The Partner Channel Magazine Summer 2016

INTERVIEWEE
Tim Harris
WEBSITE
www.arbelatech.com
HEADQUARTERS
Irvine, California
ARBELA
Gain from our Experience
ISV PROFILE
ARBELA
The Partner Channel (TPC): How did
Arbela Technologies get its start?
Tim Harris (TH): Arbela started in 2002 with
three founding members who are all still
with the company today. Two of them were
Damgaard Data employees that brought
Axapta to the United States. Microsoft then
acquired Axapta, turning it into Microsoft
Dynamics AX.
At that time, there weren’t a lot of Partners
with a good depth of knowledge in the
product, so Microsoft turned to our founders,
Carsten Glem and Anja Fisher, and said, “We
want you to start a consulting practice in the
upstream accounts.” And Arbela was born!
TPC: What type of expertise do you bring to the table today?
TH: Our organization is pretty broad with Microsoft Dynamics
AX, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, BI, Power BI, Office 365, and
Azure practices, but our primary focus is Microsoft Dynamics
AX for configure-to-order type manufacturing. Most of our
clients are in aerospace, building materials, life sciences, retail,
and high-tech industries.
Although there’s no magic recipe for each organization,
there are a few common traits. Our clients are U.S.-based and
trying to compete with Chinese and foreign supply. They need
to streamline customer service by providing fast turnarounds
on delivery times, ideally a 24- to 48-hour turnaround time.
Arbela provides solutions that help them streamline order
configuration, planning, and on-demand supply.
TPC: Tell us more about those solutions.
TH: Our products for Microsoft Dynamics AX streamline
security, master data centralization, business intelligence, and
financial consolidations.
Tim Harris
Arbela Security Manager for Microsoft
Dynamics AX provides our clients with
everything from license compliance to
security best practices. It also has an in-depth
segregation of duties and auditing capabilities
in the tool. We have more than 100 customers
on this product.
Master Data Centralization allows you to
manage your data centrally. For large multientity
implementations, they leverage this tool
for their complex international requirements.
One Step Consolidation streamlines the
consolidation process from 14 steps to one
step on a normal month-end closing period,
specifically helping with multi-currency
consolidation and auditing.
We also have a new product coming out called Arbela Data
Insights. It’s a cloud-based data warehouse that extracts sales,
purchasing, manufacturing, inventory, and financial data out of
the Microsoft Dynamics AX environments. The content packs
for the new release of Microsoft Dynamics AX use OData feeds,
which have a limited reporting time window and can only be
refreshed periodically. We have hundreds of KPIs, reports, and
dashboards based on that data in Microsoft Dynamic AX 2012 and
the new release of Microsoft Dynamics AX. Two of our customers
are going live now and are extremely impressed with the solution,
so much that our analytics team received a standing ovation when
we presented this to our recent customer sales team.
TPC: You can’t beat a standing ovation! That’s a ton of
great time-saving features and functionality. What would
you say is the number ONE way you help manufacturers,
distributors, and retailers?
TH: Big picture, we help North American companies stay
competitive against foreign manufacturing. We help them undergo
48 SUMMER 2016 | THEPARTNERCHANNEL.COM