Avalon Makes the “Natural” Choice: Microsoft Navision and SCS

Natural Products Producer Makes the Move to Navision For Greater Control and Maximum System Flexibility

Avalon Natural Products is the market leader in producing personal care products for caring consumers seeking natural, organic and cruelty-free ingredients in the products they buy for themselves and their families.

Today, Avalon carries five brand names: Avalon Organics, Avalon Organic Botanicals, Alba Botanica, Sonoma Soap Co and Un-Petroleum. Avalon’s unique collection of quality personal care products has driven the company to the forefront of the organic product industry, nationally distributed in specialty, natural stores and heath food retailers as well as major grocery chains throughout the U.S.

The success and growth Avalon has experienced was managed, more or less, by two DOS legacy systems: Vision Point for accounting, and Locator, a custom built system, for inventory and warehouse management. When it became apparent that they had to advance their technology to keep up with the increasing demand for their products, the search began.

Due to mergers and acquisitions, Avalon had the opportunity to upgrade from Vision Point to ACCPAC, but after seeing it felt that the system would not be able to grow with the company and its changing business needs. SysPro, another finalist, had plenty of horsepower, but again, it did not have the flexibility Avalon demanded. To accommodate their growth in market and mindshare – and to facilitate an aggressive growth plan to nearly double over the next two years – Avalon needed a system that was first and foremost malleable. Product lines will be expanded, new ingredients used, warehouses will grow and processes change. 

“The critical deciding factor for us was the system’s flexibility,” said Avalon IT Manager Ralph Haney. “That, along with the fact that it was a Microsoft product, was the reason we went with Navision.”

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And benefits were realized immediately. “We took seven years of history and data from two disparate systems and married them in a state-of-the-art Navision system,” commented Ralph Haney. No small feat indeed, as the implementation team took history where products were accounted for in cases, and converted it into “eaches” for standard costing purposes. Now Avalon will track each component ingredient of each product down to the milligram.

Other such immediate wins were the introduction of lot control and wireless systems for the forklifts to enter real-time data as opposed to filling out documents that had to be entered into the system at the end of the day or the next morning. Data handled twice means two times the chance of errors. That problem is now eliminated.  

The implementation by all measures was a tremendous success. An aggressive four-month implementation plan was executed on-time, on-budget with a smooth go-live and no disruption to the business. “We didn’t even lose one hour of production,” remarked Ralph Haney. “It was the best implementation I have ever seen.” According to Avalon Senior Vice President of Operations, Peter Caparis, “the dedication of the entire project team, both SCS and Avalon, is what made this implementation such a success.”

Kudos were given to SCS team members Kartik Pasumarti, Project Manager, and Mohan Chilari, senior Navision Programmer, for “redefining the term customers service,” as Ralph Haney put it. “They bent over backwards to meet our requests,” he added.