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Digital transformation for a food manufacturer & distributor
The customer wanted to improve cross-regional coordination of business processes and enhance operational efficiency while maintaining regulatory compliance. Itransition implemented a scalable platform on top of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to unify and streamline business operations and ensure compliance with a complex regulatory landscape.
30%
increase in operational efficiency
95%
user adoption rate achieved within three months
100%
compliance with African regulatory requirements and IFRS standards
All technologies used
Engagement model:
About the customer
Our customer is an agri-food company headquartered in Europe and operating across the international supply chain. Its core activity is high-capacity wheat milling, producing flour primarily for the Angolan market.
The company manages both upstream sourcing of wheat and finished goods in Europe and downstream logistics and distribution across Angola, maintaining a robust wholesale and distribution network, supplying flour and other food products to bakeries, retailers, and wholesalers.
Industry
Manufacturing
Company type
Private
Operational footprint
Multi-regional (Europe, Middle East, Africa)
Client base
300+
The challenge
With operations spanning multiple regions, the customer faced several organizational and technology-related challenges:
- Heterogeneous landscape of legacy, siloed systems (including ERP solutions such as SAP Business One and Microsoft Dynamics NAV/Business Central, a treasury management solution based on Kyriba, and supporting tools such as Excel) limited business process visibility and caused operational inefficiencies.
- Lack of alignment between local Angolan accounting practices and group-wide standards made it difficult to unify financial governance across the organization.
- Managing geographically dispersed teams created logistical complexity and communication gaps, including delays and unclear authority boundaries between the global headquarters and the local Angolan operation.
- Operating across multiple African markets with a dynamic regulatory landscape (e.g., IFRS, local GAAP, tax regulations) created significant compliance complexity.
- Limited scalability of the existing IT landscape and tight coupling with legacy systems constrained the company’s business growth.
- Driving adoption of a new digital platform across a large, geographically dispersed workforce posed a challenge due to potential user resistance and varying levels of technical maturity across the organization.
The solution
At a glance
Itransition’s team designed and implemented a digital transformation solution on top of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management, integrating it into the existing technology environment and business workflows.
The project started with a comprehensive audit of the legacy IT infrastructure, revealing fragmented, Excel-based processes and a lack of real-time visibility into the Angolan milling operations. By gathering business process owners from Angola, Europe, and the UAE, we conducted intensive workshops and led the transition from 'As-Is' to 'To-Be' states. Our role transcended technical mapping; we acted as transformation architects, aligning operational goals with global best practices.
We analyzed end-to-end business cycles, including international wheat imports, domestic flour distribution, and milling and silo management, to design a coherent future-state operating model and system architecture that reflects how value is created across the business rather than optimizing isolated functions.
Consistency in financial governance, together with necessary local operational flexibility in Luanda, was achieved through the adoption of a "Global Core" model. Following the design of the target operating model, we determined the best transformation roadmap through a comparative analysis of Tier-1 ERP platforms from SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. We assessed these platforms against the newly defined 'To-Be' processes and the total cost of ownership considerations. Based on this prioritization, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management was selected as the core of the solution.
Support for cross-continental structure was ensured through the native multi-entity and multi-currency capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management, together with its ability to handle high-volume industrial manufacturing and complex international trade finance. Dynamics 365 enabled us to effectively bridge the gap between local execution and international financial standards by providing a single, integrated platform that satisfies Angolan local accounting and tax requirements while delivering IFRS-compliant group reporting.
Platform implementation
To achieve the required transformation goals, Itransition’s team deployed the previously identified
processes and applied Dynamics 365 best practices, ensuring that operational and financial challenges
were addressed effectively.
Key areas impacted included:
- Automated costing
To ensure that fluctuations in imported wheat prices were accurately reflected in the cost of a bag of flour, we moved from manual estimates to real-time FIFO costing (using the oldest inventory first). - Two-step inventory confirmation
To eliminate inventory discrepancies, the team redesigned the confirmation process for production order completion (where the production registers arrivals and the warehouse confirms them), creating a controlled, verifiable workflow.
To ensure seamless data flow and data exchange between the Dynamics 365 solution and the customer’s IT environment, our team integrated the platform with the following systems:
- Kyriba-based treasury management system
we achieved automated bank reconciliation, reduced finance team workload and error risk, and improved cash visibility across countries and currencies, enabling informed funding and payment decisions. - Logistics and vessel-tracking systems
we ensured end-to-end supply chain visibility and improved planning and coordination across teams. Itransition developed custom interfaces to support vessel reception processes, automatically converting vessel shipment data into real-time inventory updates in storage silos. - Weighbridge systems
we ensured accurate production records, stronger cost control, and improved auditability and compliance by automating data transfer from factory-floor scales to the ERP system.
Itransition’s team achieved regulatory compliance with both local Angolan regulations and international reporting standards through a properly configured Dynamics 365 environment that also enables future business growth. The solution supports multi-currency accounting with both local (AOA) and IFRS-based group reporting (EUR/USD).
To enable this, the team implemented:
- Parallel accounting structures for Angolan PGC (Plano Geral de Contabilidade) and IFRS, ensuring consistent yet compliant financial reporting.
- Automated generation of tax reports required by the Angolan General Tax Administration (AGT).
- Dual valuation of fixed assets, enabling different depreciation approaches for local tax regulations and IFRS standards.
Scalability and adaptability were ensured through an architecture designed to support both horizontal and vertical growth. Onboarding new markets, including other African countries, and the introduction of new product lines now can be achieved through configuration and targeted extensions, without the need for a fundamental architectural redesign.
Increased production capacity (exceeding 1,000 tons per day) and a growing user base across multiple geographies are supported through Azure’s elastic scalability, ensuring that the solution’s infrastructure can expand in line with business demand.
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The outcome
Itransition implemented a comprehensive ERP system that helped our customer operate with greater clarity and stability, enabling better decisions and smoother coordination across business units in Angola, Europe, and the UAE. It resulted in:
01
Faster decision-making with real-time, multi-currency reporting across multiple legal entities
02
30% increase in operational efficiency by making business processes faster and easier to manage
03
95% successful user adoption rate within three months
04
100% compliance with African regulations & IFRS standards, with regulatory controls built directly into the platform
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