On May 17, MDC-UM lost its in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy (IT) in­fra­struc­ture af­ter a cat­a­stroph­ic fire de­stroyed most of their build­ing lo­cat­ed in the Trinci­ty In­dus­tri­al Es­tate. Through lever­ag­ing a long-stand­ing re­la­tion­ship with Mi­crosoft part­ner Davyn Lim­it­ed and the Mi­crosoft Azure cloud plat­form, the home and of­fice fur­ni­ture man­u­fac­tur­er was able to quick­ly get their crit­i­cal sys­tems back up and run­ning.

For­tu­nate­ly for the fac­to­ry which em­ploys 120 peo­ple, a work­ing back­up of their con­tent was cre­at­ed two days be­fore the fire oc­curred. Once this sys­tem was re­stored to the cloud and up­grad­ed, MDC-UM ex­pe­ri­enced in­creased ef­fi­cien­cy in its use of Dy­nam­ics GP due to the new fea­tures avail­able in the 2015 R2 re­lease. The fac­to­ry is ex­pect­ing to re­turn to full pro­duc­tion next month.

The com­pa­ny's chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer Ra­mona Tamasar said: "With the im­ple­men­ta­tion of Mi­crosoft Dy­nam­ics GP 2015 via a cloud en­vi­ron­ment, it is now very easy for my IT per­son­nel as they do not have to wor­ry about dai­ly or week­ly back­ups. To date, we have had no is­sues and our em­ploy­ees and cus­tomers are quite hap­py with the ser­vices pro­vid­ed."

Tamasar said she con­tact­ed Davyn fol­low­ing the fire and the Mi­crosoft part­ner rec­om­mend­ed her busi­ness host their Dy­nam­ics GP so­lu­tion on Mi­crosoft Azure, in ad­di­tion to set­ting up a new do­main con­troller, SQL serv­er and ap­pli­ca­tion serv­er run­ning Re­mote Desk­top Ser­vices. Davyn al­so im­ple­ment­ed a sub­scrip­tion to Of­fice 365 Pro Plus to pro­vi­sion Word and Ex­cel which work with Dy­nam­ics GP. All pro­fes­sion­al ser­vices, out­side of the host­ing fees and the re­quired Re­mote Desk­top Ser­vices li­cens­es, were pro­vid­ed at no charge by Davyn.

"Davyn was quite ef­fi­cient and did a fan­tas­tic job," Tamasar said.Davyn, which fo­cus­es on de­liv­er­ing En­ter­prise Re­source Plan­ning so­lu­tions to clients in T&T and across the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, played an im­por­tant role in de­vel­op­ing a long-term so­lu­tion for MDC-UM and with the im­ple­men­ta­tion process.

"When I saw the news that the MDC-UM build­ing was burn­ing, my heart re­al­ly went out to the own­ers and em­ploy­ees. That is a dev­as­tat­ing set­back. We were very hap­py to as­sist them with get­ting their busi­ness back up and run­ning, and we look for­ward to many more years of part­ner­ship with MDC-UM," said Der­rick Vil­leneuve, di­rec­tor of strat­e­gy at Davyn.

Among its fea­tures, Dy­nam­ics GP 2015 pro­vides com­pa­nies with a range of func­tion­al­i­ty geared to in­creas­ing op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy which in­cludes fi­nance, sup­ply chain man­age­ment, hu­man re­source man­age­ment, pay­roll, man­u­fac­tur­ing, field ser­vice and an­a­lyt­ics. In ad­di­tion, it in­cludes an ex­pand­ed set of work­flows that help stream­line re­quired busi­ness ap­provals which can be eas­i­ly con­fig­ured by cus­tomers to ac­cel­er­ate the ap­proval process.