Multi-site Equipment Rental and Service Company Employs Open Door's Technology to Gain Accurate Visibility into All Areas of Operations

• Product

  Jet Reports, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, ODT Rentals, ODT Service

• Company

  Milford

• Name & Job Title

  Ben Tarango, IT Systems Manager

• Industry

  Equipment Rentals and Service

Problem/Challenge

As a well-established equipment rental and service company offering turnkey solutions for large engineering projects, Milford’s team struggled with the lack of integration in their separate systems across multiple locations. Despite having a robust front-end, when Ben Tarango, IT Systems Manager, stepped into Milford (https://milfordonline.com/), he quickly saw that the lack of planning, procurement, and inventory management was causing financial discrepancies and hindering their ability to streamline operations.

Users had no visibility to see what was coming from the data they input; when P&L’s didn’t match the manual tallies, all the financials were getting undermined because there was no way to drill into the details. “As a large footprint business, we are constantly moving things back and forth, and it wasn’t clean. There was also no tight financial integration, just output of journal entries – so the balance sheet got disconnected and inconsistent across systems. We ran it like this for so long that things just got further and further apart the longer they existed,” Ben explains.

“So much was spent doing manual investigation and reconciliation, it was a lot of labor that could have been spent elsewhere making operational decisions.”

Solution(s)

Knowing they needed to fill the gap in operational and financial management to keep up with their growth, the IT and management teams at Milford evaluated multiple cloud-based platforms, including SAP. But they kept running up against too high and unjustified price tags where the proposed solutions didn’t adequately outline their value or return. After contacting Microsoft, Milford were referred to Open Door’s ODT Rentals app which runs on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central platform, and Open Door’s team of industry and technical experts.

What was cetainly unexpected during the initial kick-off process was the unraveling of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Still, the Open Door and Milford teams were able to successfully implement across all locations, on-time, and on-budget despite the obstacles facing project resources and lack of traditional onsite sessions. Ben recalls that “overall it was a bit chaotic, but fortunately for me and us, the team at Open Door involved in the project helped a lot. Our primary project manager had so much knowledge on master data, and he spoke the same language as me, relating things back in familiar terms.”

Results

Ben and his team noticed incredibly impactful results nearly immediately upon testing and going live with Open Door’s equipment management software solution of ODT Rentals and ODT Service on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central platform, mainly in the integration between processes. Now, when the finance and management teams look at the data, they are presented with a clearer understanding of what drove the numbers – an added reassurance Open Door’s solutions have provided.

“By gaining frontside control of the business, it vastly reduced the number of people/resources involved in just the hands-on management, people who had to be working IN the business versus ON it.” Ben continues to explain that “people handling journal entries can now handle quality control. Inventory specialists can now stop inventory adjustments and just do audits. October 2020 was four times September 2020’s business, and now we are equipped to handle that scale of growth.”