How Duomed Belgium ramps up reporting with Cegeka Business Insight

Business

Years ago, Duomed sold the first Fujifilm endoscope in Europe. Today, its name can be found on all kinds of medical equipment in hospitals and private practices: the Duomed Group distributes over 20,000 products from more than 700 different suppliers. Local teams sell, install, integrate, and maintain the medical equipment in high-tech, critical medical environments across Europe.

Never not innovating

Innovation is at the heart of Duomed. “We sell high-tech solutions and provide training to doctors and nurses so they can work with the latest medical tech,” says Financial & Administrative Analyst Michaël Roman. “Of course, we also work with state-of-the-art technology ourselves to run our operations. This includes a modern ERP system to centralize all our data, as well as next-gen reporting tools.”

Acquire to grow

Duomed Group is a dynamic organization, operating in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the Balkans. “In recent years, we’ve acquired many new companies as a part of our growth strategy,” explains Michaël. “Before, they all had their own digital environment. Getting them to work with the same technology and use the same terminology requires lots of change management. After all, two companies can have a completely different understanding of a revenue report, for example. That’s why we looked for generic, standard tools to facilitate the adoption process for the individual companies.”

“Of course, we also work with state-of-the-art technology ourselves to run our operations. This includes a modern ERP system to centralize all our data, as well as next-gen reporting tools.”

Solution

In June 2022, Duomed Belgium upgraded its ERP system from Dynamics AX 2009 to Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. At the same time, they introduced Cegeka Business Insight (CBI) together with Power BI to improve reporting based on data from the new ERP. “Instead of building everything from scratch, we chose CBI because it is a standard BI solution on top of Dynamics,” says Michael.

Cegeka Business Insight & Power BI

“Think of CBI as a data warehouse where all kinds of data come together”, explains Business Intelligence Solutions Architect Sylvie Goetgeluk. “CBI is oriented towards Dynamics by default, but it’s also possible to integrate other data sources. With CBI, we translate the complex ERP data model into reporting tables, which can then be visualized in clear reports and dashboards using Power BI. These reports provide insight into key figures such as turnover, margins, production efficiency, delivery rates, etc.”

Acces to all data for anyone, anytime

“Some roles, such as our Account Managers, don’t have direct access to Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations,” Michaël explains. “If they needed data from the ERP, for example, on suppliers, products, customers..., they used to call the support department and we would send them an e-mail with the data as an Excel attachment. Now, with CBI, they can independently access the data they need, whenever they want.”

Databricks upgrade for CBI

Early 2023, Cegeka and Duomed launched a pilot project to test the new Databricks technology for CBI. Sylvie: “Databricks is a unified analytics platform that changes the way the data from the ERP is processed to the CBI data warehouse. The output remains the same, but we now rely on future-proof, more performant Azure technology to create the reports.”

The game changer for Duomed? Michaël: “In the past, the data was refreshed once a day, at night. But now, we can refresh it multiple times a day to have the most up-to-date data at our disposal. Another nice to have: thanks to the new CBI framework, adding customization to CBI costs 10% less.”

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“We like to call Cegeka Business Insight an accelerator: thanks to the many default reports, you can get off to a quick start. After that, there’s plenty of room for further optimization.”

Approach

Building a dream team

According to Sylvie, close cooperation between the different teams was paramount in this project. “The set-up of the ERP environment largely determines what you can and cannot report on. Our Dynamics consultants and developers worked closely with the CBI consultants to align both solutions. In the run-up to the go-live, both teams were present at Duomed one day a week. Today, we are still in contact with Michaël via Teams to follow up on ad hoc questions and change requests.”

All in this together

Duomed’s CBI project is still ongoing today. Michaël: “Our end users are only just getting accustomed to the new tools. Practice makes perfect, so I encourage them to experiment as much as possible. What’s more, I also organize training sessions to get new users up to speed. If they do encounter a problem, I either try to solve it myself or I send a change request to the Cegeka team.”

“We’ve now received about 70% of the scheduled reports. Some essentials, such as customer pricing, are still under development, so we’re looking forward to testing those as well. Meanwhile, Duomed France and Denmark are preparing their CBI rollouts. And who knows what other companies we’ll acquire in the future. One thing’s for sure: we’re all in this together!”

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