Case Study: InFocus Dynamics CRM & AX - Avanade

Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Manufacturing—High-tech and
electronics manufacturing
Customer Profile
Headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon,
InFocus has 400 employees and is the
industry pioneer for digital projectors.
Business Situation
The company needed a new business
management solution to support
operations and sales, after outsourcing
manufacturing and undergoing
consolidation efforts.
Solution
Catalyst to a larger IT rearchitecting,
InFocus chose Microsoft Dynamics AX. To
support sales, the company deployed
Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Benefits
125 percent improvement in
productivity
More strategic contribution and
greater revenue from sales
65 percent reduction in annual IT costs
Enhanced operations that support
future growth and change
Microsoft Dynamics
Customer Solution Case Study
Display Leader Increases Productivity and
Savings with Integrated ERP and CRM Solution
“The switch to a business infrastructure based on
Microsoft technologies helped us reduce annual IT
expenses from $5.4 million to $1.9 million.”
Nina Palludan, Vice President of Operations and CIO, InFocus
InFocus is a leader in the digital-projection market and a
globally known brand. To compete more effectively and
profitably in a challenging market, the company made a
strategic decision to outsource its manufacturing operations and
reduce overhead. To facilitate such change, InFocus
decommissioned its Oracle software environment and built a
business-aligned infrastructure with Microsoft Dynamics AX as a
key element. To support sales and drive revenue, the company
deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Since then, the company
has increased productivity by 125 percent and decreased annual
IT costs by 65 percent. For Microsoft Dynamics AX alone, InFocus
has achieved an annual savings of U.S.$1 million and a full return
on investment in less than 24 months. In addition, the
company’s sales team has been able to sign up more than 70
new strategic accounts by taking advantage of the CRM system.

“We would not have
been able to become a
privately held company
and achieve an
organizational
productivity gain of 125
percent or more without
Microsoft Dynamics AX
and Microsoft Dynamics
CRM.”
Nina Palludan, Vice President of
Operations and CIO, InFocus
Situation
Based in Wilsonville, Oregon, InFocus is an
industry pioneer and global leader in the
digital-projection market. Display systems
and digital projectors from InFocus help
people present, collaborate, and learn in
conference centers and meeting rooms
around the world. The 400-employee
company sells the products it manufactures
through an expansive partner network.
Most high-tech and electronics
manufacturers continually face pressures to
control costs, get products to market faster,
and provide transparency across their
organizations. In 2007, faced with rising
manufacturing costs and increasing global
competition, InFocus made the strategic
decision to undergo a significant business
transformation. In doing so, InFocus shifted
from a publicly traded company with 900
employees to the 400-person private
business that it is today. In addition, the
company decided to outsource all of its
manufacturing operations.
To facilitate and support such a far-ranging
transformation, company leadership
decided to completely rearchitect the IT
environment to better align with the
changing business. As a key element in
accomplishing this goal, they sought to
replace the existing Oracle enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system with a new
solution that was a better fit for the now
smaller and more streamlined operation.
Nina Palludan, Vice President of Operations
and CIO of InFocus, explains the reasoning
behind the decision: “Our Oracle
environment was workflow driven and
highly customized to support a much larger
enterprise that did its own manufacturing.
And, because those workflows involved
roles that no longer existed in our
organization, we constantly had to switch
between roles in the system to keep the
workflow moving and simply get our jobs
done.”
Furthermore, Palludan found that because
the Oracle system had been so heavily
customized for existing business roles, it
was not practical and cost effective to
further customize the software to support
the more generalist roles that employees
fulfilled in the leaner organization. These
roles also demanded a different flow of
information throughout the business.
Although a new ERP system would support
efforts to streamline operations and better
manage the bottom line, InFocus
leadership saw deploying a new customer
relationship management (CRM) system as
an opportunity to simultaneously drive
increased revenue. This opportunity would
transition sales staff away from mere ordertaking
functions to a more strategic role
that could help proactively deliver on the
company’s sales initiatives. Although this
was not a new goal for the company, the
existing CRM system went unused,
hindering such efforts. “We had Oracle
Field Sales in place, but because sales staff
had no level of ownership of the solution,
the system had 0 percent utilization,” says
Palludan. Instead, sales staff relied heavily
on stand-alone spreadsheets, which
resulted in fragmented information and an
overall lack of insight into sales
performance and results. When salespeople
needed to report to managers, they would
spend as much as 20 to 30 percent of their
time gathering the information needed to
provide updates on sales leads and
accounts.
Solution
In looking for a new ERP and CRM solution,
InFocus briefly considered upgrading the
existing Oracle system, but ultimately
decided on Microsoft Dynamics AX and
Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Says Palludan,

