Measuring the output of a business process or procedure, then adjusting the process or procedure to enhance the output, increase efficiency, or raise the effectiveness of the process or procedure is known as performance improvement. In this post we are sharing with you, what is performance optimization, the importance of system performance for any company, and of course how are we helping the companies to resolve this kind of issues. Besides that, we are sharing two short use cases from our clients in the manufacturing and food & beverages industry, where our experienced team members helped them resolve their issues. 

What is performance optimization?

Performance optimization, in the nutshell, is a process of modification of system components to make them work more efficiently and execute more rapidly. Dynamics is an enterprise application and great performance is an integral part of its design with default adjustments. However, there could be objective factors that can affect the operation parameters, such as improper system settings, custom developments not following Microsoft best practices, and underestimated volumes of data…

Importance of system performance

System performance is a key element of any Dynamics implementation that ensures a positive customer experience regardless of whether the customer interacts with the system directly or indirectly. Any bottleneck in the system components might impact the business’s ability to achieve its goals. Especially if performance issues appear in areas that support key business processes, which can result in revenue loss, opportunity loss, bad customer satisfaction, employee productivity, or brand reputation.

How is Axapta Masters doing it?

Our approach to resolving such issueс is proven many times and mainly relies on the experience and expertise of our team members, along with the application of proper management methodologies, with a strong intention to keep the cost as low as possible by doing minimal changes in the system. These is the high-level process we execute:

• Identify the process that performs slowly against business targets.
• Collect available metrics, logs, and trace files.
• Analyze collected information.
• Reproduce the issues in a non-production environment.
• Implement corrective steps.
• Perform User Acceptance Test – new metrics vs. targets.
• Deploy to production.
• Monitor and cross-check telemetry data.

 

 

We have prepared for you two short use cases from two different clients we work with, about:

• Use Case 1: Warehouse Load Preparation Process
• Use Case 2: On-time Management Reporting

use case 1: warehouse load preparation process

A customer in the manufacturing industry approached us with an issue that an important, highly customized, business process in distribution warehouses was executing approx. 10 hours on daily basis, which resulted in major delays in load preparations. Axapta Masters acquired a team of Senior AX Developers and Database Administrators to perform initial analysis and work on this issue. Conclusions were:

• The database was configured and tuned properly and there was noт any bottleneck on the SQL level.
• The custom code developed by their previous partner was the root cause of the issue. The code was not written according to MS best practices and common development standards which was not utilizing any parallelism and was optimized for a small volume of data.

Axapta Masters team redeveloped part of the logic and managed to optimize the process to finish in about one hour.

use case 2: on-time management reporting

In informal conversation a customer in the food & beverages industry shared an issue that the business is getting important daily reports with 4-5 hours delay, increasing on daily basis. At the very beginning, the solution was working fine, but as data continued to grow, performance degradation was linear, and it was a question of time when no reports will be generated at all.

• The BI solution was a black box – most of the components were encrypted without the ability for further tuning or modifications.
• The customer has plans to replace this solution in about 3 years and didn’t want to invest a lot in major changes.
• Two other partners analyzed the solution and confirmed it reached the limits of the architecture and no further improvements can be done.
• But still, the business needed their reports on time.

Axapta Masters BI experts were confident that the existing solution can be improved, and proposed a different approach:

• Utilize the majority of existing solution in order to keep the cost as low as possible, with some modifications only.
• Implement an agile approach with short sprints, with Go/No Go gates in between, to be able to cancel the project if no quick wins were achieved at the very beginning.

 In the end, the project was completed successfully on time and on budget, and now the business has its reports fully refreshed by 9 am in the morning.

 

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If you have more questions or you are considering doing performance improvements to your current system, contact us and schedule a meeting with our experts for a consultation!

And if you are interested in potential career opportunity, check out our careers page.