Haulfryn Group Ltd

Haulfryn Group delivers massive operational efficiencies through implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Since 1935 Haulfryn Group has been providing ideal holiday lifestyles for the discerning holiday home owner. If you've ever dreamt of owning or renting your own holiday home in the UK, putting your feet up surrounded by home comforts, then you've probably looked at one of the Haulfryn’s family owned and residential homes holidays. With locations in North Wales, Cornwall, Devon and the South East of England, the Haulfryn Group has grown rapidly since 2001 principally by acquisition but also organically.

Business needs

The Haulfryn business was reaching a point where any future growth could be hindered by the constraints of their legacy systems. These systems had evolved over a several years into a complicated mix of bought in applications, in-house developed databases and spreadsheets which were labour intensive and difficult to manage and adapt to changes. If they were to build a future on their already successful past, this situation needed to be addressed, so Haulfryn decided to replace their disparate systems with one fully integrated system. This needed to be easy to use and flexible, which would not only meet the demands of the business as it stood today, but which would also evolve with the business and support their future growth plans.

Haulfryn had two key drivers for this systems replacement programme:

The first was to deliver an efficient solution which would bring together their disparate systems, provide uniformity across their 60 sites and support growth through acquisition
The second was to enable their parks to manage their own activities, leaving the head office operation free to deliver centrally orientated tasks.

As with most rapidly growing organisations there were other operational challenges facing Haulfryn, so they took the opportunity to make improvements to their business processes. The challenge was to find the best practice within the group and then to implement it as part of the IT change. Haulfryn knew they needed a supplier who would understand these challenges and help find away through them.

Will Henshaw, Haulfryn IT Director commented,

"We wanted to move away from the situation where parks worked on paper systems and sent these to be processed centrally to one where each park did its own share of the input as it used the system locally. It was vital to our growth strategy to be able to quickly and seamlessly acquire new parks without the need for additional central processing staff".

Solution

After looking at a number of solutions Haulfryn decided to invest the future of their business on Microsoft Dynamics NAV supplied by Total Enterprise Solutions Limited (TES). Microsoft Dynamics NAV was favoured because

It had a secure future – fully backed by Microsoft
It has a powerful programming environment – allowing current and future bespoke requirements to be catered for
Microsoft SQL Server based – opening up the product to a wide variety of 3rd party tools and integration options
Citrix could be used to deploy Dynamic NAV across the estate
Tight integration with MS Office

TES had listened to Haulfryn, understood their challenges and concerns and were able to advise on alternative approaches to solving their business issues. This assisted Haulfryn in reaching carefully considered decisions. Haulfryn’s team found that TES were able to understand their business needs and map them to the workflow within Microsoft Dynamics NAV without any difficulty.

In addition to using a number of Microsoft Dynamics NAV standard modules a number of bespoke modules were created to meet the particular needs of Haulfryn. These included:

Extensive Data take on processes
Sales Order Wizard – workflow integrated to stock and job costing functionality
Pitch billing – monthly and annual billing of fees, rates, and metered utilities
Auto production of legal contract documentation
Customer meter readings – input at park
Till Solution for taking payments on site
Purchase order wizard to aid creation of PO’s and handle reduce double entry errors
PO authorisation process – electronic approval of invoices
Integration with the FILEstream document management solution
Caravan Sales Order fulfilment system – Allowing stock levels to be managed by meeting sales demand by transferring stock or automatically creating PO, including manufacturers options, from Sales Order

"The key personnel here at Haulfryn have built good personal and professional relationships with the TES team" said Henshaw, "the guys at TES quickly built a good understanding of our business, they understood the product and they were flexible in their approach to implementation."

Summary

As they look to the future, Haulfryn plan to continue to gain benefit from Microsoft Dynamics through introducing additional functionality, such as centralised booking, to continue to empower the parks to manage their own operations.

"Although our business is constantly changing we feel confident, with TES as our partner and Microsoft Dynamics as our platform, that we will be able to successfully adapt to whatever the future has in store". Henshaw commented.

Total Enterprise Solutions Limited focuses on selling software and services built around the Microsoft Dynamics NAV platform and the complete Microsoft suite. This includes the core Dynamics NAV ERP product as well as complementary technologies such as SQL Server 2005, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SharePoint. TES are partners with FILEstream Limited.

Benefits

Haulfryn wanted a single repository to hold all their information. The new system replaced the numerous manual paper-based systems across the business, with a fully integrated application that could be accessed by staff at all locations. Having access to data in real time means that staff and management could interrogate site information anytime and be sure that information is up to date and correct. They have one version of the truth. David Thrussell, Haulfryn’s Financial Controller commented:

"The quality and speed of the data available is far better than the team has ever had before. Microsoft Dynamics NAV is easy to use. It's very much like MS Excel which finance people love to use and are comfortable with".

Since the system was put into live operation in December 2005, benefits have been seen across the business. These benefits have been as varied as the Haulfryn business operation:

an efficient solution which would bring together their disparate systems and support growth through acquisition
Operational cost savings based on a unified environment with single data input
A single repository for data from multiple systems, supporting the business better and faster decision making
Streamlined design ensured quick deployment of the new environment, reducing costs and delivering rapid gains
Significant time savings achieved when setting up core contract and customer records
Automated production of all legal contracts saves time
Quick, easy and distributed access to all scanned and electronic documents across the estate
Weekly management reporting is fully automated and delivers timely accurate information
MS Excel integration provides flexible reporting
Decentralisation of park management accountability
Empowered personnel can make timely business decisions to maximize operational efficiency
A front desk solution ensures that the process of taking the customers money is as simple and efficient as possible, thus improving the customer experience
A 90% reduction in the time taken to create monthly invoice for over 2500 residential customers
A sales tool which enables flexible and accurate steps through all the required elements of the sales process while including the associated costs.
Intuitive design features means an easy adoption of the system by employees

For more information about Total Enterprise Solutions or its products please contact us on 0845 257 1173 or enquiries@totalenterprisesolutions.co.uk

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