All posts by : Mason Whitaker

A lot of you may know them. They produce a lot of tortillas, and one of the largest in North America. And they have a pretty large operations. They distribute all over North America. They have a lot of distribution trucks as well as just a heavy operational footprint. So they have a a lot of things that are going on, and we have been working with them over the last year or so. They've worked with their leadership for many years, but specifically on this this project over this last year. And they have a lot of complex operations, one of them being on the finance side of how they actually collect cash from their customers. Being a tortilla distributor and manufacturer, they're working with a lot of mom and pop restaurants as well as wholesale, grocery operations, and so they've got a lot of distribution that's going on. And it's not always through, you know, just ACH or wires that they're collecting these payments. It's a lot of cash. They collect a lot of cash every single day. And they have three full time people that all they do all day long is collect the cash from the drivers. They receive the manifest, and they essentially record what's going on from just their their AR side of things. It's their account receivables team. And this team deals a a lot with this cash, and it's pretty hectic. So about half of their day we're spending collecting the cash from the drivers, recording it on manifest, and then ultimately just jotting it down in the ledger. But then the pain really comes for them when they when the pain comes whenever they're actually trying to reconcile these these payments. So where are these payments actually coming from? They know their customers, and they know the the cash that they have in hand, but what are the invoices that actually these these payments get applied to? So that's really the the challenging factor for that. It's going through so many different reports and so many different notices from salespeople to be able to sorry. I'm switching clickers. They have so many different reports, so many different document formats that their salespeople are saying, hey, this customer, they paid this invoice, and this was the cash that you collected on this day. And the data is all over the place, and it's not a great area for typical automation. Normally, we would use some sort of automated tool to essentially find the payments and apply them, but it's all over the place. The data is very unstructured, so it's very difficult to actually determine how you're gonna apply these payments. So the process looks like this. For a standard daily operations for an accounts receivable client, they are first getting the cash in the beginning. So collecting them from the drivers. They've got their manifest. They're processing that cash. They're actually just counting the money and putting it on a Excel spreadsheet and then being able to actually look at how this is affecting their overall cash position. And then the last aspect of the day is them actually reconciling and applying that cash to their invoices. So this way they know when they go to customers, hey, you still owe me this money, and it's for this specific invoice. So it's a very important component of their operations. So this is essentially a full day, full eight hours for one of their accounts in the receivable loads. And what we were able to do is look at the process, and I'm gonna walk you through exactly how we got to this point of being able to impact their process. But we looked at their process and said, there's a really great opportunity for a tool called Microsoft Copilot to be able to go through all of that unstructured data across all their emails, Teams messages, text messages, and just all the unstructured data that they have with their salespeople and say, what does this, invoice, apply, or what does this cash apply, to what invoice? And so this manual process that they were doing for about four hours with introducing Copilot and the solution took fifteen minutes for our team to come up with a prompt that says, Copilot, I want you to take this cash amount and this customer, search through my emails, and find the invoice that it needs to apply to. Copilot then goes and looks through all that unstructured data, finds the invoice that this cache should apply to, and creates now a ledger record that actually applies that cache. So turning what normally takes their entire afternoon into just one hour of activity across each of the different accounts receivable clerks. And so in totality, what we were able to do with a fifteen minute solution and an extremely affordable, like, so cheap even solution, we save one year of processing time. That's actual time that those clerks are now actually able to spend on going and reaching out and finding new customers, like helping find new customers, as well as updating any age to accounts receivables. So, like, actually, their cash position is going up into the right because they're able to collect much more because they don't have to spend as much time on just doing the actual the mundane tasks around the processing side to it. So this is just, you know, one of the areas that we've seen, and I'm gonna dive into a bunch of other areas that are applicable to a lot of your organizations today. But I just wanna start with that story that AI is this is not something that's in the far future and something that we're getting to, and maybe our organizations are to get there by twenty