“We were particularly attracted to the
flexibility of the Microsoft Dynamics
products and their five-year road map. And,
regarding our ERP system, we found that
deploying Microsoft Dynamics AX would
cost us less than performing an upgrade of
our Oracle software.”
Ease of integration between Microsoft
Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM
also played an important role in the
decision, because the company would gain
the ability to create a single repository for
all its operational and customer
information on a common Microsoft SQL
Server database. Says Palludan, “The
biggest win for us is that we could pull all
the once-disparate information together
into a central system, and then use that
data in demand planning and forecasting,
which, in turn, lets us run a more efficient
operation.”
To implement and provide application
management for the solution, InFocus
turned to the expertise of Avanade, a
global systems integrator and joint venture
between Accenture and the Microsoft
Corporation. Because of InFocus’s strategy
to simplify operations and control costs,
the implementation of the integrated
solution, including Microsoft Exchange
Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server, took the form of a hosted software
service. A provider of managed software
services hosts the solution for InFocus.
Providing Efficiencies and Role Focus in
Operations and Sales
On the operations side, the Microsoft
Dynamics RoleTailored interface plays a key
role in facilitating the productivity gains the
company sought after changing its
business model. Specifically, InFocus is
taking advantage of the RoleTailored user
interface of Microsoft Dynamics AX to align
the solution functionality and information
people most frequently need to their
specific roles in the organization. Doing so
enables employees to quickly access the
functionality and information they need
through Role Centers, enabling them to do
their jobs without having to navigate
extensive menu choices. One such Role
Center, focused on Accounts Receivable,
draws on data from the Microsoft Dynamics
GP General Ledger Cube. Employees can
configure important functions of these Role
Centers on their own. For example, they can
add task lists or monitor specific reports.
Currently, InFocus uses Microsoft Dynamics
AX to support employees across the
following roles: finance, inside sales,
customer service, repair, logistics,
purchasing and planning, and engineering
project management.
Reflects Palludan, “We were able to align
Microsoft Dynamics AX to the job functions
and workflows that we needed so that it
reflected the much leaner organization that
we had evolved into.”
Ease of use also played a key role for the
sales team. In a sharp contrast from the
previous solution, sales staff were quick to
adopt Microsoft Dynamics CRM. After
providing their input, they had a stake in
the success of the implementation and
were able to take advantage of the solution
with two widely used tools: Microsoft Office
Outlook and their mobile devices. As a
result, the company was able to create a
single repository of all customer
information and interactions without
requiring sales staff to perform information
management duties outside of their dayto-day
roles.

