insightsoftware Partner Grows Business and Provides Added Value to Customers Through Offering Jet Products

Optimus Business Transformation, a business consulting and enterprise technology provider, specializes in implementing Microsoft ERP solutions with complementary applications that enhance the efficiency and profitability of its customers’ businesses. Since partnering with insightsoftware in 2018 and adding Jet Reports and Jet Analytics to its portfolio, Optimus has been able to offer its customers richer, more robust reporting, budgeting, and business intelligence solutions that have led to significant business growth.

Over many years, Optimus has built trust among its loyal customer base in the Americas and Europe. They’ve helped customers of all sizes in areas such as retail, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, and hospitality. This success was recently recognized when Optimus was awarded the Top 100 VAR for 2020 by Global Insights Publication. The Top 100 resellers are organizations specializing in the sale and implementation of ERP and accounting software.

The Challenge

Despite the historic success Optimus had enjoyed and their proven track record of assisting their customers to implement, upgrade, and maintain Microsoft Dynamics systems, with the shift from on-premise solutions to the cloud, in the form of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (365BC) and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, Optimus noticed that customers were reluctant to make the move at first. A common concern was that their historic data could get lost when migrating from older ERP and Point-of-Sale (POS) systems to newer solutions.

At the same time, most of Optimus’ customers relied on the old, inflexible Management Reporter tool for financial reporting or they exported the data to Excel to manually format and manipulate them. In both cases, this was inefficient and not giving their customers’ finance teams the flexible, self-service reporting capabilities they needed.

Finally, most customers also relied on manual processes and multiple spreadsheets to manage their budgeting process in GP or NAV. Again, this was inefficient and also prone to error.

Optimus felt its customers deserved better. So, the company determined to look for a software partner with a strong track record in the Microsoft Dynamics world, who could provide solutions to help with data migration during upgrades to avoid data loss, and to fill other functionality gaps where its customers were currently using Excel or native tools for reporting and budgeting.

Building to Success with Jet

In 2018, Optimus evaluated the market to find the best reporting and analytics solutions partner for its customers. After an extensive search, it decided to partner with insightsoftware to offer the Jet Analytics and Jet Reports products.

What originally piqued their interest was Jet Analytics, which they realized solved the issue of potential data loss that was concerning customers who were thinking of migrating to 365BC. By importing their legacy data into Jet Analytics’ pre-built cubes and tabular models and then connecting to 365BC, customers can seamlessly report over their historic and current data, without having to go through a lengthy and risky data migration exercise.

For financial reporting, most of Optimus’ customers are looking to upgrade from the native Management Reporter tool. They are looking for something more flexible and that puts finance in control of their own reporting. Jet Reports is Optimus’ recommended replacement for Management Reporter.

“With Jet, our customers benefit from real-time information, simplified reporting, and interactive dashboards,” said Hector Negron, Managing Director at Optimus. “We now recommend Jet to all of our customers right from the start, because it’s a robust product that we trust. In fact, we have recommended Jet in all four RFPs we have completed in the last three weeks.”

Implementation time varies, but most customers see value immediately. Simple implementations take a maximum one week. More complex implementations, like a recent budgeting project for a civil aviation customer, can take up to three months. For shorter or longer implementations, the payback is clear. The budgeting project delivered savings both in setup and throughout the budgeting cycle.

“Just the process of building out the formulas for budgeting took the civil aviation customers about two months each year, just for that year,” said Negron. “With Jet, they were able to configure everything in just two weeks and can now use that same configuration over and over again, while still maintaining the ability to adjust as needed. With Jet, the whole budget cycle was then compressed from two months down to three weeks.”

Beyond its software, Optimus values insightsoftware’s investment in their channel, with benefits like volume rebates, marketing accelerator rebates, training, and certification built in to their partner program.

“insightsoftware’s culture and how easy they are to work with is the gold standard for how it should be to work with ISVs,” said Negron. “insightsoftware helps us grow our business and actually puts their own skin in the game while doing it.”

The next step for Optimus is to implement Jet in their own organization next year. Its finance team went through an internal RFP process and thoroughly evaluated Jet against other products, but, hands down, Jet was the clear winner.

Navigating Success

Thanks to the partnership with insightsoftware, Optimus has been able to expand into an entirely new area of business with its existing Microsoft Dynamics customers solving concerns about data loss when moving to 365BC, providing robust budgeting capabilities, and offering a flexible, financial reporting solution, which is critical as Management Reporter moves toward end of life. The results of this partnership speak for themselves with Optimus enjoying record revenues and now having created a new, dedicated 10-person BI practice:

• Last year was a record year in revenue for Optimus. Last quarter, while businesses were impacted by Covid-19 quarter, its revenues surpassed those in Q3, 2019.
• Ninety percent of its new RFPs include at least one of the Jet products.
• Optimus intend to expand its business intelligence practice by offering Jet to its Sage customers.