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Case Study RMD Kwikform

DY N A M I C S R E N TA L . CO M

Managing risk while generating business growth in the rental market with Dynamics Rental.

for more information about

Dynamics Rental please visit:

www.dynamicsrental.com

RMD Kwikform (RMDK) are part of the Interserve Group which is a £2b turnover company and RMDK’s turnover is around £195m. RMDK’s core business is the hire and sell of goods and they operate in the construction indus-try providing formwork/false work equipment to major construction players around the world. Operations cover 20 countries around the world, in every time zone, 24x7 365 days of the year. The biggest markets RMDK operates in are the UK, Middle-East, Australia and USA. Some of their key projects include most of the bridges in the UK, the Dubai mall & Airport, the 2012 Olympic swimming pool, YAS Island Hotel on YAS grand prix track. RMDK focuses on major civil engineering projects around the world.

Our main challenges were around having a com-mon set of processes for all global businesses – which would manage our operational needs, our stock assets, the movement of these assets, as well as the financial business management.

We started that journey about 10 years ago with the aim of consolidating our many ERP systems around the world. At that stage we did not have common processes, no transparency of assets, or the move-ments of these assets. Stock management was com-plex and the ability to understand stock utilization was difficult and if we needed to ship goods to other countries then the visibility of available stock was

also challenging and costly. Our particular challenge in the rental market is that we are not a serial hire, we are a bulk hire - we have no identification at all on any of our goods that go out to the customer.

So for example, when we hire 50 pieces of stick to a customer, we don’t know which piece of item has been rented or returned

We manage everything by quantity, therefore we need to match quantities going out with quantities that come in and the tracking and management of assets is a paramount within our system.

THE CHALLENGE

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We therefore needed a rental solution that met all of those core requirements as there was no ready-made solution in the market and we needed a partner to develop our bulk rental business model.

We needed to put a system together to be able to con-sistently manage a common set of processes (order, pick-ing, returns and invoices) and provide us with visibility of our stock within country and around the world and also have consistent financial management of our business operations.

Our main goal, was to establish ‘a common set of pro-cesses’ which we could deploy and replicate anywhere. We wanted a fully integrated end to end solution – We did not want multiple systems with multiple interfaces.

If we did an order, the order went through right the way to invoicing – this would then capture all the right finan-cials. We also wanted to incorporate a single purchase order system. This would provide RMDK with a single database and a single source of information and report-ing. Both for our financial and operational parts of the businesses.

Furthermore, we wanted to deploy a repeatable standard-ized system, so that we could deploy this model into any country without re-inventing the wheel or being too tied down to local practices or putting a specific infrastructure in support of a local system. We just needed to focus on the local country legal issues, training and implementa-tion and effectiveness of our single solution.

THE SOLUTION

We have been involved right from the initial inception of the original solution as an active customer and collabora-tive partner in shaping the bulk part of the 1st version of the Rental solution as it was conceived 10 years ago start-ing with a company called Global, who had a hire pack-age and who wanted to turn it into a Microsoft Dynamics® AX package. We got into partnership with them to develop that particular product. Global was taken over by Touchstone with whom we then further developed the product, and then subsequently they got taken over by HSO who are our current implementation partner.

Over that period the rental product has evolved consid-erably, from different versions of the AX Platform, start-ing with version 2 to 2.5, to 3, to 4. As part of the 10 year product run we had a program to roll that out to all our 20 operating countries, which has taken around 8 years to compete and the last country was completed 18 months ago.

We have been able to implement right across all our 20 operating countries whether it is the USA, South Africa, India or Australia and we have been able to get each country up and running within 6 months, in a scalable and cost effective method.

The Bulk Rental solution is now owned by Dynamics Software (DYS) and importantly for both RMDK and DYS that relationship has evolved and grown since the acqui-sition. We wanted to work with a partner whom we could trust, who understands our business needs and take our business model and evolves it into our core business model.

We have now embarked on a new exciting journey with DYS, to upgrade and re-implement the next release of AX: AX 2012 R3. Dynamics Software are re-writing our core bulk rental product based on current Microsoft Technology making use of standard code where possible and minimizing/avoiding customizations.

RMDK are working collaboratively with the development team such that the standard Dynamics Rental Solution is enhanced with our bulk rental requirements and RMDK will provide expert industry knowledge and input from a customer perspective in terms of our rental requirements and market needs. So while it is called an upgrade proj-ect, it is actually a significant re-implementation project lasting over 2-3 years.

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THE BENEFITS

For RMDK, Dynamics AX been a very good product. It strengths lies in its flexibility. We have been able to rollout AX into 20 different countries and as part of that rollout incorpo-rate each country’s legal requirements very easily into the product.

And, as part of the implementation process-es, together with our partner we have de-veloped a number of import routines to ex-tract data out of legacy systems to drop into straight into our rental system. Which simpli-fied the transition from the old system to the new system.

One unexpected factor from the rollout out was to take a break from the continued roll-out and do a mid-point review. From our first rollout into the UK and then through the sub-sequent countries, we were introducing new changes and processes as we learned more or had to make changes to the common processes, it became difficult to go back to countries where we had already implement-ed to add these new processes and changes. So the older implementations started to lag behind!

We therefore took a break from implement-ing the product and went back and revisited the implemented product and went to

the countries where it was implemented to ask how they wanted to improve the product.

This was quite beneficial in terms of incorpo-rating key improvements in the product that the business needed such as wizards to make the operator’s life easy, reducing the number of clicks within the product, improving the visibility of stock into a single screen with a single click etc.

This in turn improved the core product, as it also had many improvements built into the product and thereby enhanced the delivery and the functionality.

The main benefits for us have been and are: • Having a common set of streamlined and efficient processes and utilizing a standard model which we can implement anywhere in the world • Similarly if we develop new functionality, we can develop it once and deploy it many times across our global operations• The ability to track our assets and have stock visibility within country and across our global operations• The ability of manage our ‘cash flow’ much more effectively – if we have a big project with a shortage of stock, then because we have visibility of stock not being utilized in another country we can ship it across to the country where we need it – thereby maximiz-ing our utilization of stock in an integrated global system• Providing one global system from one cen-trally hosted system delivering multi-curren-cy, multi-time zone and meeting local legal and fiscal requirements. This in turn saves money in not having multiple systems or the management of these multiple systems and we can provide 24x7 service, 365 days a year.

“Using 1 single standardized solution with streamlined best practices and processes, we are maximizing stock utilization, tracking assets in an integrated global system & running a very effective cost model.“

Bansh Mistry, Head of I.T. RMD Kwikform

For more customer stories and to listen to an interview with Bansh Mistry online visit www.dynamicssoftware.com/references