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Wiston-Salem Industries for the Blind, INC.

"InterDyn's professional resources took a very challenging project and exceeded our expectations."

The Industries for the Blind, serving Winston-Salem continuously since 1936, produces high quality, value priced products ranging from custom made mattresses and military clothing to prescription eye glasses for consumers in the local community and across the nation as well as for military personnel and their families around the world.

The Winston-Salem Industries for the Blind has provided employment for thousands of visually impaired people since its inception. It is currently the largest employer of the blind in North Carolina with over 100 blind employees.

The Industries for the Blind is a self-supporting not-for-profit organization that has won many prestigious awards over the years, most recently the "Most Innovative Agency Award" from General Services Administration, (GSA) and the "Small Contractor of the Year Award" from the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), a branch of the Defense Department.

History
The Winston-Salem Industries for the Blind struggled with their Datapro system trying to make it work for their business. The technology had become outdated and the system could no longer support their operations moving into the future. Reporting needed to be real-time, data needed to be easily accessible and accurate. Time consuming tasks such as inventory management needed to be automated to maximize their current resources.

Because of this growth and complexity, The Industries for the Blind began an evaluation of its business solution and decided it wanted a more powerful, higher-end solution. After a review of multiple industry specific solutions, The Industries for the Blind decided that a foundation built around the industry leading Microsoft Dynamics GP product was the right choice.

Microsoft Dynamics GP: The Right Choice
As an innovator in the manufacturing industry, The Industries for the Blind continues to recognize the importance of technology to improve their business operations. "The manufacturing industry is a very competitive market with fixed costs and market influenced pricing for finished products. The only opportunity for increased profitability is by becoming more efficient within your business itself. After investigating a return on investment with Microsoft, we decided to take advantage of the available technologies to reduce our business operating costs.", said Erik.

The Microsoft Value Proposition
The Industries for the Blind needed a product to be implemented quickly so they could begin the new year with a new business management system in place. "With the strength of the Microsoft Dynamics GP product, in conjunction with the experience and professionalism of InterDyn, the first phase of the implementation was completed as scheduled", commented Erik.

The Industries for the Blind employees gained tremendous functionality with Microsoft Dynamics GP in comparison to the Datapro system. "We absolutely love the Smartlist feature within Microsoft Dynamics GP", said Erik.

Return on Investment
With Microsoft Dynamics GP, The Industries for the Blind has established a core business system foundation that has dramatically increased the efficiency of the operations by automating data flow and reducing manual labor.

Examples include:

• Financial Reports: An easy to use module, FRx has significantly lessened the time spent waiting for financial reports. Critical business information is retreived in minutes-these reports were unobtainable before and had to be completed as a separate process within Excel. I.e., Went from manually preparing financial statements to automated fincancial statements saving an estimated 2 days per month.
• Intuitiveness: As a user-friendly system, employees adapted to Microsoft after the implementation quickly.
• Daily Processing: Microsoft has provided a vast improvement in the day-to-day processing of reports, quiries, and Excel tables. What previously had been a multi-step process is now a very simple process, saving both time and effort. Doing reports, quiries, and exporting a file to Excel can now be accomplished in a matter of minutes where before it took hours.
• Labor Rededication: Employees who were dedicated to running Datapro and generating reports in Excel now have many extra hours each month to focus on other opportunities at The Industries for the Blind.