A five-year strategic transformation plan has kicked off at food equipment manufacturer tna solutions. Cloud computing and Dynamics 365 are streamlining operations and transforming talent management. The approach is providing real-time insights to executives and employees when and where they need them—and opening the door to new revenue streams.
A series of acquisitions left Australian food equipment manufacturer tna solutions with a patchwork of information systems and fractured processes.
tna is transforming its human capital management process by deploying Dynamics 365 Human Resources to empower its people and optimize operations.
“We looked at lots of products, and for me the Microsoft product really stood out. Over the next three to five years we are going through an implementation to Dynamics 365—the whole suite. Human Resources was the first piece in the jigsaw for us.”
The advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe in early 2018 was significant for tna, which holds both European employee and customer data on its systems. That data needed to be secured to comply with the new regulation. If it wasn’t, the company risked enormous fines of up to 4 percent of revenues.
A move to Microsoft Azure and Dynamics 365 offered the security, resilience, and trust that tna needed and the regulation demanded, according to Singh. “Dynamics 365 Human Resources gave us the database, the security, the user friendliness. We got rid of all the third-party products and spreadsheets and brought it into one. That is what it gave us: the vision and control that we were after.”
The approach has already streamlined HR, and over the next couple of years it will do the same for all the other departments of tna. Singh also stresses that the move to the cloud and access to Azure services creates new opportunities for the company—particularly to use Azure Cognitive Services and Azure IoT Hub to help tna develop new business services.
“This is really big on our agenda. Being a manufacturer, all our machines have sensors built in,” says Singh. The opportunity to feed data from those sensors through Azure IoT Hub and make the insights available to tna employees and customers can help tna offer new products, like predictive maintenance and service agreements, to its customers.
Already well down the road to streamlining talent management, the next transformation focus for tna is ERP and CRM. It’s part of the transformation agenda that Singh says will leave tna with a single globally integrated system within three to five years.
Besides Dynamics 365, tna has also rolled out other Microsoft cloud-based productivity solutions across the world, like Office 365, Skype for Business, and Intune, to bolster mobile access security.