thirty, and this will have a real impact on our organizations then. We are seeing it now, and we are doing this across so many different companies. So I wanna try to really make AI real for you guys today. But to be up here talking about all these AI solutions and working with this tortilla company. Like Lindsay said, my name is Mason Whitaker, I'm the president at Volt Technologies. My background is really heavily on the technical side. I've been a technical architect or, I like to say, a recovering software developer for the better part of the last, you know, decade. Started my first company when you know, last fifteen years and started in the front end engineering segment. So doing web design back when you had to write HTML and CSS manually as opposed to, you know, having something like WordPress or Squarespace or something like that. I stumbled my way into the Microsoft channel, do a ERP implementation and continuous improvement over the enterprise sector. So I've worked with hundred billion dollar organizations doing the largest rollouts of enterprise resource planning systems that have ever been done in the world. Saw how big companies do this and then built Vault Technologies as a subsidiary of a company called Sunrise Technologies, which is the number one Microsoft partner in the world, and now have found a way to do the same thing that we were doing for these hundred billion dollar organizations, but now doing it for small and mid sized businesses. So that is my goal, is to be able to enable a million small and mid sized businesses to take advantage of this cutting edge technology. This should not only be available to those hundred billion dollar organizations anymore. This is available to every single person in this room. So right next to the, Charlotte Mett Stadium, Make America Stadium. So we have a big presence in Charlotte, but we also have office locations in Winston Salem and then also operations across the globe. So we have twenty four seven follow the sun type of support. We have over three hundred and fifty professionals that are dedicated to Microsoft business applications. So regardless of what area, you know, you're kind of looking for when it comes to Microsoft, we we help support customers in that area. And we specialize in a couple areas, a lot of what you all do from manufacturing to retail and a lot in North Carolina. So my business partner in the company, John Pence, he actually was the CIO or chief information officer of Sara Lee. They're known for the, you know, the wonderful loaf of bread, but also they owe a lot of companies like Hamid's brands and Champion. So a lot of apparel companies that we've been working with. And so we've been with Microsoft ever since they first released their first set of business applications. So we've been an inner circle partner ever, over the last decade, and you'll see just a couple customers who you're probably familiar with. You know, we primarily work in that small and mid sized business space, but we do have a lot of flashy customers being in retail. You know, a lot of people know a lot of the brands. But and we've done implementations in every single continent across the world with the exception of Antarctica. So we're only you know, we're we're getting there someday. But I say all of this really just to paint a picture that, you know, we've worked at the highest levels of enterprise implementation and AI implementation, and now we're bringing this to the small and mid sized space. I think that's just so important for this community that we have. And there's a lot of complex logos and lots of things that, you know, we can dive deeper into in all the products and areas that we support. The very confusing slide, but really in essence, all it really is is just Microsoft business applications is what we implement and support. So that's the framework that I'm gonna be speaking from, about, you know, all the different ways you're gonna be able to incorporate AI into your business is coming from that Microsoft perspective. But I have had a career in kind of agnostic to Microsoft, starting a couple AI companies, you know, before you did join in the Microsoft channel. So been an AI since you know, before it was cool, I like to say. Now it's, you know, all array. But for the agenda, what I'm actually gonna cover here, wanna talk about how the landscape has changed. And so the first thing with this is the landscape. Things have changed over the last five years. Things are not, you know, more rapidly than they ever have before. Technology is exponential, and we are not in a state where we just are able to act like everything is the same anymore. But the first thing being that AI and automation opportunities are no longer just afterthoughts, or they're not something that you should be thinking about for the next five years. This is something that you should be thinking about now. Because if you're if you're not doing it, your competitors are going in, then they're gonna be taking your talent. They're gonna be taking your customers. And so it's only a matter of time if you're not staying on that curve. And the thing that's really drastically increased is globalization and the availability of remote work. With the COVID pandemic, there's a big push towards modern applications. You no longer have to only be able to work if you went to the office. This has now enabled a whole flooding of new AI tools that are able that are able to really revolutionize your business. And then