William Turner

A brand new website in a breeze

William Turner manufacture and supply schoolwear accessories, almost all of which is bespoked to suit an individual school’s uniform. This family-owned business was founded in 1969 and has invested in manufacturing in the UK. Over 80% of its business goes through repeat customers, mostly a network of independent schoolwear retailers.

In November 2019 William Turner were already an established Dynamics NAV user, having purchased and implemented the software with another Partner and moved to TNP looking for more focused support. Craig Abbott, their IT Manager, found time to attend TNP's Annual User Day - an event that is designed to give all Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central users in the UK an insight into the direction of the product. Craig talked to TNP staff who help implement e-commerce solutions for customers. At that point, many of the orders that William Turner received were still taken by phone. Only a limited range of their products were available for online order, and this was through a heavily bespoked website that was based on a legacy platform (Magento One) that needed to be replaced. On the back of the conversation at the event and the practical advice they had received, Craig decided to dive straight into the new partnership with TNP by planning a deployment of Sana – an e-commerce platform that is tightly integrated with Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central.

In early 2020 TNP and William Turner ran an initial scoping session to determine their requirements. After the worst of the Covid-19 disruptions were out of the way, Phase 1 of the project began. Dave, Senior Developer, and Nathan, Web & Mobile Consultant, were assigned to make the magic happen; between them both they’ve been working with NAV and website integrations for 25 years!

"everything was spot on"

Craig is full of praise for Dave and Nathan, who he said, "had knowledge in their area that was second to none". They understood from the offset what William Turner were hoping to achieve, and Craig recalls that when they’d come back with developments, "there wasn’t often many changes to make because everything was spot on the first time around!"

Having invested the right amount of time in end to end testing, the day of Go Live went like an "absolute breeze". Afterwards, the team came back together to scope Phase 2. The nature of the school uniform market is such that most orders are received in a bulk ‘Early Bird’ order in the autumn for the following years intake, with top up orders for the current year fulfilled on an ongoing basis. William Turner want to increase the proportion of these orders that are placed online – and encourage customers to place orders earlier - to improve the service they offer and improve the visibility they have of demand.

Craig concludes by saying, "the project exceeded our expectations and has delivered results beyond what we could have imagined". That’s all the team at TNP ever want to hear.

Would you like to find out more about an e-commerce platform that could link seamlessly with your Dynamics NAV or Dynamics 365 Business Central system? Take a look at what Sana could do for you!

Are you interested in implementing an ERP system? Find out about our implementation process.