Bedrosians Tile & Stone

The Challenge: Inventory inconsistencies, inflexibility, and an aging ERP

Bedrosians Tile & Stone (Bedrosians) is one of the largest independent porcelain tile and stone importers and distributors in the United States, with 40+ retail locations across the country and customers worldwide. Its business depends on healthy economies in both construction and renovation — which means Bedrosians must be able to pivot on a dime as markets fluctuate and tastes change.

But with a decades-old ERP system, a 10,000+ item inventory (and overstock often forcing discounted sales), manual purchase order processes, a lack in demand planning and forecasting, and shifts in local and global economies, Bedrosians’ future was looking challenging. It required both a new platform and optimized processes to enable improved analytics, real-time control over inventory, and fuel high-performance operations.

The Solution: Dynamics 365 Finance, Azure, Power BI, and new ways of working

After an extensive review process, Microsoft Dynamics 365 was selected as the system to meet the company’s demands, and Real Dynamics (an Argano company) was selected as the partner to make it happen.

“In terms of the improving efficacy of back-office functions, the accuracy of inventory levels, costs, predicting demand, and greater visibility, Dynamics 365 had the biggest impact on our company,” said Larry Bedrosian, CEO. “Microsoft Dynamics 365 is built on new technologies that gave us easy access to the services we wanted," added Bedrosians’ Chief Information Officer, Nirbhay Gupta.

The flexibility of Dynamics 365 together with Azure Service Bus made integrating existing platforms a breeze. And the addition of Power BI gave executives and regional managers the same view across different levels of the enterprise, improving forecasting and inventory management.

The Results: Moving from what “felt right” to what is right

What used to be a manual demand forecasting process based on what “felt right” is now an automated, scientific forecast based on historical data and industry trends. Data-driven insights calculate optimal inventory on hand to cut costs dramatically, and the solution ensures that Bedrosians is proactive on the purchasing side (rather than being both reactive and tied to manual processes).

Azure Machine Learning models work with operational data in Dynamics 365 to keep inventory aging to a minimum and accurately forecast demand to get products into the hands of contractors, designers, and homeowners. But it was not just technology that made the difference: it was also the team, specifically in addressing Bedrosians’ change management needs.

“Dynamics 365 helped us improve business processes and adopt industry best practices for our backend operations,” said Gupta. “Change management was a critical part of our success as we were moving from an old platform and did not want to re-create the same processes in the new system. The Argano team understood our business and presented us with multiple solutions to meet our requirements… We could not have expected better partnership.”