mateco's rental fleet consists of over 30,000 machines, and they operate from more than 140 branches in Europe, South America and Asia.
Numerous acquisitions meant that various entities within mateco used different and disparate IT systems to manage the information of the various departments. This led to various inefficiencies in the management and control of the business operations, duplicated and incongruent data across departments as well as outdated information for decision makers, amongst other issues.
Undoubtedly, this increased the need for synergy across all entries and in order to achieve this, mateco called upon KPMG’s expertise.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge that mateco faced in implementing the change needed to achieve its growth ambitions, was to find the right qualified and trained personnel. The project involved transforming the entire company, replacing both mateco’s internal processes and IT systems. Adding to the complexity was the fact that this process had to be carried out not only within Europe, but also beyond; mateco had systems and local data in countries such as Mexico, Hungary, Poland, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Belgium and the Czech Republic, all of which needed to be fully integrated.
In order to achieve this, mateco defined both the core and context processes. As mateco specialises in machine rental, they know better than anyone how the rental business works. For this reason, they developed their own integrated business application architecture for managing the primary mateco processes from within their own project organisation ‘Q.one’. This includes applications for managing the rental process, a machine information system and their own field service application.
Implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft Dynamics 365 was implemented for supporting business processes, such as finance, trade and back-office service management, and as a result of this implementation, a seamless integration was achieved between all these business processes.
The Approach
For this digital transformation, Microsoft Dynamics 365 was the best choice for the company. Microsoft Dynamics is not only a tried and tested software, but it is also a cloud solution and therefore scalable, agile and easy-to-use. It was also easy to integrate with the Q.one application architecture. With the integration of Microsoft Dynamics, a core was developed that could then be rolled out across all the countries in which mateco operates. Each branch will use the same work processes when implementing Microsoft Dynamics. At group level, this provided much more insight into what was happening across the board.
Finding the right internal collaborations
The local KPMG offices in various countries, with staff who are highly proficient in both the English and the local languages, facilitated the collaboration between the local and central teams. KPMG’s financial, tax and legal experts took care of the correct system configuration to ensure compliance with local regulations in each country.
Another team made up of both business and IT professionals supported the local mateco teams with data migration, testing and support after the platform went live. KPMG constantly sought for the best possible collaboration between the central and local teams as well as between the various development teams and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 team. This was one of the main challenges during the project. Most components of the solution, including the integration of the platform, had to be built from scratch.
It was therefore necessary to find the right balance between the flexible, autonomous progress of the agile development teams on the one hand, and the implementation team of the planned, predefined, targeted and centrally managed approach of an ERP solution on the other.
Balancing conflicting interests
Finding this balance was no easy task. Within then mateco project, two potentially conflicting interests played a role. Firstly, the solution had to be further expanded to include new and improved features. Secondly, the project had to go live in various countries. For this reason, the right mix had to be found to represent the interests of both the rollout team and the product development team.
The Results
The implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 ensured:
- Internationally aligned business processes, saving time and money;
- Enhanced automation. Before the implementation, invoices were still entered manually. This has now been automated, allowing more time for employees to work at process level rather than at operational level;
- Better monitoring. The cost of ownership of a machine is now more transparent, making the costs and revenues of a machine across all business units – rental, service and trade – easier to understand. This allows for better decisions to be made as to whether a machine should be repaired or written off;
- A single database for all spare parts, in all the different countries. These were previously different systems, which complicated the transaction process between the various countries. Synergy has now also been created here, which means that the article status only needs to be updated once rather than in each individual country.
