Proven Impact of3RIVE TECHNOLOGIES

The Challenge

An ERP migration is two programmes wearing one name. The first gets the system live. The second makes the business work on it. Most organisations resource the first and discover the second.

This distributor, the largest of its kind in Australia, with thousands of trade and retail customers and a high daily order volume, was moving its core operations onto Dynamics 365. The data that needed to move, customers, products, pricing, stock, open orders, and years of transaction history, lived across legacy systems and spreadsheets with inconsistent structures and quality. Getting it into the new ERP cleanly was a programme in itself.

Once live, the gaps appeared where they always do. Processes the old system had handled implicitly now needed explicit tooling. The ERP had to exchange data reliably with the customer-facing storefront, the procurement platform, reporting and the warehouse. Orders still arrived as emails, PDFs and photographs of handwritten notes and had to be keyed in by hand. The finance team was absorbing a growing administrative load, including a backlog of expense reports in Coupa that the new environment had not relieved.

The distributor's internal technology team was small. It needed a partner that could do the migration, stay through stabilisation, build the tooling, and take over the functions that should not sit with an internal team at all.

The Solution

3Rive's work has run in four connected layers, each building on the one before.

1. 1

   Data Migration into Dynamics 365

   3Rive data engineers profiled, cleansed and mapped the distributor's legacy data estate, built the migration pipelines, and ran the iterative load, reconcile and correct cycles that bring data into a new ERP cleanly: more than 40,000 customer and supplier records, a product catalogue of over 25,000 SKUs with pricing and stock positions, open orders, and 7 years of transaction history, across 4 full mock migrations before cutover. Reconciliation reporting at each pass gave the business confidence in what was moving, and a unified data platform with Power BI on top meant the distributor came out of the migration with better visibility of its data than it went in with.

2. 2

   ERP Stabilisation and Integration

   After go-live 3Rive stayed as the distributor's stabilisation and integration team. That meant resolving the defects and process gaps that surface in the first months on a new ERP and building and hardening the integrations between Dynamics 365 and the systems around it: the headless e-commerce storefront 3Rive had built and continues to maintain, the Coupa procurement platform, reporting, and warehouse and fulfilment operations. Post-go-live defect volume was brought down by roughly 80% within the first 12 weeks. The objective was a single operating platform the business could rely on, rather than an ERP surrounded by workarounds.

3. 3

   Process Automation and Tooling on Power Platform

   With the platform stable, 3Rive built a portfolio of more than a dozen Power Apps and Power Automate solutions that closed the process gaps the migration had exposed: purchase and credit approval workflows, warehouse receiving and stock-adjustment capture, pricing exception handling, customer onboarding, and the internal tools that staff use every day around the ERP. Alongside these, 3Rive built an AI order-processing agent that reads incoming order emails and attachments, including scans and handwritten notes, extracts and validates the order data against customer history and the product catalogue, and creates the order in Dynamics 365 through its API. Manual rekeying stopped at source.

4. 4

   Finance Operations under Cognitive Outsourcing™

   The final layer is operational. 3Rive has taken over elements of the distributor's finance administration as a managed function: Coupa expense reconciliation, validation and processing on a weekly cadence across Australia and New Zealand, with a dedicated team and overflow capacity for peaks. The backlog the finance team had been carrying was cleared in a single afternoon when the service commenced. The function runs under 3Rive's Cognitive Outsourcing™ model, in which 3Rive operates the process, applies automation and AI to reduce the effort in it over time, and the gains are shared with the client.

The Approach

• Treat migration and stabilisation as one programme. Resource the months after go-live as seriously as the months before it.
• Migrate clean and leave a data platform behind. The migration pipelines become the reporting layer once the cutover is done.
• Integrate the ERP with everything around it. Storefront, procurement, reporting, and warehouse, so the business runs on one platform rather than a set of reconciliations.
• Close the gaps with Power Platform. Fast, maintainable tooling the client's own team can own and extend.
• Automate the highest-volume manual task. Put an AI agent on order intake, where errors and delays originate.
• Run what should be run, not staffed. Take over finance administration as a managed function and keep reducing the effort in it.

Systems and Stack

Systems integrated or migrated

Credentials

Related Services

Related Case Studies