Case Study – Global Refrigeration Services Provider
Industry: Refrigeration equipment service, repair and parts distribution
Region: Operating across five countries spanning Australia, New Zealand, North America, Europe and the Middle East
Scale: Multi-entity business with 20+ concurrent ERP users and a global field service team
The Challenge
This business had grown into a five-entity, five-currency operation running on a decade-old, heavily customised legacy ERP system that had fallen out of mainstream support. The platform carried hundreds of custom modifications, and daily batch processing for electronic data interchange (EDI) with major shipping and freight customers would freeze the entire system, locking out every user until the run completed. Financial consolidation across five currencies was a manual, spreadsheet-based process that didn’t conform to proper foreign currency translation standards, and the US entity had no automated sales tax handling, creating ongoing compliance risk.
The Solution
Austral Dynamics migrated the business from its legacy on-premises system to Dynamics 365 Business Central in the cloud, using a staged upgrade path to protect data integrity at every step. Rather than a lift-and-shift, the team rebuilt hundreds of custom objects as modern, upgrade-safe extensions — including a complete rebuild of the EDI engine to run as overnight batch processing, eliminating the freeze issue entirely. A new multi-entity consolidation structure was configured with correct foreign currency translation, automated daily exchange rate feeds, and clean chart-of-account mapping across all five entities. Automated US sales tax determination closed the compliance gap, and the business’s field service application was integrated directly with the new platform so technician data flows straight into finance.
The Results
Batch EDI processing that used to lock out the whole business now runs overnight with zero disruption. Financial consolidation across five currencies, once a manual multi-day exercise, is now automated and standards-compliant. US tax compliance risk has been eliminated through automated calculation at point of sale, and management now has real-time, consolidated reporting across every entity — replacing reports that used to be built by hand.