Irrimax Supports Massive Growth with Scalable Microsoft Dynamics 365 Solution

Background

Irrimax Corporation is focused on reducing infections, healthcare costs and improving patient outcomes. The company’s flagship product, Irrisept Antimicrobial Wound Lavage, is a single-use, manual, self-contained irrigation device. Irrimax has attracted experts in the fields of product development, clinical research, manufacturing, and distribution. Its management team is committed to leading the organization with high standards of integrity and accountability.

Irrimax, as a startup, was managing data with QuickBooks and spreadsheets, and quickly outgrew those solutions when doubling in size every two years for eight years in a row. Irrimax also needed to comply with heavy regulations in healthcare while providing exceptional customer service. They were using Veeva CRM built on Salesforce to manage regulatory compliance, but it was very cumbersome, not user friendly, and very expensive. “We were having big problems with user adoption [for Veeva],” says David Meyer, VP of IT for Irrimax. “The sales folks just wouldn’t use it, and I can’t really blame them. And that was hard for me as the IT guy that’s providing the solution – it wasn’t user friendly,” continues Meyer.

The organization also needed a production control system for its supply chain as they had no way to place production orders, track the movement of materials, or materials consumption. “What I did originally when I started here is I created spreadsheets for each of our products, and every time material was moved or consumed, I manually adjusted it on a spreadsheet to keep track of inventory and know where my order points were and where material was at any given time,” says David Kafowski, supply chain manager for Irrimax. “But that was really a manual system, kind of trying to emulate an ERP system, but it was a lot of manual work,” continues Kafowski. “Excel was fraught with complexity, manual effort, and very prone to errors,” explains Meyer. “And our supply chain is critical. If we don’t have product on the shelf to ship, we’re dead. You can sell all you want If you can’t ship and deliver the product, what’s the point,”? asks Meyer.

Irrimax set out to find a solution to enable expected growth and provide automation, supply chain and financial accounting. With manufacturing and distribution in Chicago and headquarters in Georgia, Irrimax knew that the cloud would be key for up to the minute data management. “Having [data] in the cloud is the only way to do it when you’re operating locations in different places and you have workers located in different areas,” says Michael Gill, COO for Irrimax. “Productivity and efficient communication on a real time basis is key to operating and managing the business, so that’s essential,” continues Gill.

“I’ve probably done ten projects together with Velosio across CRM and ERP, and now a lot of reporting and analytics, a lot of Dataverse and Power Platform … we have a 100% success rate on all projects.”

– David Meyer

VP of IT Irrimax

Irrimax wanted to find an all-in-one solution. “We thought wouldn’t it be nice if we could have everything under one roof in the Microsoft Dynamics family and have all the solutions working together,”? queries Meyer. Having worked with Velosio in the past at previous positions, including rescuing a failed implementation, Meyer invited Velosio to demonstrate a best-fit solution for Irrimax. “I’ve probably done ten projects together with Velosio across CRM and ERP, and now a lot of reporting and analytics, a lot of Dataverse and Power Platform,” describes Meyer. “And I’m really proud and happy to say that we have a 100% success rate on all the projects that we’ve done together, which is pretty amazing to me,” continues Meyer.

Solutions

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Irrimax engaged with Velosio and first selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central to manage core accounting and supply chain management as a first step and were encouraged by the benefits received. “We went from almost no automation to pretty much full automation of processes and workflows and then visibility throughout the entire supply chain,” says Gill. “A lot of the systems we’re working on now I can access on my phone. So, you know, we’ve developed all these dashboards, financial metrics, and I can see in real time how we’re operating any second of any day – that was not the case before,” continues Gill.

Irrimax is now using supply chain management functionality in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central to manage the chain from end-to-end. “Business Central has been a great success here,” says Kafowski. “Now that we have all our inventory in Business Central, we can create production orders and then from there create purchase orders. But one of the biggest benefits of it is we can put in building material and routers. And when you create production orders and close them out, that automatically consumes the material,” furthers Kafowski.

In addition to better managing its supply chain process, Irrimax can now better track costs. “It’s very easy to track costs in Microsoft BC,” says Kafowski. “We use average cost instead of standard cost. So, it always fluctuates, but BC calculates that automatically. You can look at any purchase order at any time and review your cost to know if it’s gone up or down. Commodities have fluctuated. Supply chain has been a struggle through the pandemic and all the challenges that we’re faced with, but that just means you need to plan further ahead, keep a little more inventory, which is not a big issue when you’re growing like we are,” continues Kafowski. “Having visibility into cost positively impacts the whole company, particularly Finance, because they’re the ones writing the checks,” says Kafowski. “You can then formulate what your finished goods cost is going to be. You can figure out your cost of goods and your pretax profit, your EBITA. It’s all there in front of you so you don’t have to dig around looking for it,” continues Kafowski.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

For Phase two, Irrimax implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing to further its automation. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales would replace Veeva for an improved user experience and manage Irrimax’s two sales teams: direct sales and medical affairs, which is like pre-sales. Sales team members are not allowed to share clinical data as stated by the FDA unless they fill out a medical information request where the physician has specifically requested the data. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales was set up to automate the request process, which is then fulfilled by the medical affairs team. “You have to provide value to salespeople to get them to use the system,” says Meyer. “The value for us is being able to efficiently get that medical information request completed with the least amount of effort for them. So, the interface has to be very easy and friendly to use. The simpler, the better. So, we’ve really stripped out a lot of the fields that come out of the box and kind of boiled it down to just the bare necessities of what they need to enter, making sure it’s user friendly, and accessible from their phone or their iPad,” explains Meyer. Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration with Microsoft 365 is beneficial to Irrimax, especially when managing the medical affairs request. “When we email the information out to the prospect it’s coming right out of CRM. So, we can see a record of that email having been sent,” says Meyer.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales helps Irrimax manage opportunities, received mainly from tradeshows. After an opportunity is entered into Dynamics 365 Sales and assigned to a rep, the marketing team receives feedback about qualification to determine which tradeshows are most successful. Irrimax will further its use of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to assign leads on specific journeys through the marketing process to keep in touch and move them towards becoming a customer. “Our vision with [Dynamics 365] Marketing is to build out the foundation with the core entities, leads and opportunities, contacts and accounts and then eventually in the next phase add AI and Microsoft Copilot to supercharge the system and gain even more efficiencies and better results from it,” says Meyer.

Power Platform

Irrimax is utilizing Power Platform in several ways. As an example, to aggregate sales data from 15 sales distributors, who each send over their sales data in different formats. “With Power BI, we’ve been able to aggregate all of that data together and then feed it to the reporting layer so that our executives can have visibility into what’s going on in the business,” says Meyer.

Benefits

Irrimax is benefitting from an end-to-end solution which provides better productivity and visibility to key metrics in real-time. This used to be a 30-day lag on the old systems. User acceptance has been high across the organization. “Microsoft BC is very intuitive, user friendly and not hard for people to learn,” says Kafowski.

Irrimax is also experiencing:

• Better business insight and actionable data for important business decisions
• Improved user experience and adoption
• Cost savings from switching over from Veeva (Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is 1/3 the cost of Veeva)
• More flexible, scalable solution
• Streamlined marketing and sales process
• Sales request for medical information adheres
  to FDA guidelines
• End-to-end Supply Chain Management with better visibility into raw materials, finished goods, and costing
• Better leadership visibility into business health
• Supports accelerated business growth
• Improved inventory management
• Mobile, 24/7 access to data insights