Freightways make a great move with Fusion5 and Dynamics 365 F&O

Freightways’ portfolio of brands includes New Zealand Couriers, Post Haste, DX Mail, Big Chill, TIMG, and Shred-X. All key business activities are supported by Freightways’ internal service providers: technology partner - Freightways Information Services (FIS), linehaul national network - Parceline, and national air network - Fieldair Holdings.

With its growth through acquisition approach, Freightways has cemented itself as a ‘Pick Up, Process, Deliver’ force to be reckoned with in New Zealand and Australia.

The only downside to adding more brands to Freightways’ portfolio has been inheriting a plethora of financial systems, each with its own coding system and associated business process.

Maintaining the disparate systems required a significant investment of time and money and, more importantly, slowed Freightways’ ability to grow and expand.

To unify the business and its brands and make strong inroads into the Australian market, Freightways decided to progressively implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365 F&O).

After a less-than-satisfactory experience with another partner in 2019, Freightways made a strategic decision to partner with Fusion5 in late 2020. This decision marked a turning point in their journey towards successfully implementing D365 F&O.

Fusion5 was charged with delivering a significant program of work over several years that would introduce not only a standardised finance solution and set of processes, but also a standardised set of coding structures. The program commenced with a complete systems review to establish the existing configuration issues that needed to be redressed. Following this, Freightways and Fusion5 agreed that reimplementation would provide a clean start, starting with Freightways Information Services (FIS).  

Jane Wakefield, Freightways Group Financial Systems Manager & Financial Controller of FIS, joined the business in early 2021. She quickly immersed herself in the D365 F&O project alongside Simone Vidal, Finance Systems Analyst for FIS.

“By the time I joined Freightways, we were part way through our finance implementation roadmap. We had a mix of entities who were fully on and using D365 F&O, those still trying to find their feet with it, and others still on their journey (using different finance systems). The business was a hybrid of old and new ERPs. With one underlying cloud-based financial system, we were well and truly headed towards sharing a centralised chart of accounts across all of our entities and streamlining how we did business.”

Jane Wakefield | Financial Systems Manager & Financial Controller of FIS, Freightways Group

A forward path

While D365 F&O is primarily used within Freightways as a financial system, Wakefield expects the business to leverage more of its functionality in the future. “We’ve inherited a lot of bespoke legacy systems. It’s always challenging to introduce change and move away from the comfort of what’s known and familiar. D365 offers us a lot of potential for our entities on both sides of the Tasman, but each decision will be evaluated on a cost-benefit basis.”

While generally applying a rinse-and-repeat approach to each implementation, Wakefield acknowledges that each entity is unique and has required some degree of configuration to achieve the right fit.

To help Freightways pull together and report on data from all its entities, regardless of whether on D365 yet or not, Fusion5 implemented Workday Adaptive Planning.

“There were a lot of Excel spreadsheets flying around for budgeting and forecasting at month end and as part of our annual budgeting process. It was both unsustainable and prone to human error, so Workday Adaptive Planning (WAP) has been a pivotal decision in our organisation. WAP also pulls in the actual P&L results each month-end for each Freightways entity from a central repository – our data lake. Workday enables us to consolidate everything in one place despite having multiple ERPs in play.”

Jane Wakefield | Financial Systems Manager & Financial Controller of FIS, Freightways Group

To increase efficiency further, Fusion5 has also implemented ExFlow, a built-in accounts payable automation solution for D365 F&O.

As can be imagined with such a sizable project, it’s been a massive journey for the Freightways team. To date, 25 entities are now on D365 F&O.

Freightways strongly appreciates the value of OCM (Organisational Change Management) and recruited its change manager to empower users with the confidence and enthusiasm essential to making the project(s) successful.

“I think the key to getting through a project of this size is to keep an open mind, accept it’s not always going to be plain sailing, and that you’re not alone – you have an amazing project team to help you make the right decisions. It's a huge effort on everyone's part, whether it's the accountants and the new business unit coming onto a new system and upskilling, or an internal or external project team.”

Jane Wakefield | Financial Systems Manager & Financial Controller of FIS, Freightways Group

“I really enjoyed the process of working with Fusion5,” says Vidal. “We all had different working styles, but our lead consultant from Fusion5 was brilliant. We don’t have all the answers and don’t pretend to. So, it’s great to work with people who know what they’re doing, are happy to share their knowledge and jump in when they see you need expert assistance or are stressed.

“Even when we were all struggling resource-wise, the lines of communication were open and upfront. It was an excellent collaborative approach between two groups of professionals and meant we could be pragmatic instead of frustrated when consultants weren’t available on demand, or we had issues. We could be really open with each other and just make it work together – and if we couldn’t sort something out, there was a clear escalation path.”

For both Wakefield and Vidal, this has been the largest technology project they’ve ever been part of. To overcome being daunted by the sheer number of implementations, they’ve tackled it one business at a time while retaining a lens over the entire project to ensure that it follows the roadmap that will deliver streamlined centralisation for the whole group.

“It’s going to be amazing to have all of our businesses on the same platform; it’s been an exciting journey.”

“Fusion5 understand how we tick, and vice versa, so that’s helped us stay on track,” says Wakefield. “We’ve also had consistency in who we’ve worked with over this long journey, which – based on experience – has been a big positive.”