BACKGROUND
MCA Connect has been a key member of Microsoft’s ‘Inner Circle’ for decades, repeatedly winning the ‘Microsoft US Business Applications Partner of the Year’ award and being a global finalist for Microsoft Partner of the Year for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain. Focused exclusively on manufacturing, MCA Connect operates primarily in the US, serving thousands of customers across 50+ countries with a team of over 300 employees.
Their process-driven approach is designed to align and modernise manufacturing operations. With a strong track record of success with large manufacturing customers, MCA Connect has developed a comprehensive worksheet for accurate estimations, integrated with BI reporting. They work closely with customers to understand their operations and processes, ensuring precise solution requirements. This industry experience is key to their unique value proposition, ensuring smoother and faster implementations. It is this approach that has built them their reputation and an impressive list of global manufacturing clients, including Sealy Mattress, Alliance Steel, Litens, Magpul, Andis, Trivium Packaging, and Wenger.
THEIR CHALLENGES
Prior to engaging with Seer 365, MCA Connect was using Excel spreadsheets and Word documents to collate all the information and work out their Dynamics 365 project estimates. It was a very manual and time-consuming process.
Craig O’Connor, Director of Pre-Sales at MCA Connect, explains the challenges they faced, with their traditional method of engaging with their customers, “To qualify customers and create estimates, we relied on a gigantic Excel worksheet containing over 2,000 lines of Visual Basic code, multiple tabs, and thousands of calculations.
“To qualify customers and create estimates, we previously relied on a gigantic Excel worksheet containing over 2,000 lines of Visual Basic code, multiple tabs, and thousands of calculations.”
As part of our Discovery process, we used a Word document in tandem with the worksheet to ensure we asked all the right questions and covered every detail. We would annotate the Word document, drawing on all our collective experience, and then translate that into project estimates.
Our implementation methodology was built on this process, which took a long time as the document was passed back and forth to facilitate discussions, obtain sign offs, and confirm everything was accurate. Then, this was converted into a Statement of Work for the customer – taking a further 20 hours. While we generally got things right, there were occasional instances where we missed detail, or a customer change wasn’t reflected, leading to inconsistencies and it all took time.”
THE SOLUTIONS
When Sam Dharmasiri established Seer 365, Graham Leitch, Managing Director of the Pre-Sales Group for MCA Connect, took a close interest in understanding how GYDE365 could help transform his own organisation’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 projects and help him to scale his business.
MCA Connect was already doing many things right but partnering with Seer 365 and using their GYDE365-Discover application has enabled them to revamp and streamline their Discovery process. With GYDE365-Discover, MCA Connect has been able to incorporate industry-specific questions related to their own IP taken from their own worksheet, enabling them to capture requirements, build pricing and automatically generate customer-ready documents.
MCA Connect stands out due to over 20 years of experience delivering Dynamics solutions to manufacturing businesses. This extensive knowledge is now embedded within GYDE365-Discover, driving greater efficiency and consistency on every customer engagement. Once GYDE365-Discover was established as the preferred method for creating accurate Statements of Work for MCA Connect, the team explored other ways to leverage the GYDE365 Platform to increase efficiency, turning their attention to support renewals. Although renewals are a steady source of income, they often posed an administrative burden due to changing legislation, new legal language, updated modules, and fluctuating sales tax rates. It was never a simple ‘copy and paste’ from one year to the next. The team now use one of Seer 365’s other applications, GYDE365-Qualify, to manage this task more efficiently.
THE RESULTS
O’Connor, explains the impact GYDE365 has had at MCA Connect, “GYDE365-Discover has introduced a wealth of automation for us, and with its integration to other systems, tasks that used to take five hours, now take just five minutes.
Also, the Statement of Work is always accurate, leaving no room for error. This allows our three pre-sales specialists to consistently deliver precise results every time and efficiently support the whole sales team.
“The Statement of Work, autogenerated by GYDE365, is always accurate, leaving no room for error. This allows our three pre-sales specialists to consistently deliver precise results every time and efficiently support the whole sales team.”
And for our existing customers, customer-ready support renewal documents can now be produced in minutes, instead of hours.”
Recently, MCA Connect has also been taking advantage of GYDE365-Discover’s new feature, an RFP Automation tool. It enables partners to easily ingest the contents of a prospective customer’s RFP document. Then, using the power of AI, automatically identifies requirements in the RFP and matches them against relevant requirements such as a detail, or a customer change that wasn’t met by Dynamics 365, greatly speeding up the RFP response process.
“We were able to auto-generate a detailed proposal from GYDE365 with a full breakdown of time and cost. This approach literally saved our team a full week’s work.”
O’Connor continues, “The power of the GYDE365-RFP Automation tool goes beyond just RFP ingestion.
Recently, we were provided with eight hours of video footage from a prospective customer’s requirements gathering meetings and had less than 48 hours to provide a response. Using AI, we were able to quickly convert the videos into meeting notes, which we then ran through the GYDE365-RFP engine. The result was an instant list of circa 600 requirements, which was close to what our team had estimated when they initially reviewed the notes. We were then able to auto-generate a detailed proposal from GYDE365 with a full breakdown of time and cost. This approach literally saved our team a full week’s work.”
This approach can be useful for any customers who would rather verbalise their requirements as opposed to completing a GYDE365-Discover requirements gathering survey.
After an initial pilot period, MCA Connect were so impressed with the GYDE365 Platform and support from the Seer 365 team, that they committed to a 3-year subscription term.
The longer-term vision for MCA Connect is to develop even more resilient and consistent processes that save more time and boost efficiency, including using GYDE365 for delivering smoother handovers from Sales to Delivery, all of which will be achieved through working together in partnership with Seer 365. O’Connor concludes, “It feels like Seer 365’s main goal is to make us more effective at our jobs. It’s professional, but also personal and no matter what the challenge, the Seer 365 team are always ready to find the right solution.”
“It feels like Seer 365’s main goal is to make us more effective at our jobs. It’s professional, but also personal and no matter the challenge, the Seer 365 team is always ready to find the right solution.”