now generations, generational expert expectations have changed. Millennials and and Gen Z, they don't want to work at organizations that don't have these toolings available for them. I can tell you from experience, I've seen companies running green screen operations that don't have the concept of a mouse and only know function keys, that can't integrate with anything or any of the productivity tools that are out there. People will flat out say, no, I will not work at that organization. So when Matt is talking about retaining and attracting talent, this is one of the key ways to do that is enabling new technology that are gonna get people excited to work in your operations. Wow. They have such an incredible set of tools that I can leverage, and I can do so much more. That's what you want them to to really be saying. And there's some alarming statistics for this. You know, right now, in twenty twenty five, seventy eight percent of organizations have adopted AI in some capacity, coming out from in twenty twenty, fifty percent of organizations. That's a massive jump. You know, that's for across all companies in the last five years, we've seen an uptick of about twenty eight percent. And the people that are using it are getting actual real results. So workers are reporting seventy seven percent aren't improving their productivity, but a seventy three percent higher output and good quality. And that's an important metric, that AI is not just driving up this ability to be efficient, it's driving up this quality metric as well, which is an important KPI for you to be able to deliver better to your customers and be able to retain more talent. And this is a big one that I'll talk about. The core skills are changing. No longer are you gonna have to just have someone who's really good at manually entering in something. Their skill, wow, they're really good at the numpad on the keyboard. That no longer is the case. The skills have changed where you need adaptability and creative thinking, and you need to upskill your people that are in your current workforce to get to that point where they actually are changing over their skill sets. And there's a big, great flattening going on right now with AI where you don't have to have these advanced specializations even if you have these research tools like AI at your disposal. So it's something you need to be thinking about with upscaling your organization over the next five to ten years. And then this one, I really love this one. In the last five years, almost four times the amount of people are now using AI on some at some sort of factor. You know, we saw it with the launch of ChatGPT three point five, which people like to call the AI movement. If you have not used ChatGPT, you should go check it out. There is really a they were the fastest adopter of any customer or the most amount of customers of any technology product ever. So you had people that were creating new users like Facebook over the course of, like, two years, they got to a million. It took a matter of, like, three days for JWT to get to a million users because it's that revolutionary of a product. And this is just the beginnings of the shifting landscape. It's only an exponential technology, so it's really only up from here. And the way that you need to operate, the terms of your just overall operations and your workforce, is like a chameleon. Being able to adapt is the skill set that every single person needs in this room and for you to be able to train your organization and your users in your organization and your the the talent that that you're bringing in. Adaptability is really that number one skill set. So we're moving away from this look at just everything is based on efficiency. If, again, you know, hit the numpad. They can enter in a lot of numbers very fast. That's not really the thing that now is driving change within organizations. It's people who are actually able to adapt to all the new technology that's coming out and to be able to implement it very quickly. Like I said, that initial solution around, the tortilla company took about fifteen, twenty minutes for our team to come up with a solution, and it saved a year of time for for their operations. Imagine if you actually have team members that are constantly doing this within your operation. They're always looking for those areas that can adapt your business to this technology. You will blow away your competitors. You'll blow away your customers with the delivery and the quality that you're able to provide to them. So a hundred percent success is gonna be really predicated on your ability to adapt in the steam market with AI. So that's the current landscape. That's that's where we're at. There's a lot of shifting things. What are some more areas that are applicable for today? We're not talking a year from now or two years from now, but things that we're doing that are that are really driving change with organizations. And it starts with the stack, the stack of products that you know, I'm gonna I'm gonna talk about all the different application areas, but these are the areas that we see from just an overall foundational level with technology that you need to be investing into. And the first is your infrastructure as a service and your platform as a service. For the solutions that we deploy, we use Azure. There's Amazon Web Services, Google as well, Google Cloud. These are the foundational areas of, hey, we don't no longer have to buy our own on premise servers and