Dynamics AX Budget Planning Customer Experience

Doug Kenyon - Sakata SeedYogesh Kasat – Real DynamicsRyan Sandness - Microsoft

AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit

Session Agenda• Company Overview• Budgeting Requirements• Demo• Key Learnings• Benefits to the Business• Enhancements in AX ‘7’

http://www.realdynamics.com/

About Sakata Seed• 100+ year old independent seed company

o Headquartered in Yokohama Japano Publicly Traded on Tokyo Stock Exchange

• Producer / Wholesaler of Hybrid Vegetable and Flower Seedo NO GMO Products

• Semi-autonomous global subsidiarieso Sakata Seed Corporation (Japan/Asia)o Sakata America Holding (US/North America)o European Sakata Holding (EMEA)o Sakata SudAmerica (Brazil/South America)

• Sakata Seed America, Inco Almost 40 years oldo Headquartered in Morgan Hill, CAo Seed Processing, Packaging, ando Distribution Facilities in Morgan Hill CA and

Burlington WAo Research and Production Facilities in Salinas CA,

Colusa CA, Yuma AZ, Fort Myers FL, Burlington WA

o Subsidiaries in Mexico and Guatemala

Budget process overviewBudget

guidelineDepartment

ReviewExecutive

review Final Budget

• Draft based on history

• GL or budget history

• Budget by month, GL#, Department, Cost center

• Reviews and changes by cost center managers

• Cost Center manager submits changes

• Rolled up to the department level budget

• Reviewed by department managers

• Rolled up at company level

• CFO reviews & makes changes

• Company wide budget reviewed by the management team

• Final Changes

• Final Budget• Used for Budget

Controls & Financial Reporting (Budget vs. Actuals)

FTE Count, Salaries and overheads (including Forecast Positions)

Sales forecast

CAPEX

Cost Center Review Finance review

Budget workflowFi

nanc

eInitial

PY ActualsPY BudgetedBaseline

Dep

artm

ents Distribute

PY BudgetedBaseline

Cos

t Cen

ters Distribute

PY BudgetedBaseline

Cost Center Request

PY BudgetedBaselineRequested

Submitted

PY BudgetedBaselineRequested

Department Roll up

PY BudgetedBaselineRequested

Department Review

PY BudgetedBaselineDept Approved

CFO Review

PY BudgetedBaselineDept ApprovedCFO Approved

Final

PY BudgetedBaselineDept ApprovedCFO Approved

Baseline including

CAPEX, Salary and Sales

budget

Budget Cycles @ SakataBudget & LE2

• Purpose: Preparation of Next Year Budget. Also LE (latest estimates) for current year

• Timeline: Nov to Jan

• Team involved: Budget Office, Cost center managers, Department Managers, CFO

LE1

• Purpose: Budget revision based on latest estimates for rest of the financial year budget.

• Timeline: ~Sept• Team involved:

Budget Office, Cost center managers, Department Managers, CFO

Forecast

• Purpose: Forecast for Next year, Year +1 and Year + 2.

• Timeline: ~Jan• Team involved:

Budget Office, Department Managers

Excel Layout

DemoYogesh Kasat

LE2 Cheat Sheet for Cost Center and Department Managers

• 1. Open Dynamics AX from Citrix

Opening Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3

• 2. Work on your LE2 and NY plan using ‘AX->Budgeting->Common->Budget plans->Budget plans assigned to me’

• 3A. Aggregate the cost center plans for your department using the ‘complete’ action from the workflow ribbon. (Department Managers only)

• 3B. If unable to aggregate, review the pending/incomplete budget plans for cost center’s using the budgeting hierarchy. (Department Managers only)

• 4. After aggregation, open Worksheet and make necessary changes (do not touch table, delete, or filter) to the cell value in the ‘Data’ sheet. (Department Managers only)

Working on your LE2 and NY Budget Plan and Worksheet

• 5. Click Publish to save your changes in Dynamics AX 2012 R3. This will ensure latest data is always available in Dynamics AX and upon opening of the spreadsheet

• 6. Save the worksheet to ensure additional supporting information (that does not get stored in Dynamics AX) in the spreadsheet is saved, for example – additional sheet you added for details of travel expenses.

•Note: Always publish and save

Save Vs Publish

• 7. Delegate if you want to review with someone else before committing the LE2 or NY values. You can delegate to anyone belonging to your department or to budget office team.

• 8. Approve when you are 100% sure of committing the LE2 and NY values.

Delegate Vs Approve *Note: LE2 cycle is December 2015 – March 2016NY is New Year for FY17

Key learningArea Type Comments

Organization hierarchy Implementation When you are manually sending excels, there is not much structure or can have matrix organization. We had to spend some time to streamline our department / location and regional managers, their approvals in the workflow

Excel Add in Product limitation - Slowness; performance issues for large data sets. Custom upload functionality was big saver.

- Filtering issue (received hotfix from MS) - Templates need to be re-created every year (matrix fields)- Deployment across environments

Row level security Product limitation Payroll accounts had to be filtered, fixed by changes in process

Shared Folders and security of budget data

Product limitation As excel worksheets are stored in shared folders (document handling), users can access other users files.

Enterprise portal Product & Implementation - Plan was to use portal to avoid need for clients- Excel add-in needs to be installed locally even if you are using EP. (defeats

the purpose and we used TS).

Licensing: Budget clerk is a Enterprise role; every budget user needed

Other - Created custom role for budget managers; provided access to budget planning process and removed other unnecessary pieces from the role

- This was a functional role and lot less expensive

Benefits to the Business

• Time savings in manual work of splitting worksheets for departments, cost centers and consolidating them back

• Better visibility of process – tracking progress/deadlines for cost centers /departments is much easier • Time savings in generation of initial budget guidance • Less chances of errors due to removing manual steps and time saving in double/triple checking

numbers/managing versions of spread sheets

Net Effect: 200+ man hours saving and reduced 45 days of calendar time in budgeting cycle

The Case Study - BudgetingCase Study by Microsoft https://customers.microsoft.com/en-US/story/seed-company-cultivates-productivity-with-updated-erp-budgeting-solution

AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit

What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Operations

Workspaces

Workspaces

Power BI

Budgeting EnhancementsEXCEL• Improved performance via new Excel add-in and architecture changes

o Records that don’t apply will be filtered out before getting into Excel• Templates are no longer year specific• Browser based app should eliminate issues with local versus Citrix/TS Excel

SHARED FOLDERS• Excel worksheets are stored in Azure blob storage, and not accessible to users

EASE OF USE• Simplified Security setup using organization hierarchy, rather than worker position

o Also available in R3 CU8+• Removed scenario constraints

Open Issues• Salary accounts

o No changes. Some customers will leave these costs in their department, and others will enter these budgets in from the HR or other department

• No SharePoint support for budget planning docso Azure blob storage only. Any formulas should be included in budget template. Any supporting doc can be

done via justification documents

• No justification documents in AX7 RTMo Coming with Fall Update

AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit

Contact Info• Doug Kenyon, Sakata Seed

• dkenyon@sakata.com

• Yogesh Kasat, Real Dynamics• Yogesh.Kasat@realdynamics.com

• Ryan Sandness, Microsoft• Ryan.Sandness@microsoft.com

AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit

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