V&P Scientific

The Company: About V&P Scientific

Since its founding in 1979, V&P Scientific, based in San Diego, has engineered innovative research equipment, including OEM and private manufacturing products. 

The company specializes in machining and 3D printing tools for scientific research and patented the first 96-Well Filter Manifold and the Mini-Fold Dot-Blot Hybridization Manifold.

Today, V&P Scientific offers nearly 2,100 products from its 8,000 square-foot manufacturing facility.

The Situation: Legacy System Hampered Workflow

V&P Scientific previously relied on legacy systems for both ERP and CRM. With surging growth, the systems hampered workflow efficiencies. 

In addition to leveraging modern cloud technologies to solve this challenge, V&P Scientific wanted to integrate ERP and CRM so real-time data could flow automatically between the two systems. This would allow the staff to avoid rekeying information manually and create immediate visibility into the status of all business activity.

The Solution: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

The V&P Scientific management team decided to solve these challenges by deploying Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Cloud and Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM) supported by Microsoft Power BI for reporting. 

Solution Highlights

• Automates converting quotes to salesorders.
• Accurately tracks the location of inventory.
• Captures all costs on each bill of materials to simplify measuring product margins.
• Facilitates collaboration on performance metrics for employees in different offices.
• Reduces days outstanding on shipments to customers.
• Decreases variances in inventory hand counts by 10%.
• Improves customer service by enabling visibility into customer communications and order tracking.

The Results: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Implementation Benefits

With standard naming conventions, it’s now easier for V&P Scientific to track inventory and capture costs on each bill of materials. This, in turn, makes it simpler to measure product margins. 

The Power BI reports derived from the ERP data allow managers to track inventory, sales, and costs more accurately while the documented workflows streamline the process for new employees to pick up on how to complete each manufacturing workflow.

Using a cloud solution rather than an on-premises solution also generates benefits. Across locations and home offices, V&P Scientific can conduct meetings in Microsoft Teams, just like everyone is together. They can also easily access the information in Business Central and Sales since the applications are all part of the Microsoft ecosystem. And with the integration to Power BI reports, users can pull data right from Business Central without leaving Teams.

By leveraging Business Central, V&P Scientific has reduced days outstanding on shipments to customers while variances in inventory hand-counts decreased by 10%. This helps make sure every bill of materials contains all the necessary components.

In addition, using Business Central gives the staff greater discipline around inventory, bills of materials, and the tracking of sales orders and purchase orders. This creates an environment and a structured way of managing processes the right way. In other areas of the business, V&P Scientific uses CRM to manage marketing programs while customer relationship management has improved with the transparency of all email exchanges with customers. 

The customer service team can track where a product or item is and access documented conversations about returned or defective products. The flexibility of CRM allows V&P Scientific to modify the user interface to develop Workflows, Entities, and Tasks specific to the business needs for complete transparency across the company.