One of the companies that turned to Velrada for help was City FM, a $1.9B facilities management company based in Glasgow, Scotland, that specializes in both hard and soft facilities management with a significant footprint in global retail. City FM had developed its own software in-house to direct 14,000 service technicians supporting hundreds of clients around the world. This represented a significant investment by City FM which required a large team of developers to build custom apps, each of which would often be tailored slightly different for each customer. The company wanted to move to a unified platform solution that could help them be more agile in addressing customer needs. In 2019 and 2020 it started a major transition from hybrid environments to a fully cloud-based solution with the Microsoft Cloud.
“Their custom, in-house approach had been highly successful for 30 years,” said Nolan. “But moving to Dynamics 365 Field Service creates the opportunity to be much more responsive to their customers’ needs as well as optimize service delivery by using a cloud-based platform that offers unified scheduling across all of their assets and customers.”
City FM had originally engaged with Velrada for its UK operations, but quickly saw the potential to create a global cloud platform that works equally well in all regions. Velrada secured funding from Microsoft for a Catalyst engagement, which it used to map out a blueprint for the architecture needed to support its global operations. This plan has been endorsed by company leadership, and once in production, will allow the company to retire the multi-version approach it’s used with customers over the next few years. The new Dynamics-based platform will increase efficiency for deploying technicians, as well as faster time to market for new features and functionality.
Improved workforce productivity and client service through optimized workforce planning for roster and shift management of front front-line workers. Increased agility, efficiency, and cost of technology solution changes.
“If a client has a legacy ERP or asset management solution, replacing something that they’ve been using for 20 years is a challenge. But add Dynamics 365 Field Service, Power Apps, Power BI BI–and glue that together using our Azure services services-based EAM Connect solution solution–that is a very successful strategy.”
Velrada sees its approach with Dynamics 365 Field Service as a way to drive new business with both their traditional asset-intensive customers like City FM, as well as in newer sectors like healthcare, non-profit, and government.
“We’re famous for asset-intensive industries, but there are a lot of analogous businesses right now,” said Saul Sabath, Managing Director of Velrada. “In healthcare, you now have a highly mobile, skilled workforce that needs to be managed, have appointments scheduled, and have equipment or medication allocated, and we can help solve those business challenges.”
Using its success to gain traction with Microsoft sellers and the Microsoft partner ecosystem has propelled Velrada to a position as a global industry expert that gets pulled into deals early, resulting in 538% growth of its Microsoft business in recent years. Dynamics 365 and Power Apps have a particularly high growth trajectory that the company doesn’t see slowing down anytime soon.
“Microsoft wants to double the Dynamics 365 business to $10 billion by 2024,” said Sabath. “By being well-connected to the ecosystem and knowing Microsoft is hiring more staff, making better products, and pushing harder into the market, we absolutely believe we can double our growth as well, giving Microsoft a partner that will grow with them. We’re in it together.”
“Microsoft wants to double the Dynamics 365 business to $10 billion by 2024. By being well-connected to the ecosystem and knowing Microsoft is hiring more staff, making better products, and pushing harder into the market, we absolutely believe we can double our growth as well, giving Microsoft a partner that will grow with them. We’re in it together.”
After landing a significant project with a large multi-national facilities management company in 2015 to deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Azure data and analytics services, long-time Microsoft partner Velrada realized it had hit on a winning solution for asset-intensive industries. By using Dynamics 365 Field Service as a complement to their existing ERP or CRM systems, Velrada could give these companies a comprehensive cloud-based solution to manage and maintain critical assets and personnel, as well as the analytics to report on the effectiveness of their efforts.
Organizations with thousands of service technicians need an efficient way to manage those technicians’ time, allocate tasks, and oversee the assets they are servicing. They are also likely to be very large enterprises with a significant investment in a legacy ERP or CRM system like SAP or Oracle and not looking to replace those systems wholesale, as that would be extremely costly from both a financial and operational perspective.
“We’ve been successful in implementing Dynamics 365 Field Service by wrapping it around existing infrastructure so that all of those field workers can have the functionality they need to be effective, while also making them more efficient,” said Dominic Nolan, Owner and CTO of Velrada. “We always lead with an end-to-end Dynamics Field to Finance approach. However, if a client has a legacy ERP or asset management solution, replacing something that they’ve been using for 20 years is a challenge. But add Dynamics 365 Field Service, Power Apps, Power BI–and glue that together using our Azure services-based EAM Connect solution–that is a very successful strategy.”
Velrada has taken this approach from its home base in Australia and extended it to Europe, North America, and Asia, garnering attention from both Microsoft and other companies looking for a better way to maintain and service their diverse, remote assets globally.
Velrada is a system integrator that drives transformational business improvement using the Microsoft enterprise cloud platform, helping clients optimize operations, transform products, empower employees, and engage customers.
Dynamics 365 Field Service, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365
Finance, Power Platform
Facilities Management, Energy &
Resources, Government, Healthcare, Infrastructure, Non Non-profit, Retail, Utilities
Australia
2009
538% growth in Microsoft Dynamics 365
license sales
Accelerated implementation of end-to -end Field Service and Finance for asset asset-intensive industries
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