Tectura, founded in 2001, is one of the largest providers of business consulting and IT implementation services in all of Asia.

Tectura employs over 400 team members across three countries and has worked with over 6,000 organizations across the world. By applying its deep expertise in Dynamics 365 solutions paired with broad experience across a variety of industries, Tectura delivers technology solutions that help customers achieve their most pressing strategic business goals.

Over the years, Tectura has received a number of awards and recognition for their great work, having most recently been recognized in 2018 as the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP partner of the year in China. Reflective of its expertise in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Tectura has three Microsoft gold competencies in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Cloud CRM, and ERP.

Maintaining quality service at a global scale

Founded by Robert Rich Sr. in 1945, Rich Products Corporation (Rich’s) was born from innovation—as the organization pioneered the world’s first non-dairy whipped topping. Today, Rich’s is a leading supplier and solutions provider serving foodservice organizations, in-store bakeries, and retail marketplaces across over 100 countries.

With such a vast and diverse set of customers, Rich’s experienced challenges maintaining its high quality of service while running a massive global operation with factories across the world. As each of these locations would often leverage a different IT infrastructure to support its operations, it was difficult for Rich’s to effectively and consistently monitor operations and production.

Until recently, employees would at times rely on spreadsheets to compile reports manually as the technology in place often could not support integration of data across departments.

As a result of these manual processes, production plans, and cost settlements could become delayed. Knowing that it needed a better solution, Rich’s reached out to Tectura for help.

Optimizing operations with Dynamics 365

Beginning with a single branch office based in Suzhou, China, Rich’s worked with Tectura to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 to manage and automate its production processes from order to delivery. What’s more, Tectura was able to leverage its expertise with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to deliver a customized deployment that addressed Rich’s unique needs as an organization in the frozen food industry.

The frozen food industry has incredibly strict requirements on production process control—and for good reason. Maintaining food at the correct temperatures throughout the production process is critical to avoid food safety concerns and delivery the best products possible. This makes it critical for organizations like Rich’s to have specific, detailed information on material supply, production scheduling, cold storage, and focused logistics management.

Tectura’s Dynamics 365 implementation helped Rich’s more easily meet these requirements by providing more accurate, detailed information across the production process that managers could access in real-time. This allows them to head off any concerns regarding food safety, avoid unnecessary costs, and respond more quickly to new orders as they come in.

Tectura helped Rich’s Suzhou branch realize the full set of benefits that Dynamics 365 can enable for its customers. To assist in the development of new dessert products, Tectura helped customize the solution to support product recipe management, with tools in place to set permissions and approval processes in order to maintain confidentiality while developing new recipes. Special permissions ensured that only specific users could understand the content of a given recipe. In addition, the system records relevant data in detail during trials and testing.

Once approved, the production cost and production plan can be quickly calculated by combining inventory data, purchasing data, and information on production line operations.

Finally, Tectura used the rich customization features in Dynamics 365 to localize its software to help comply with the latest financial standards in China, including standard financial vouchers, itemized accounts, and tax statements.

Delivering transformational results

Tectura’s implementation of Dynamics 365 at Rich’s Suzhou branch has already transformed the business. Information that was once scattered across a variety of systems and spreadsheets is now consolidated across all departments, making it easier for managers to understand detailed information regarding production costs and order fulfillment.

All authorized users can now access a single set of data that is updated throughout the production process and registers across the business in real-time. This has provided managers with the insight needed to resolve any query and perform in-depth analysis to make critical business decisions—such as the need for a new factory.

Meanwhile, the seamless integration of the solution with the organization’s control printing system has streamlined how invoices are printed and managed. This significantly reduces the chance of human error while allowing orders to be easily traced and connected to their relevant invoices.

All told, the solution has allowed Rich’s to enhance customer satisfaction by increasing how efficiently it responds to customer order queries by 10 times—all while lightening the workloads of sales personnel.

Financial reporting accuracy at the branch has been increased to 99.9 percent, reports are generated in half the time, and the time taken to collect and collate sales data is 1/12 of what it was prior to implementation.