Zones

The challenge: Modernizing to stay ahead

For more than three decades, Zones has been a global solutions provider delivering end‑to‑end IT services with an unmatched supply chain. Guided by a customer‑first mindset and a passion for simplifying complex technology, Zones helps organizations modernize, secure, and scale their digital environments across workplaces, the cloud, data centers, security, managed services, and global IT solutions — earning its reputation as clients’ First Choice for IT.

But with its relentlessly customer-centric approach, Zones often found itself putting its needs behind those of its clients. While helping clients move to and use the latest platforms, Zones itself was working off an older ERP — AX 2012. When Microsoft announced AX 2012 was officially being sunset, Zones turned the challenge into an opportunity and worked with Argano to enact a top-to-bottom transformation.

The solution: Dynamics 365 Finance, SCM, and Sales, Azure, and Copilot

At the core of Zones’ transformation is Dynamics 365 — the peerless cloud-based enterprise platform. With guidance from Real Dynamics, an Argano company, Zones went all-in, implementing Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 SCM, and Dynamics 365 Sales to improve back-end operations, inventory management (the company has 2 million+ SKUs), and customer relationships.

Furthermore, Zones leveraged Microsoft Copilot to automate sales workflows (such as quoting), Azure Synapse for business intelligence, and Microsoft Teams to better connect its workforce to each other and to customers.

The results: A global transformation leading to increased orders

Simply put, the project was a success from top to bottom and start to finish.

• Zones now operates on a single global platform, bringing all geographies onto one instance to standardize business processes and deliver consistent customer experience worldwide.
• Sales teams used to use hundreds of different programs to maximize discounts. Now, they can do it all on one user-friendly screen.
• Material requirements planning processes used to take several hours to run. Now, master planning runs in just a few minutes.
• Where product placement formerly relied on manual decisions, rule-based slotting in Dynamics 365 now ensures products are stored logically, maximizing warehouse picking efficiency.
• With Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales, Zones can facilitate real-time conversations, and enjoy quick access to customer information, opportunities, quotes, and details.

And there was success in the process, too. “You always risk losing some potential customers because it can take three to six months to normalize after a massive rollout like ours, but we didn't see a drop,” said Michael Guarino, VP, Global Logistics.