As many of us know, being able to justify why your business should make the move to a new technology solution can often present several different challenges. It is sometimes tricky to quantify exactly how the new technology will provide a number of business benefits as well as cost savings in the long run as well as being able to justify the value of the investment to key stakeholders.
Is moving to the Cloud the answer?
There are no doubts that cloud-based management solutions have helped many SMEs to make significant cost savings, securely access data, improve productivity and the overall customer experience.
However, as the COVID 19 pandemic has impacted on the way that we conduct business, many small businesses are looking to ramp up cloud adoption to ensure business continuity, adapt to change & working towards full time remote working - a decision that needs to showcase the return on investment for specific solutions.
Therefore, small businesses who are currently used legacy ERP systems, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics GP on-premise are no exception to this rule.
Forrester Study on ROI for Dynamics 365 Business Central
To help legacy ERP, Dynamics NAV and Dynamics GP on-premise users examine the potential ROI that they can take advantage by adopting Business Central, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a ROI study around this.
This study involved Forrester conducting interviews with five Business Central customers to learn more about the benefits, costs as well as understanding the risks around migrating to the Cloud. Following on from these interviews, it was decided that the analysis would take place on a small business with a value of around £10.8 million ($15 million).
Furthermore. this analysis helped to demonstrate a benefit value of approx £334,000 ($466,000) over three years against associated costs of approx £127,000 ($178,000) which calculated to an overall net present value (NPV) of £208,000 ($288,000) and an overall ROI of around 162%.
As well as the above, the move to Dynamics 365 Business Central had also helped these five customers to improve their overall efficiency, reduce costs dramatically as well as being able to scale their deployments with growth whilst still retaining the full value of being in the Cloud.
In addition to this, the five customers also felt the full business benefits of improved flow of operations, greater visibility over their business performance, improved productivity along with improved morale amongst their employees as well as reduced licensing and IT costs.
How are the cost savings & ROI for Dynamics 365 Business Central achieved?
Furthermore, the study also revealed that the five customers achieved specific cost savings and ROI benefits that helped to improve the overall productivity and operational efficiencies that came to include the following:
- Reduced the need to hire two finance and operational personnel (one full-time and one part-time) - by allowing businesses to have a greater visibility on growth helped to reduce the need to employ more personnel by around 10%.
- Streamlined the flow of operations by 8% - with more advanced tools at their disposal allowed them to complete work along with more efficient workflows which freed up employees to work on more important tasks.
- Reduced costs of around £31,700 ($44,000) on third-party reporting spend over three years – by utilising the built-in reporting of Dynamics 365 Business Central and the power of other solutions such as Power BI, the businesses reduced the requirements for externally-built reports.
- Around £28,800 ($40,000) in cost savings simply achieved by moving to Business Central – largely achieved by migrating from an on-premise Microsoft solution/legacy ERP solution.
There are no doubts that the Forrester Study helps to highlight the return on investment that small businesses across different industries can achieve by moving to the Cloud. By making the move to one cloud-based solution, Business Central will give you a comprehensive cloud business management solution that allows you to collate both sales, services and operations teams.
Next Steps?
If you have read the above article and would like to download a copy of the study you can by going to this page. Furthermore, if you have read the above article and are keen to look to implement Business Central in your business or want to find out more about what the ERP solution can offer your business through our FREE Microsoft Dynamics one hour suitability checker then please get in touch with one of our Business Central experts today.