solutions. We can instead outsource this to the big players like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to be able to have just compute to things like that. And try not to talk too technical. It's really good. It's really hard for me. The next thing that you want to look at is software as a service. And so these are your application areas. These are the things that your users, like your employees, are actually logging into every single day and performing their job. So these are the different areas that we focus in, you know, across reporting, like through tools like Power BI, Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five, like Vista Central, or your productivity tools like Teams, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, etcetera. You know, those are those are your SaaS offerings that that you should should really be looking into to create this this foundation for AI. And then now there's a new level, so AI as a service. And for us, at Vault Technologies, Microsoft Compilot is that tool that we look to for AI as a service. There's other offerings, of course, as well across I'm sure people have heard of the different models of Chai Chi BT, Claw, Gemini, etcetera. They kinda pick your flavor. The reason we like Copilot is we're not picking a model. It's really just actually the the application that you're working with, and you can choose whatever model you wanna use, so it's agnostic to that. But, really, this is the step, and you need to develop your own stack. If you're running on a paper based system today, and when you look at this, you say, well, we have no infrastructure, we have no software, and we have no AI as a service. You're not ready for AI. And your competitors are gonna beat you to this. You have to have a foundation in some way, and I'll kind of talk about the checklist of how you can get to the point where you have some of this stuff. But for the purposes of these next examples, all of these tools are really what are at play when I talk about this the real world innovations that we're that we're doing today. And the first way that he will pull in AI, first business processes, is through agentic AI. And that is it really that's core as just a pretrained AI model that's it basically says, this is ChatGPT, and here's this preloaded set of instructions for that for that AI model. And so what we've done is we work with companies that have a foundation built up where now they can deploy these AI solutions in the that fifteen, twenty minute solutioning, hey, Ling. We should create this. Okay. Let's just add some instructions to an agent, and let's do it, and it's done. You have to have that foundation first, but that's the way that we're going through and and looking at revolutionizing businesses today. And so we've talked about in finance, and this is across all departments that we're doing this. We talked about this accounts receivable agent with finance. That's one area. There's the accounts payable agent something done. So all of these are ones that either we're running internally or we have at home and customers. The accounts payable agent is one that you're able to take a picture of any sort of documents, like any invoice or sales order or inventory transfer or inventory adjustment, whatever whatever it may be, and it it is sitting on an email inbox that it gets that picture loaded for you in the email. It uses optimal character recognition to map that into your system of record, whether enterprise resource planning system or or something similar, and it loads that in and works back and forth. If it's a an invoice, for example, purchase invoice, works back and forth with your vendor to get the confirmation on the

So you're thinking about moving to a modern cloud ERP solution, and you're wondering what the differences are in how your on premise licensing works today versus what it will look like in the cloud? Well, I'm here to help answer that question for you. In the future, with Cloud ERP, you'll be based on a seat license, meaning that per user, you'll be able to have access to the system and pay per user. So a user will be assigned a license, and then they'll get associated features that they can leverage based on that license. On the on premise model, you're used to where there's limits to concurrent usage. In the cloud, that's no longer a factor. So one user can have as many tabs open sessions as they like to no hindrance. With Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, licensing is based on, two different full user licenses. You have Essentials and you have Premium. With Essentials, you get full customer relationship management, financials management, sales management, purchasing management, inventory management, and warehousing management, as well as project management too. So a lot included in the Essentials package at just seventy dollars per user per month. With Premium, you get all of that's included within Essentials and then also manufacturing and service management. So two additional modules that have a lot of of included in there that are great for field service organizations or production inventory organizations. So those are just some of the ways that the cloud ERP licensing model can work and how it will work specifically for Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. If you have any questions on how licensing works in the future, reach out to one of the members of our team. We're happy to work with you to create that plan for you.

