XCounter

In 2016, the company invested in new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software in a bid to increase operational efficiencies and selected the powerful Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP platform. During this project, documents including purchase orders, sales order acknowledgements and delivery notes, to name a few, were developed from standard AX formats.

Although the documents were of a satisfactory standard, XCounter required greater flexibility and autonomy when it came to design and template modification. The company wanted to produce more creative designs and empower users to independently modify documents as, due to the complexity of the software, document development could only be carried out by a professional AX developer. This proved to be time-intensive and carried a significant financial cost. On top of this, the number of different formats available to create the documents in was limited, which restricted users, caused delays and made managing customer communications difficult and unnecessarily time-consuming. Additionally, it was felt that the professionalism and brand perception of the business was at risk of being weakened due to the inability to create customer-facing documents that were consistent, properly aligned and formatted.

Following the Lasernet implementation, XCounter has met key short-term objectives in relation to the creation of professionally branded documents, with ease, speed and precision, which better reflect the company’s brand.

Post-implementation, XCounter now has the ability to design and edit documents in-house. The latter has improved internal efficiency; no longer does the business have to wait for a skilled developer to be available and pay a fee for his or her time; now 2-3 staff are developing customer-facing documents independently, whenever the need arises, with a further 25 members of staff using the Lasernet solution for document creation.

Training was provided to all users by the Lasernet team on how to exploit the software’s sophisticated yet simple-to-use functionality. Due to the user-friendly nature of the software, XCounter personnel were quickly up-to-speed and ready to start using and benefiting from Lasernet’s features and benefits.

On top of delivering the core short-term objectives, the Lasernet implementation has in fact provided XCounter with long-term benefits over and above the brief. Roland Neal adds:

“Despite the significant investment made in Lasernet, long-term, the software will pay for itself. To be able to achieve what we have done with Lasernet would have required us to purchase a new entity to support the current AX environment – totalling a further investment of another €10,000- €15,000. Even with this investment, we are confident that the end result wouldn’t have resulted in such a high-quality solution, as provided by Lasernet. In addition, due to the re-brand that we were undergoing, we would have had to spend an extra €5,000 to change the existing documents, however, this was avoided completely due to Lasernet.”