Hong Kong Maxim’s Group serves streamlined sales and production with Dynamics 365

Maxim’s Group provides quality dining experiences under its homegrown brands and renowned global brands at more than 2,000 restaurants, quick service outlets, bakery shops, cafés, and catered events across China and Southeast Asia. Maxim’s also operates a food processing and distribution business with an extensive product line that caters to both internal retail branches and external wholesale customers. The company turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to modernize and streamline its sales and production processes.

Ensuring a five-star ordering experience

Amusement parks, airlines, hotels, and other large-scale enterprises rely on Maxim’s Caterers Ltd. to feed their customers. Maxim’s legacy production management system, built around a database engine and stored procedures, couldn’t scale to meet new business requirements. As a service-centered company committed to delivering memorable dining moments, Maxim’s Caterers wanted to ensure that its customers continued to enjoy a five-star ordering experience. It needed a flexible, yet foundational solution better suited to the complexity of the business and its diverse range of customers, and able to manage the operations of eight factories all producing different products.

The company was poised for an operational overhaul, and it set out to find a unified system that could handle roughly 50,000 daily transactions, efficiently allocate production resources, and ensure prompt order fulfillment for external customers. The ideal solution would also streamline sales order management processes, enable real-time visibility, and enhance collaboration between IT and manufacturing units to boost overall efficiency. Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management not only fit the bill with out-of-the-box functionality, it was also flexible enough to meet Maxim’s business-specific integration needs.

Hungering for change

The legacy system left Maxim’s employees as well as its customers hungry for a better way to work. Customers had to order products from the factory that made them. That meant that if a customer wanted products made at eight different factories, the customer had to place eight orders. And without a centralized online product catalog, customers had the added burden of investing considerable time in understanding which factory made which products. The system didn’t have the ability to analyze historical order data to predict peak ordering times, and product management was more art than science.

Deliveries included corresponding notes for each product. Customers commonly ordered 100 different products at a time, and the volume of delivery notes made reconciliation a tedious and time-consuming task.

Employees were little better off. Internal business processes were heavily manual. Customers used paper catalogs of each factory’s inventory, so any product change required the sales team to update the catalogs and mail them to customers. Faxed and emailed orders were sent through Electronic Data Interchange to be manually sorted by delivery date to determine production schedules, a laborious and confusing process. There was no standard template for orders. Manually mapping orders to factories could take hours and was prone to error.

The sales team needed to know which factory produced each product to place orders correctly. This requirement not only slowed down order placement but also increased the likelihood of errors—any misunderstanding of a factory’s capabilities or an item’s provenance could lead to an incorrect order and delayed delivery.

Changes to orders posed significant challenges. A change before production required a manual update in the system, so it was difficult for Maxim’s to ensure that it was working off the latest, most accurate version. If a change occurred after production, Maxim’s had to spend time working very closely with the production team to adjust the order. If a quantity was increased, the delivery date was delayed. If the quantity was reduced or the order canceled outright, Maxim’s lost revenue. Like the original order, all these changes were received by email and fax, restricting awareness and increasing the risk of errors.

Putting optimized experiences on the menu

Maxim’s implementation of its new Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management solution rolled out in phases. The first phase focused on external customers and brands outside of its own extensive portfolio of restaurants and cafes.

Simplified ordering

To optimize sales order management and fulfillment, Maxim’s used Dynamics 365 to build an application based on the concept of a “MegaFactory.” The MegaFactory serves as a sales hub for both internal retail stores and external customers. The innovative solution captures all orders in a customer portal, relieving customers of the need to understand each factory’s product line. The only information they need to provide is the product name, quantity, and receive-by date. Ken Mok, Lead of Manufacturing Solutions, says, “With Dynamics 365, our MegaFactory platform allows both customers and our retail business unit to consolidate all their orders into one, regardless of the product type or manufacturing location. The user-friendly single-page interface integrates seamlessly with our production systems.”

Now when an order is changed, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management automatically routes the new data to the correct factory, keeping the system synchronized with the latest information. This integration minimizes the risks of delays or errors, maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction even as the rollout to all eight of Maxim’s factories continues. Customers and internal teams alike benefit from the simplicity of placing orders through a single point of contact, streamlining processes and enhancing overall efficiency. “Our customers’ order experience has greatly improved; Dynamics 365 helps us work smarter, respond to changes faster, and simplify processes,” says Louis Mah, Director – Group IT, Maxim’s.

Enhanced reporting

With full data integration with Microsoft Synapse and Fabric, Supply Chain Management users can easily create Power BI reports directly from the data warehouse. This self-service capability empowers employees to generate insights without relying on IT support.

Improved planning

Maxim’s used Microsoft Power Apps to develop an in-house paperless system to replace physical data collection on the production line. This innovation not only improves production planning but also supports environmental sustainability by reducing paper waste. Power Platform automated notifications provide real-time updates, saving time, minimizing waste, and optimizing costs.

Centralized management of product master data and production planning plays a crucial role in maintaining inventory accuracy, which is vital for any food company. The system's advanced forecasting capabilities support strategic decision making in key areas such as minimum order quantity, item multipliers, lead times, replenishment, and costing. It also enhances the management of raw material shelf life, quality assurance, and traceability, ensuring meticulous control over all aspects of production and inventory.

Setting the table for results

Thanks to Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Maxim’s Caterers is already reporting a 5% reduction in waste, a 40% improvement in productivity and efficiency, and a 50% reduction in on-premises hardware maintenance operating expense. Another benefit of the implementation is convenience. The system’s flexibility allows for easy extension of applications to cover different business scenarios.

Other notable benefits include improved customer satisfaction, enhanced compliance and risk management, reduced time to market, and cost savings through automation.

Next on the menu is implementing Dynamics 365 Finance in all of its factories to streamline internal sales operations, which is sure to serve up even more delicious results for Maxim’s and its customers.