The Client

Located in the south-central U.S., this client is a commercial real estate lender that specializes in mortgage products for multi-family dwellings, such as senior housing and health care facilities.

The Challenge

As an entity that provides financing opportunities for its customers, much of this client’s work processes involved tracking loan premiums. The client had been implementing Workday, which its parent company was already using. Geared for larger organizations and enterprises, Workday is an American on?demand financial management and human capital management software vendor geared toward large, enterprise organizations.

However, the client wasn’t impressed by Workday’s capabilities. While it had more bells and whistles, a year and a half of experience with trying to implement the platform was proof positive that the solution wasn’t working for this company in terms of maximizing its operations overall efficiency. It wanted something that allowed it to work more independently, which Workday simply wasn’t doing.

The Solution

When the client approached us at The TM Group, and told us of its expectations and why Workday wasn’t working, we offered an alternative: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The beauty of ERP software is its capabilities; it allows organizations to do more so they can get a better handle on their company’s day-to-day management needs. As a solution that is available via the cloud — as well as on-premises — Business Central tools can be leveraged from anywhere.

One of the more useful tools in Business Central is Dimensions. This feature makes tracking transactions, cost accounting and other processes simple and more organized by assigning values to virtually any data point that desired collected. It also helps with report creation and filing. Cost tracking — or more specifically, loan premium tracking — was a major chore for this client. Dimensions made the chore less of a hassle and faster to complete.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central’s tools go well beyond Dimensions; it also boasts Jobs, which is ideal for their project tracking, reporting and invoicing-related activities.  Accessible through Project Management, Jobs help with planning, tracking, reporting and billing, all tasks that were relevant to the commercial real estate lender; it used Jobs primarily for project tracking. Thus, when it extended financing to borrowers, Jobs allowed the company to track that loan product by assigning it a job number.

This allowed the firm to accumulate the costs of a loan so it can figure out the true costs of processing the loan pre-emptively. This gave the client more insight and visibility into its operational costs so it could plan accordingly in terms of cash flow and accounts receivable. Dimensions can provide several of the same capabilities that Jobs can, but since several of the lender’s tasks were being addressed by Dimensions, Jobs served as a convenient alternative.

Finally, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central made payables management less complex thanks to AMC Banking. Users can now more easily get all their banking activities accomplished thanks to the AMC Banking/Microsoft partnership, be it submitting payments, account transfer, bank statement retrieval and other solutions (e.g. ACH, remittances, wire transactions, etc.). This was yet another way Workday didn’t measure up.

While we are still working with this client, the bottom line is this: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central worked when Workday didn’t; it can work for you, too. If you’re interested in learning more about this ERP or want to arrange an integration, contact The TM Group today.