Landscape Structures sought a fully integrated solution that could keep pace with its growth while streamlining and automating processes between sales, manufacturing, and finance.
Automation has saved hundreds of hours of manual processing per year; Planning optimization in Supply Chain Management significantly reduced Material Requirements Planning time.
Minnesota-based Landscape Structures has been the world’s leading manufacturer of commercial playground equipment since 1971. The employee-owned company has designed, manufactured, and installed more than 80,000 play areas worldwide that welcome kids of all ages and abilities. As the company grows, so does its need for a cloud-based, integrated solution that drives seamless order flows and enhances data quality. Dynamics 365 Finance, Sales, and Supply Chain Management are the solutions that enables Landscape Structures to keep pace with the energetic, ever-changing play of kids on its playgrounds.
Landscape Structures’ mission is to enhance children’s lives by fostering and creating inspiring play experiences while honoring the environment. Founders Barb and Steve King believed in the power of collaboration, kindness, and respect and focused those values on the principle of continuous play. As Steve describes it, continuous play connects several play components together to encourage decision-making and interaction and provide more play value in a limited amount of space than dispersed, disconnected structures. Continuous play inspires everything Landscape Structures does, from inclusive design to back-office operations.
More and more communities and schools are seeking safe, inclusive, and fun playgrounds that are designed for all ages and abilities, and Landscape Structures has grown to meet the challenge—not just in market share but in product lines. With the 2015 acquisition of Aquatix® and the 2016 creation of SkyWays®, the company added new configurations of water play splash pad products and shade structures to delight children everywhere.
The company’s ultimate customers are the children who reimagine playgrounds as pirate ships, castles, and other fantasy play worlds, but its most immediate stakeholder is its global network of playground consultant organizations. Local playground consultants are independent sellers of Landscape Structures playground equipment, committed to serving their communities and working with cities, schools, parks, and other entities to bring children’s imaginations to life. They’re crucial to the company’s success.
Landscape Structures’ marketing and sales operations teams focus on supporting and providing a world-class experience for local consultants. In 2017, the company looked closer at their needs in relation to its business processes and found that growth had exposed cracks. The manual quote-to-order process was inefficient and insufficient for a growing business. Disparate systems were used for quoting, ordering, and manufacturing, with opportunities managed in spreadsheets, quotes and orders managed in Microsoft SharePoint, and manufacturing managed in the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The order management team had to rekey information from one system to the next, verifying the data was accurate so that playground orders could be manufactured correctly.
Sally Prinsen, Vice President of Information Technology for Landscape Structures, recognized an opportunity to migrate the company’s operations to the cloud and create a modern, intelligent, user-friendly platform. Embracing its founders’ innovative spirit, Prinsen thought “Landscape Structures is growing, and we need a more robust and scalable platform to support our current business needs and provide a pathway for future growth and transformation, beyond what we can see today.”
By 2020, it was clear that the benefits of a cloud-based ERP and customer relationship management platform were both compelling and necessary to continue providing world-class support for Landscape Structures’ playground consultants. The company needed a solution that could scale and be configured to meet the needs of its marketing and sales operations teams now and in the future. Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a fully integrated solution that drives flow between sales, manufacturing, and finance business processes with the reliability and scalability Landscape Structures was looking for.
The company implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance, Sales, and Supply Chain Management using Dual Write to seamlessly share data, improving the flow of business and communications, saving hundreds of hours of manual processing per year, and improving the quality of its business data.
Landscape Structures ensures that its playground consultants have what they need to serve their customers as efficiently as possible. The marketing and sales operations teams expedite leads, quotes, and pricing in the shared Dynamics 365 platform, while sales support teams verify orders, answer questions, and facilitate special requests.
Potential customers find their local playground consultant on Landscape Structures’ website, which sends leads to Dynamics 365 Sales and on to a secure portal. Consultants work their leads, quotes, and orders entirely in the portal, accessing critical information at any time and managing every aspect of their playground projects, including product pricing and specifications, financing, shipping, maintenance, replacement parts, and service questions. For the customer, it’s a friendly, easy, one-stop ordering experience.
And with Planning Optimization as a Service, material requirements planning (MRP) can run in parallel with manufacturing processing without causing lags in system performance allowing for more flexibility in scheduling, manufacturing, and staffing to meet the demands of our customers.
As a lean manufacturing organization, Landscape Structures has a goal of building a strong supply chain network that supports order lead times with just-in-time delivery rather than accumulating large inventory levels on site. As business grew and supply chain challenges emerged, the company needed to hone its warehouse and inventory management practices to meet its goal. Dynamics 365 Warehouse Management provides the flexibility and functionality that the operations teams need to pivot inventory levels and locations, easily adjusting inventory levels and the granularity of the picking location to meet each area’s needs.
The company disperses orders to different manufacturing sites as needed. With Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Landscape Structures can respond to issues quickly and easily, and with fewer resources. “We can switch or add a vendor or move production to a different location,” explains Sheri Budde, LSI’s Dynamics 365 Manager. “Dynamics 365 gives us a lot more flexibility and agility to make strategic decisions.”
Dynamics 365 supports optimal, uninterrupted processes end to end in one order flow—from sales to shipping. With more agile and accurate order planning and a more flexible supply chain, Landscape Structures can respond to customer demand faster while reducing inventory needs, eliminating complex customizations, reducing downtime, and increasing production throughput.
Dynamics 365 keeps playgrounds humming after the sale as well. Landscape Structures offers one of the longest warranty plans in the industry, and Dynamics 365 Case Management is a single source of truth for tracking product defects and replacement parts.
From design to manufacturing, safety to sustainability, efficiency to accessibility, Landscape Structures employees have thought so far outside the box that, as they say, one moment they’re being told, “it will never work,” and the next, they’re being followed. It comes as no surprise, then, that a company so rooted in innovation is looking forward to “playing with” new Microsoft products in the future, such as Microsoft Fabric and Copilot, as it carries out its mission to make a difference in the world by creating a better place for children and families to play.
Dynamics 365 gives us a lot more flexibility and agility to make strategic decisions.
Sheri Budde, Dynamics 365 Solutions Manager, Vice President of Information Technology
Landscape Structures is growing, and we need a more robust and scalable platform to support our current business needs and provide a pathway for future growth and transformation, beyond what we can see today.
Sally Prinsen, Vice President of Information Technology, LSI
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