Hely & Weber, a manufacturer and distributor of orthopedic bracing products, moved from Dynamics GP to simplify their operations. What looked like the right setup at the time, Business Central paired with Dynamics 365 Sales, turned out to be more complicated than what they'd left behind. Manufacturing and shipping lived in Business Central. Order entry and sales lived in Dynamics 365 Sales. The integration holding the two together never stopped causing problems, until Dexpro Dynamics came in and made the tough call to put everything back into one system.

Running Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales as Two Separate Systems

Hely & Weber had been running Dynamics GP and SalesPad on-premises for years. As Kirk Rogers, the company's IT Manager, put it, GP was marching toward end of life, and a small company like his no longer had the appetite to run its own data center.

The first Microsoft Dynamics partner they worked with recommended splitting the new environment across two systems: manufacturing and shipping in Business Central, and order entry, commissions, royalties, tracings, and customer management in Dynamics 365 Sales, held together by a custom integration.

That integration became the whole job. "We went live in December 2024, and we fought that integration for a year," Rogers said. "I wasn't able to do anything else because I was always fighting fires."

A Business Central Partner Willing to Simplify Instead of Upsell

When Hely & Weber went looking for a new Dynamics 365 Business Central partner, they talked to several before settling on Dexpro Dynamics. What stood out was less about the sales pitch and more about the willingness to challenge the existing design.

Dexpro proposed consolidating everything back into Business Central, using its native functionality instead of stitching two platforms together. That recommendation ran against Dexpro's own short-term interest, since the firm also implements Dynamics 365 Sales and stood to lose license revenue by suggesting otherwise. Rogers noticed. "Even though they also work with Dynamics 365 Sales and would lose out on extra license fees, they recommended what was best for us," he said. "They gave us a fixed price range for the project, and we moved forward."

That kind of transparent pricing and advice is a big part of why Dexpro has built a reputation of directness among manufacturing clients evaluating a partner. If your organization is still on GP and weighing what comes next, our Business Central for GP Users page walks through what that path can look like.

Custom Order Entry and Pricing Built Inside Business Central

A redesign is only useful if it holds up against the details of daily operations, and Hely & Weber had plenty. The company manages more than 400 contracts with special pricing, which makes every price adjustment a small project of its own. Business Central's enhanced sales pricing tools gave them a way to keep that process under control.

Order entry needed attention too. Customer service reps had grown attached to the grid-style input in SalesPad, and Business Central didn't offer that layout out of the box. Dexpro built a custom order entry experience so staff could keep working the way they always had, just inside the new system.

Shipping and manufacturing turned out to be some of the more straightforward parts of the project. A shipping tool with native Business Central integration streamlined that side of the business, and the manufacturing functionality carried over from GP without much friction.

Cutting Infrastructure Costs by Moving Business Central to the Cloud

The financial case for the move was significant. Before the project, Hely & Weber maintained around a dozen servers to support remote users, databases, and shipping. Today, they keep only a domain name server and a shipping integration server for handhelds on-premises.

That smaller footprint changes the math on every future hardware refresh. Replacing the current setup will run roughly $10,000 to $11,000. Under the old server cluster, that same refresh would have cost $120,000 to $150,000, a reduction of more than 90 percent. The time savings mattered just as much. The people who once managed that infrastructure are now free to work on other projects.

Add in the fact that the project was delivered on time and on budget, something Rogers called "a rarity in the IT world," and the numbers tell a clear story.

Advice for Manufacturers Choosing a Business Central Partner

Asked what advice he'd give another company evaluating a Dynamics partner, Rogers didn't point to features or price first. He pointed to fit. "Look for the partner that is the right fit for you. Bigger is not always better," he said.

Location and communication came up too. Working with an overseas team on a tight budget and short timeline had been difficult in the past. With Dexpro's US based team, Rogers said he dealt directly with the people doing the implementation work, without a salesperson or gatekeeper in between.

Read: Why You Should Choose a Dynamics 365 Partner That Has No Sales Team

Most of all, he wanted a partner who would listen before prescribing a solution, and one who would keep teaching him along the way. "I pose operational questions to them, and they show me how to accomplish it in Business Central," he said. "They've been willing to help me figure out the things I didn't know about the cloud so that I can attend to system maintenance on my own."

A Simplified Business Central Foundation for Manufacturing Growth

Hely & Weber's story is a familiar one for manufacturers and distributors: a first implementation that adds complexity instead of removing it, followed by a redesign that finally gets the architecture right. The full case study covers more of Rogers' story in his own words, including how the teams worked through design and specifications before a single line of code was written. Read the full case study here.

If your Business Central environment has grown more complicated than it should be, or you're still running Dynamics GP and want to know what a move to Business Central could look like, we'd welcome the conversation. Get in touch with Dexpro Dynamics to talk through what a redesign could look like for you.