Sakata Seed America, Inc.

The challenge: On-premises ERP + hands-on workflows

Sakata Seed America, Inc., (Sakata) breeds, produces, and sells wholesale vegetables and ornamental genetics through seeds and plant cuttings. For more than forty years, Sakata has worked to meet the industry's needs for high quality seed, strong performance, and excellent yields. For almost half as long, Sakata has leaned on Microsoft for its platform and biz app needs, being a long-time Dynamics AX user.

But with an ever more volatile supply chain, a perishable product line, and a reliance on manual processes — for example, pricing updates manually entered in spreadsheets, manually updated by the sales team, and then manually loaded into the system — Sakata knew it was time to transform operations. And that meant a move to the Microsoft Cloud with help from Real Dynamics, an Argano company.

“The business was changing, shifting, growing,” said Doug Kenyon, IT Manager at Sakata. “It was time for a change, and we had an excellent history with Microsoft solutions and decided to continue that journey with Dynamics 365.”

The solution: Dynamics, AI Builder, Azure Data Lake, and Argano

Sakata and Argano collaborated to design and implement processes and data to support current business needs with an eye to further transformation focused on specific KPIs: increasing accuracy of lead-times for sales demand and production planning; improving financial reporting and budget planning; automating routine functions; and enhancing both connectivity and visibility across business units.

The selected solutions were Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management for improving operations, Azure Data Lake for faster and more accurate data warehousing and reporting, and Power Platform — specifically, Power Automate and AI Builder — to automate and optimize critical workflows, such as returns.

The results: Greater automation and endless opportunities to grow

Prior to Dynamics, pricing updates were handled manually. Now, automated calculations adjust prices and thereby speed performance—these automations alone resulted in time savings of more than 60% per update cycle.  And instead of being maintained in spreadsheets, pricelist and price agreements are generated in Dynamics 365, creating a single source of truth.

But this was just the beginning. Other improvements included:

• Automated invoice processing: Sakata automated invoice entry and approval and credit approvals using Dynamics 365, Al Builder, and Power Automate, increasing accuracy and productivity while reducing manual processes and costs.
• Reduced operational risk: Sakata's Dynamics 365 integration with barcode scanning controls ties directly to seed processing equipment. By reducing the risk of processing, picking, packing, or shipping the wrong seed, Sakata has significantly reduced operating risk.
• Better data, better decisions: With Dynamics 365 export to Azure Data Lake, Sakata has easy access to standardized information, data is aggregated, and reporting is faster and more accurate. They have better data for decision making and 30°/b fewer reports to maintain.

Sakata’s partnership with Argano continues to grow as the company seeks new ways to use technologies such as Al and IoT to streamline business processes, reduce manual tasks and risk, and reap even greater rewards in time savings and process efficiencies.