Established in 1980, Te Pari Products was purchased by the Blampied Family in 1997. Since then, Te Pari has evolved from a small factory making products for beef producers, to a business renowned for leading edge, quality New Zealand-built cattle and sheep handling hardware and solutions. Today, and still under the private ownership of the Blampied family, Te Pari proudly exports NZ Agri-tech to the world. The business’s vision is to become a global leader in seamless livestock handling solutions.
The on-premises software struggle
To support business growth, Te Pari knew they needed to take a close look at their technology.
We were struggling along using old, basic on-premises systems. But we had to do something. We were opening branches overseas, our manufacturing had grown, and managing our inter-company transactions and inter-entity stock control was becoming a major problem for us."
"We’d actually started looking at ERP systems around eight years ago, because we knew we needed an end-to-end solution that could handle everything for us — from sales through to manufacturing and production.”
After identifying several Microsoft ERP solutions that would meet their business needs, Te Pari decided to instead first implement Dynamics CRM to manage their direct customer base — and to integrate it to an ERP when they were ready.
Fast forward to 2020 — and progress!
“For a variety of reasons, we never got around to implementing a new ERP,” says Blampied. “It was only in the middle of New Zealand’s first COVID lockdown, with all of our admin and sales teams working from home, that we had time to draw breath and focus on a new ERP.”
Te Pari entered into discussions with Topaz Solutions, a small Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central practice. They decided that Dynamics 365 Business Central, including some Topaz developed extension applications for banking, landed cost and consolidations, was the perfect fit for the business.
A well-timed solution
Topaz started Te Pari’s Business Central implementation in late 2020, with a go-live goal of February 2021 for its entity, and 1 April 2021 for New Zealand. Then, a month before the local deadline, Topaz announced to Te Pari that they’d been purchased by Fusion5.
While initially a little taken aback by the news, Blampied says that the remainder of the implementation was largely ‘business as usual.’ Te Pari continued to work with familiar Topaz faces, backed by Fusion5’s comprehensive support services.
Most importantly, Te Pari’s Business Central roll-out was still delivered on time, and within (if not slightly under) budget.
Easy outcomes
Blampied says that Business Central has done exactly what Te Pari needed and expected.
“The move from the old on-premises environment to an online one has been surprisingly intuitive for our team; they’ve taken to it quite well. They especially like that when working out of the office there’s no need to log into remote servers, they can just open a browser and go — which is exactly how we wanted it to be.”
Business Central has replaced the majority of Te Pari’s old processes with inbuilt modern best-practices, and Blampied reports that his team enjoys the more streamlined workflow which cuts down on effort and eliminates most manual tasks and workarounds.
We’ve been using it for around 12 months now, and we’re really seeing the benefits of using an ERP that we can actually scale with. We also have the transparency to see what needs to be done in the business, and when."
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