, otherwise data and reporting related issues will occur later in the project. We experienced this first-hand and this resulted in quite some extra pressure on our teams and budget. But I am confident that our new data warehouse is a good foundation for future standards and reporting.”