Dyno Nobel launches a groundbreaking cost accounting solution in months with help from Model Metrics and salesforce.com

When Dyno Nobel, a leading supplier of industrial explosives and blasting services, wanted to manage margins more carefully and more accurately calculate and assign costs to customers, it tapped Model Metrics and salesforce.com for help. In just 7 months, the two companies built a complex cost accounting system on the Force.com cloud platform that integrates with Dyno Nobel’s SAP ERP solution. The result: an explosive growth in efficiencies.
 

A fast, cost-effective way to improve margins

The explosives industry is one of the most highly regulated, with complex safety requirements for manufacturing, transportation, storage, and use of devices. Add wildly different customer needs and service requests, and the effect is a cost accounting nightmare.

Like many companies in today’s challenging economy, Dyno Nobel wanted to increase profitability by better understanding the costs associated with specific customers and products. It had been using a highly customized quoting solution called LMS for its North American business, but the system was slow and difficult to support. Sales reps spread across North America accessed the system over VPN and frequently complained about the poor speed. Dyno Nobel considered updating its existing system, but the cost was prohibitive. It also investigated new systems, but with a small IT department, it was concerned about the potential for maintenance overhead.

According to David Price, pricing and contracts manager at Dyno Nobel, “Speed was one of the most important requirement for us, and Salesforce—with its cloud computing model—gave us speed, but without all the costs of the other options.” The team at salesforce.com referred Price to Model Metrics for systems integration because of the firm’s experience with highly complicated custom applications.
 

Building a new solution in record time

Using Force.com code (Apex) and Force.com pages (Visualforce), Model Metrics built a full cost accounting system on Force.com from scratch. The system integrates bi-directionally with Dyno Nobel’s SAP ERP system to update information each day on 75,000+ cost points, and develops complex quotes using the latest data.

According to Dan Belwood, technical architect at Model Metrics, “We conducted a weeklong business process review, which turned into a 2-week review. Ultimately, we put seven people on the project, started in March, and went live in September. Only Force.com would help us take an application this complex from idea to concept to finished product this quickly.”

Dyno Nobel was ecstatic about the application. “We took a quoting process that formerly took up to 4 hours and reduced it significantly, giving us a real competitive advantage,” says Price. “More important, we’re able to accurately assign costs so we know which customers and products are the most profitable and where we have to optimize our business to maintain margins. Plus we now have this information up front, instead of from a report that’s run in Excel after the fact. And with quotes of up to 1,200 lines, the project clearly demonstrates that Salesforce can support large masses of data and ERP-grade processes.”

An agile and collaborative development effort

Force.com’s point and click configuration was key to delivering Dyno Nobel’s new system on time and on budget. Belwood explains, “With Force.com, I can use configuration—not customization—and I can rely on salesforce.com’s QA processes. The engineers at salesforce.com have had 10 years to make sure approval processes work. Why would I try to write my own in 10 days? I always tell clients—you bought the platform, now use it!”

Belwood also attributes Model Metric’s speed and success to its ability to take an agile approach. He says, “With Force.com, it’s just as easy to build a tool as it is to do a mockup. And for an application this complex, there’s a huge benefit to taking an iterative approach. We can continually refine what we’re doing, which guarantees that we’ll get it right.”

Another key to a successful implementation: collaboration with salesforce.com. According to Belwood, “We work very closely with salesforce.com from pre-sales through project completion. Some of our projects break new ground, and the fact that salesforce.com engineers are available to brainstorm a solution ensures we can successfully meet the client’s business needs.”

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