The company
Founded in 1971, Kwik-Fit is now Europe’s largest car service chain with 11,000 employees serving more than eight million customers every year.
Kwik-Fit’s Netherlands operation employs some 1,500 workers across 180 service centres including its Kwik-Fit Netherlands retail arm and USN/Centuri Netherlands wholesale business. All activities are directed from the company’s central office in Harderwijk.
The situation
Kwik-Fit Netherlands needed a fully-integrated environment that would help it efficiently manage its operations. Each arm of the Dutch business had its own point-of-sale and back-office IT systems – Kwik-Fit Netherlands used a custom application from the UK, while USN used Microsoft Dynamics NAV. In addition, the central office used a number of applications, running on more than 40 servers.
Kwik-Fit’s Finance Manager, Paul Traas, describes the issues: “We worked with Triathlon, a financial package on Unix that was quite old and definitely not flexible. We couldn’t export data to other applications, so we had to print out almost everything on paper and retype a lot of data.”
Solution
Kwik-Fit considered several options before choosing HSO to implement a Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system.
“Initially, we were looking for a good administrative package, such as Exact and AFAS,” says Traas. “Exact seemed to meet all our basic requirements, but in practice we would have needed to implement several additional applications. We realised that an all-round ERP package would be ideal for us, as it was better suited to our objective of reducing the total number of different applications.”
HSO worked with Kwik-Fit to establish what it wanted to achieve, and delivered the new Dynamics ERP system using its unique Excellerate implementation methodology.
Results
Microsoft Dynamics AX has given Kwik-Fit a fully integrated environment based on standard technologies. The system enables information to be shared between applications, enabling improved efficiency and accuracy because employees no longer need to retype data. Insight into various business processes also helps to support decision-making.
Because the system is built on standard Microsoft technologies, it is flexible enough to grow with the organisation, enabling the company to respond to changing business needs.