MegaGen Delivers more Confident Smiles with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Background

MegaGen America believes in the power of a confident smile. Its mission is to empower smiles worldwide through groundbreaking dental innovations and a passion for patient well-being. It’s a journey where science, technology, and compassion converge to create brighter, healthier smiles for everyone.

MegaGen dental implants are available in over 100 countries worldwide and are sold through affiliates and dealers. MegaGen is known for their worldleading products which have set new standards for implant and digital dentistry, with customers consisting of dentists and dental labs throughout the country.

MegaGen’s substantial growth in recent years put pressure on the existing systems and process flows within the organization. To support customer expectations, meet stringent FDA guidelines, and ensure greater security, MegaGen America needed a unified, scalable solution. Neither QuickBooks, nor the in-house developed perpetual inventory system, fulfilled these requirements. The disparate solutions required multistep (and duplicated) processes for picking, packing, shipping, invoicing and return order management. The on-premises environment lacked the ability to scale, and the organization suffered from limited visibility and slow access to information for order processing, shipment tracking, item traceability, returns, and more. This resulted in a significant amount of human effort to export and manipulate data for strategic decision making, forecasting and historical sales trends analysis.

“Shipping each product was a manual, time consuming process,” says Benjamin Ahn, director of operations for MegaGen America. “We had to copy and paste data from QuickBooks into our warehouse, and then copy the order tracking information from FedEx or UPS back into QuickBooks, so we were constantly copying and pasting, copying and pasting, over and over, leaving the organization susceptible to human error,” continues Ahn. As a healthcare organization, lot track and trace are crucial for FDA requirements, and the time-consuming, manually driven processes were not keeping up. QuickBooks was running very slowly – orders had to be processed in batches so the system didn’t slow to a complete halt.

“We felt like Velosio understood our business – we trusted them, and they brought in several solutions which would complement and complete the system.”

– Benjamin Ahn

Director of Operations

Business Objectives

After gathering requirements, MegaGen set out to find a new ERP system which would better align purchasing, sales, and returns in one system, and support barcoding, integrated small parcel shipping, and full traceability for lot and serial number-controlled inventory to manage:

• Finance and accounting
• Supply chain management
• Sales order and invoicing
• Purchase order and invoicing
• Inventory
• Improved reporting and access to information
• Improved traceability and integrated returns management process

MegaGen looked at Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) along with SAP, Oracle NetSuite, and Sage. “SAP was a front runner, but it seemed too hard to customize,” recalls Ahn. “I had some bad memories from NetSuite in the past, and Sage only offered accounting,” continues Ahn. After the Velosio team visited MegaGen several times, trust was forged between the two teams. “We felt like Velosio understood our business – we trusted them, and they brought in several solutions which would complement and complete the system,” says Ahn.

Solution

MegaGen selected BC along with Century Business Solutions EBizCharge and Avalara AvaTax to address unique credit card and tax collection needs. MegaGen also added Dynamic Ship, a shipping solution that connects BC and all the carriers to streamline the shipment and tracking process, as well as Silverware Change Tracking.

“Our implementation was completed over a five-to six-month period, and our team was heavily involved along the way, fully understanding the system end-to-end,” says Ahn. “This meant that when we went live, we didn’t have any big hiccups,” continues Ahn. During the implementation, the purchase order receipt process was streamlined:

• Establishment of unique item – serialized, lot, & expiry controlled
• Establishment of a staging table and error log reports
• Creation and/or assignment of Rack and Bin locations
• Label creation to affix to carton

A picking report was also developed using bin ranking criteria to streamline the picking process so that workers could pick in alphabetical rack order using predefined MegaGen terminology.

Train-the-trainer

MegaGen tasked Velosio with training MegaGen staff for the purposes of taking over the management and administration of system as well as security management going forward. Five core team members (one from each functional area) were trained in a “train-the-trainer” approach.
“After completing 10 or so sessions with Velosio in each functional area, and following a checklist that Velosio provided, we developed training manuals internally,” says Ahn. “It was successful – everything flowed pretty smoothly from day-one postimplementation,” continues Ahn.

System Benefits

MegaGen says having one, unified system is the most sizeable benefit of the project. “Now that we have one system, there is little to no human error – that’s the biggest thing,” says Ahn. A cloud-based solution also provides a big benefit to MegaGen. “When our system was on-premises, it was challenging when there were weather issues and we needed to work from home,” says Ahn. “Just yesterday, we had heavy snow and there were no issues in working from home with the new, cloudbased system,” continues Ahn. MegaGen also has greater security in the cloud, with regular backups. “Velosio introduced partners who were able to significantly reduce our credit card processing fees,” says Ahn. “We process over $25M in credit cards annually, and savings on processing fees alone will pay for the solution within two years,” adds Ahn.

The organization is also experiencing:

• Cost savings by reducing headcount of two full time warehouse workers
• Quicker scanning of bigger volume orders – 1,000 items in just 2 minutes
• Quick ROI
• Simplified complex sales tax filing in more than 20 states
• Well positioned for future growth with scalable system
• Timely & accurate financial reporting required to make strategic decisions
• Reduction in time spent and increased accuracy for month end bank reconciliation, intercompany transfers, and prepaid expenses
• Improved visibility into invoice & billing data to be used to implement KPIs related to accuracy & timeliness of AR invoice generation
• Improved timeliness in viewing large subsets of data, posting to GL, and cash posting across North American locations

Future Plans

MegaGen is gathering user feedback from customer relations and the warehouse team to see what system tweaks need to be made in phase two. The team would like to improve data collection, management, and Power BI reports. For now, the MegaGen team is confident in its solution’s ability to provide real results now and into the future: “I’m a big fan of BC and Velosio,” concludes Ahn.