Pearce Seeds Revisited

Cementing technology for future growth 

Pearce Seeds supply agricultural chemicals, seeds, fertilisers, feed and more to the South West of England. With 100 permanent or contracted staff at any one time, over 210k items are sold each year. Pearce Seeds also offer services such as agronomy, soil sampling, nutrient management plans, stewardship applications, animal health and more from their knowledgeable BASIS and FACTS qualified agronomists.

In 2014, a failed implementation of Dynamics NAV with another partner led to a move to TNP. We spoke to John Dean, IT Manager at Pearce Seeds, about this move in 2020. We’ve since revisited this conversation and are now celebrating a relationship between the two companies, which has continued to bloom for over a decade. 

Now, Pearce Seeds are live on Dynamics 365 Business Central Online after the project completed in 2023. After planning an upgrade to Business Central back in 2020, the Covid pandemic brought a halt to the plans of many businesses, including Pearce Seeds. At the beginning of 2023, the time was right to make the move to Business Central. The decision to upgrade with TNP as their partner was solidified by the strength of relationship between the two businesses. 

“The relationship between us and TNP has been brilliant over the years, epitomised by the upgrade project and especially Lianne, our Project Manager, who has been exceptional."

Future proofing the solution 

Business Central Online, Microsoft’s software-as-a-service version of their leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) product, was the chosen solution as it would take Pearce Seeds back to standard functionality from a heavily modified NAV 2016 version. With extensions functionality and TNP’s nHanced products, Pearce Seeds could remove the need to make direct changes to the code, making future updates easier to manage. Business Central Online was “an essential tool for making sure Pearce Seeds can stay current, up-to-date, expandable, and even contractable where required. It was the most versatile platform for Pearce Seeds to move forward on,” explains John. 

The upgrade project itself needed to go-live within a certain timeframe, as Pearce Seeds required a complete solution for trading during the autumn season. “During this time, the orders we do are time consuming. We must produce the seed, get it from the grower, get it treated and bagged. There’s lots of processes occurring whilst trying to maintain stock and location. All of this within a four or five-week window.” This meant a hard deadline for completing the upgrade, testing and go-live. The project came in on time and under budget and was “handled really well” by both teams, says John. John calls out Project Manager Lianne and Engagement Manager Jenny as a huge help, explaining that Jenny “always tries her absolute best to get us what we need”.  

“Business Central will work as a superb platform for us moving forward, the new features and functions that Microsoft are bringing into the platform are going to make it fantastic. The integration to the 365 products is superb and will be utilised more and more every day.”  

Moving forward 

The Pearce Seeds team are now set up for the future with a sustainable platform that receives regular updates from Microsoft. This means less manual effort from Pearce Seeds, who can be safe in the knowledge that their platform is benefitting from the latest functional improvements, world-class security and integration to other Microsoft solutions.  

It’s great to see that Pearce Seeds’ plans from 2020 have grown to fruition and we look forward to supporting them moving forward on their journey.