Today, every company is a technology company with a continuously increasing reliance on business-critical applications. This makes monitoring, maintaining and managing the entire application portfolio extremely important to – 1) increase operational efficiencies and, 2) maximize return on investment (ROI). Effective application management can ensure both.
Adventure Ready Brands – a leading manufacturer of first aid, insect repellent and outdoor recreation products and a longstanding Columbus customer – was facing problems because of key personnel dependence and not leveraging several of its existing ERP solution’s functions. Columbus stepped in to help.
1. Key challenges Adventure Ready Brands was facing
Adventure Ready Brands had been working with Microsoft Dynamics NAV for years before operational efficiency took a downturn when an internal resource – who was extremely knowledgeable about the product – moved out of the company. This employee’s departure precipitated a cascade of problems for the company.
Adventure Ready was also not taking full advantage of its ERP solution – primarily because they were not completely aware of its available functions and did not have the time and know-how to implement them.
2. How is Columbus helping Adventure Ready Brands overcome its challenges?
The Littleton, New Hampshire-headquartered company’s partnership with Columbus goes back to 2008; since then, Columbus has helped the company with crucial software upgrades and re-implementations – among several other important managed services. Over the years, both the organizations have developed a good working relationship that is based on camaraderie and the belief that Columbus will always help Adventure Ready Brands in the best way possible.
For Adventure Ready Brands, Columbus was – and remains – a knowledgeable technology partner and the go-to subject matter expert on everything NAV. The company sees Columbus as capable of explaining functionality at a detailed level; its management trusts the Columbus team’s ability to help in multicurrency consolidation as well as in fulfilling its requirement for add-on tasks and processes – an expectation supported by the Columbus team’s successful track record of delivering results.
Case in point being an incident when the Columbus team addressed a critical indexing issue which was dragging Adventure Ready Brands’ performance to a crawl. The Columbus team promptly leveraged its core foundation knowledge to accurately pinpoint the problem and resolve the issue once and for all.
What makes this incident stand out is the fact that Columbus assisted in identifying and resolving a severe performance degradation issue with NAV’s SQL server caused by a call code extension installed by another vendor.
According to Adventure Ready Brands, ‘this kind of proactive action and knowledge-sharing is very empowering for a customer. It demonstrates how well Columbus understands its customer, its business, and the problems it faces. This is the foundation of a good partnership.’
3. What is ColumbusCare and how is it helping Adventure Ready Brands?
A hybrid value delivery model, ColumbusCare Application Management Services (AMS) offer reactive support services, proactive managed services and as-needed consultation services to Adventure Ready Brands to keep it ‘running at full steam.’
For instance, when NAV was having its severe performance issues, ColumbusCare helped identify and fix the root cause of the problem. While there is no doubt that the process was painful, the issue was addressed promptly and business-as-usual operational performance was restored.
The Columbus team is also helping Adventure Ready Brands fully understand its own existing ERP solution’s functions. ColumbusCare is facilitating this process through comprehensive knowledge transfer and documentation that is quick and continuous.
ColumbusCare is also helping optimize the company operations proactively by providing Dynamics NAV add-on solutions, regardless of whether the add-ons are exclusively from Columbus or another vendor.
4. The way forward
In 2021, Adventure Ready Brands is actively looking at expanding its business and is seeking ways to do so. Columbus, as the company’s managed services partner, is helping this initiative by extending personal attention and service continuity Adventure Ready Brands needs to keep its operations running efficiently while focusing on innovation.
A key initiative Adventure Ready Brands is looking to undertake is paying vendors automatically through a NAV connection through the bank. Adventure Ready Brands’ leadership is confident that the Columbus team will be able to tackle this and any other future projects.
About Adventure Ready Brands
Headquartered in Littleton, New Hampshire, Adventure Ready Brands is a leading manufacturer of first aid, insect repellent and outdoor recreation products. Founded in 1975, some of the company’s most popular brands include the insect bite treatment AfterBite®, insect repellents such as Ben’s® and Natrapel®, first-aid kits such as Adventure Medical Kits® and Easy Care First Aid™, the Survive Outdoors Longer® survival product kit, and the burn remedy product AfterBurn®.