“Our use of Microsoft
Dynamics AX will provide
a full ROI in less than 24
months, which is
significant for our
business. Implementing
this solution was the
right decision for many
reasons—two of the
most critical being
increased productivity
and large cost savings.”
Nina Palludan, Vice President of
Operations and CIO, InFocus
Extending the Solution Within a
Businesswide Infrastructure
InFocus takes advantage of Microsoft
BizTalk Server 2006 to connect business
information from the integrated solution of
Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft
Dynamics CRM to other applications. In this
way, InFocus provides electronic data
interchange (EDI) to third-party logistics
vendors and offers dealer-specific productlocator
tools, which draw on account
information from Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
The company also takes advantage of the
Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX,
which is based on Windows SharePoint
Services, to provide key reports and other
information from the ERP system to on-site
and mobile employees through the
company intranet. In future work, InFocus
will extend access to the Enterprise Portal
to its suppliers and progress to sharing
data with these companies through EDI.
InFocus also uses Office SharePoint Server
for product life-cycle management, a
function that the company will integrate
with the project module in Microsoft
Dynamics AX in the near future.
Says Palludan, “We’re now able to source
data from a single repository. We don’t
have to build a separate repository or
extract or transform the data. In the future,
we’ll use Web Parts in Office SharePoint
Server that draw on data from Microsoft
Dynamics AX and Microsoft Dynamics CRM
to give customers the information they
need.”
Benefits
Business results show that InFocus’s
strategic changes successfully relaunched
the company; accomplishing this with
Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft
Dynamics CRM also proved to be a winning
decision. Says Palludan, “The Microsoft
Dynamics solutions so closely fit our people
and business model that we managed to
achieve dramatic improvements in
productivity and substantial cost savings
compared to the previous Oracle
technology environment.”
125 Percent Improvement in
Productivity
With an organization that is smaller than
half of what it used to be, InFocus
maintains the same level of revenue; this
means that following its transitions, the
business is much more profitable. Says
Palludan, “The integrated Microsoft
Dynamics solution has made our people
more independent and empowered.
Employees are much more motivated and
collaborate more closely. They now can find
the information they want, when they need
it. That’s much better than sending an email
message to a colleague and waiting as
long as 24 hours for a response.”
Palludan also notes that the new business
management solution played a critical role
in supporting InFocus’s effort to re-create
the business. “We would not have been
able to become a privately held company
and achieve an organizational productivity
gain of 125 percent or more without
Microsoft Dynamics AX and Microsoft
Dynamics CRM. This success would not
have been possible with our Oracle
software.”
More Strategic Contribution and Greater
Revenue from Sales
In the sales department, where staff once
spent 20 to 30 percent of their time
consolidating information for reporting,
InFocus has reduced the administrative
overhead associated with this task by 20
percent. At the same time, with support
from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the team
has been able to sign more than 70 new
strategic accounts as it pursues the
company’s sales initiatives.

Says Palludan, “Our sales associates now
can manage win-loss scenarios and learn
directly from each other. Managers have
insight into the productivity of field sales
and can provide that team with the tools
they need to succeed in new initiatives.
And, training new sales staff members is
easier than ever. With Microsoft Dynamics
CRM, new employees can be effective in a
very short time.”
65 Percent Reduction in Annual IT Costs
In discussing the costs of technology
ownership, Palludan notes, “The switch to a
business infrastructure based on Microsoft
technologies helped us reduce annual IT
expenses from $5.4 million to $1.9 million.”
Considering the total cost of ownership of
just the ERP system, Palludan notes a cost
savings of U.S.$1 million a year in hardware,
maintenance, and outside support. “Our
use of Microsoft Dynamics AX will provide
a full ROI in less than 24 months, which is
significant for our business,” she says.
“Implementing this solution was the right
decision for many reasons—two of the
most critical being increased productivity
and large cost savings.”
Enhanced Operations That Support
Future Growth and Change
Flexibility is central for InFocus’s ability to
maintain a competitive edge. Says Palludan,
“Microsoft Dynamics AX has the flexibility
and scalability to support our business
through growth and continuing change.
The solution’s open architecture,
application integration framework, and
ability to integrate with third-party tools
and other Microsoft technologies are
extremely important to us.”
With change ingrained in the business
culture, the ability of Microsoft Dynamics
solutions to reflect shifting requirements
benefits InFocus employees every day.
“Compared to the Oracle environment, it is
now much faster to get a change
implemented,” notes Palludan. “We can
build a new workflow with much greater
ease, and even relatively nontechnical team
members can customize the user interface
to change their view of the system. It’s
extremely valuable for InFocus that people
can make such changes with minimal effort
and continue to focus on the tasks at
hand.”
Additional Resources
Read a white paper on how Microsoft
Dynamics AX can help enhance
productivity:
http://download.microsoft.com/downloa
d/E/2/2/E228B46E-F0E2-4C38-8F02-
A21B7B544B39/AX_User_Productivitywp.
xps
Discover how Microsoft Dynamics CRM
can help improve the productivity of
sales:
http://crm.dynamics.com/docs/Customer
Think_White_Paper_Sales_Productivity.pd
f
Learn about the benefits of the Microsoft
Dynamics RoleTailored user experience:
http://download.microsoft.com/downloa
d/9/3/3/933042ed-61f4-4c24-8f22cb6deaab9404/Microsoft_Dynamics_Role
Tailored_Business_Productivity_whitepap
er.doc

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products and services, call (877) 388-
8385 or visit the Web site at:
www.infocus.com
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This case study is for informational purposes only.
MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published March 2010
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