BanCoppel increases productivity with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations

BanCoppel belongs to Coppel, a Mexican company with more than 50 years of retail presence. In 2007, the bank began operations with a mission to serve the entire country’s popular market, offering safe, accessible, easy, and clear financial services. It currently has more than 850 branches and more than 9,500 employees. 

As a company that handles large volumes of private information, it was necessary to have modern tools that allowed it to handle its daily workload in an agile and efficient manner. 

The journey to a new ERP 

Until then, BanCoppel was using Solomon, a Microsoft application prior to Dynamics 365. “When the system ran out of upgrades, we realized we had to migrate to a solution that could be adapted to our new operation,” says Miguel Ángel Mayol, Head of Financial Control at BanCoppel, and project leader in the implementation of Dynamics 365. “Because we were Microsoft users, we wanted to continue with the platform, which is why we chose Dynamics 365 to replace the tool that had become obsolete,” he adds. 

Alondra Ocampo, Microsoft Dynamics Expert at Best Practices, the Microsoft partner who supported BanCoppel in its digitization process, says the implementation began in 2018. “Planning was done with the Dynamics 365 on- premises version up to that point,” said Ocampo. “Due to security issues at the bank, the possibility of being able to upload the information to the cloud was not considered.”

When servers arrived in 2020 and installation tasks began, Best Practices began to notice difficulties related to processes, security, and connectivity of the equipment, which caused BanCoppel to begin considering the cloud. By initiating the mandatory lockdown, the idea of migrating its operations to Azure – Microsoft’s cloud services platform – became even clearer. Thus, in January 2022, Dynamics 365 was deployed. 

It should be noted that the adoption of the tool would not have been possible without the input of Leticia Ramírez and Ricardo Martínez, who were in charge of the process of designing and programming accounting interfaces within the Comprehensive Financial System, and José Roberto Moreno, the PMO who led the project. 

Eight modules that increase BanCoppel productivity 

Dynamics 365 is a suite of intelligent enterprise apps that help manage the business using AI-generated predictive insights. Dynamics 365 Finance, meanwhile, provides organizations with the ERP feature that supports their unique requirements and helps them adapt to ever-changing business environments without the need to manage infrastructure. 

Dynamics 365 offers modules that contain all data forms, processes, queries, and reports and configuration related to it. Working this way, all the information needed for daily operation is in one place. BanCoppel implemented eight modules to make their job easier: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Budget Management, Procurement & Sourcing, Product Management, General Accounting, Bank Management, and Fixed Assets. 

“The exploitation of the information was carried out outside the system, the authorization flows and reporting; everything was by hand, which could generate errors,” Mayol says. “When we saw the advantages that the solution had, that it is comprehensive, with everything unified, and with the possibility of giving access to the suppliers themselves, we really understood all the problems that it solved for us,” he says. In this way, the bank was able to eliminate manual processes and automate them, thus increasing their productivity. 

Today, all 141 users of the tool have communication available when they need it, automatic layouts for payments to suppliers, and parameters on the accounting structure according to their labor account posting rules. They can also access information reports with Power BI, Microsoft’s service that turns business data into consistent, interactive, and visually appealing reports. 

Accounting is just the beginning for BanCoppel 

“Technology is critical to BanCoppel. To talk about efficiency and productivity today, everything must be automated,” says Mayol. “Instead of manually downloading files, employees should spend their time analyzing information to look for areas of opportunity.” 

Digital transformation is here to stay at BanCoppel. Different areas of the bank are visualizing the work performed by Mayol to systematize processes that are still manual for them in a comprehensive tool. The path of digitization has just begun.