Are you evaluating Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five Business Central and you're wondering if it supports multi entity and multi currency? Well, I've got the answer for you today. Business Central does support intercompany and multi entity management as well as multi currency. So you can have up to two hundred companies within a single environment in Business Central that you can have intercompany transactions flowing between those, as well as those transactions operating in multiple currencies. So the ability for one to have an exchange rate with another, you can have that full fledged currency management inside of the application. Now, where Business Central has some limitations is when you have multi region. So if someone, has a company that is in the US and you also have a company that is somewhere in South Africa, let's say, then you have different localized environments. And so that requires two separate environments, which will need to be connected through an API connection to perform that intercompany consolidation. But if you have companies that are within the same region, let's say within the US or all within the UK, then performing intercompany is as simple as just hooking up an intercompany partner and posting transactions against them. So that's just a little bit of insight into how that multi entity and multicurrency setup and capability works within Business Central. If you have any questions on how that could work potentially for your business, then feel free to reach out to one of the members of our team today. We're happy to work with you on it.

I get asked all the time, does Business Central have a CRM or customer relationship management tool embedded inside of it? Well, I'm here to answer that question today. And yes, it does have a CRM tool built into the ERP itself, meaning that you can track all of your contacts or leads and their associated interactions, such as emails or phone calls or events with those, those contacts. And you could also track the opportunities that exist out there with those leads and turn those opportunities into quotes. And then, of course, the associated orders and customers, moving your way all the way down to collecting the cash from that given customer. So it starts as that, that entry point for any sort of customer, whether it's a lead, an opportunity, a quote, what have you, and all of that is able to be tracked inside of the application. Though there are some limitations with Business Central CRM, such as you don't have that capability to send out SMS text messages or have nurture email sequences, some of those capabilities would exist within Dynamics three sixty five Sales, which is the tier one CRM application that's available. That is available as a bolt on or an add on license to Business Central for just an additional twenty dollars per user. So if you have more questions on the CRM capabilities that exist within Business Central, then feel free to reach out to one of our team members today. We're happy to connect with you and work with you on evaluating if it's gonna suit your needs or not.

Microsoft Dynamics Great Plains is at end of life. And if you're still running the product, then you're already behind. Microsoft has announced that there's no longer gonna be support for the Great Plains products, and your competition is already moving forward with a modern scalable cloud ERP. These legacy systems like Dynamic Scrape Planes open you up to not just security vulnerabilities, but also the risk of implementing workarounds to get solutions that are just native in the cloud. Your competition is gaining an edge with new flexible capabilities capabilities while you're stuck in the past trying to make things work in the as is state. Cloud ERP offers flexible update schedules, scalable architecture where you're no longer limited by on premise infrastructure, and so much more. Plus, with remote access built into the product, your team can operate from anywhere in the world on any device, unlike Great Plains having to operate on the infrastructure that you have on your on premise solution. Let's be honest on how a month on Great Plains actually looks. With week one, your approvals crawl. Managers are traveling, emails are stacking up, POs wait, and you get your sales team asking, do we have it? Followed by three different answers. Now week two, you're dealing with spreadsheets everywhere. Smart lists to Excel, copy paste, a PO gets rekeyed, and the numbers just don't match. Friday becomes a change freeze, so IT can babysit servers. By Saturday, they patch SQL and hope the VPN holds. With week three, you're getting a cleanup. Bank reconciliation is done by hand, journals to fix timing, tickets for stuck integrations and inventory drifts, you chase receipts. By week four, your closing week turns into a closed weekend. Late approvals land, you rerun reports, and stay late tying subledgers to the GL. Monday morning, the first question is still, is the close done? Now that's the month on Delay, rework, and risk repeated every cycle. With Dynamics three sixty five Business Central, approvals route in Outlook and Teams, bank feeds reconcile without exports, and you see cash, margin, and inventory live. Updates and security are handled in the cloud. No VPN drama, no Saturday patch window. You get one set of numbers and a close that finishes on Friday, not Sunday. The future is here with Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five Business Central. Don't let GP hold you back.