How SoftwareOne will help Navtilus unpack more app sales

The Danish IT consultancy has developed a tool to help producers fulfil their EPR reporting requirements for packaging, single-use plastics and batteries.

After helping a large and loyal customer base optimize its experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for almost 25 years, the Danish IT consultancy Navtilus is pivoting to a new business model.

“This transition has grown very organically from what we’ve been doing for a quarter of a century,” says Laurits Rind, System Consultant at Navtilus. “Business Central is a very capable system, but as with all ERPs, there are gaps – and most organizations have specific requirements. Navtilus is expert at filling those gaps and adapting Business Central for our clients.

"What we are doing now is leveraging that experience to create and sell apps that are mostly small adjustments and changes to help improve Business Central in daily use. Navtilus knows like no other how to develop new ideas and solutions in this space, but with our background as IT consultants, we didn’t necessarily have the right marketing skills – especially for sales outside Denmark. This was our pain point, and this is where SoftwareOne (formerly Crayon) comes in.”

One of the Navtilus apps available on Microsoft AppSource supports businesses in complying with the reporting requirements of the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) for Packaging.

“When we started talking to SoftwareOne in the summer, our discussions centered around this app, which, as SoftwareOne realized, has incredible potential,” says Rind. “For two reasons. First, EPR requirements are complex and onerous and different in each European market, for the time being at least. Second, there are many thousands of producers that are liable to register for EPR, whether for B2C or B2B transactions. Both are covered under EPR.”

EPR is a policy tool to encourage producers to reduce packaging or use packaging that is more eco-friendly by holding them accountable for all of their packaging throughout its lifecycle. “This means producers have to report in detail what packaging they use,” says Rind. “Our app makes this a lot easier by automatically tracking and organizing all data every time a product is sold. This drastically reduces the need for manual entry and avoids confusion and calculation errors. You enter the packaging data just once, and from there, the system does the rest.

“At the same time, the Navtilus app allows you to easily export and import Excel documents with packaging data, so you can share information with your suppliers and let them fill in the packaging details for you.

“Adding this app to Business Central makes sense because the ERP already contains your entire item list, and it’s sound practice to collect all your data in one place.”

The usefulness of the Navtilus solution can be illustrated by the packaging involved in the distribution of wine. You have the glass bottle, the steel top or cork, the label—and in some markets, even the glue used to stick the label to the bottle.

What if you sell a box of six? You have to add the cardboard box, another label, and the tape used to close the box. If you sell a pallet of 25 boxes, you need to register these details 25 times in addition to whatever covering you have used for your pallet as well as the pallet itself – and in France, they even ant you to record the type of wood used for the pallet.

“One of our largest customers is already using the app – a vendor of pig farm equipment. And another – a reseller of kitchen equipment – is rolling it out. We have been approached by a pharmaceutical company. But this is in our home patch of Denmark. For extensive sales activity elsewhere, we are working with SoftwareOne to market and sell the apps across its partner network. I say ‘apps’ because there are two other related solutions that will also shortly be available on SoftwareOne's Cloud IQ platform.”

These apps are EPR Single-Use Plastics and EPR WEEE & Batteries, where WEEE stands for “Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment”.

“Not all producers need the extensive EPR for Packaging app,” Rind adds, “but most will have to do some kind of EPR reporting in Denmark and elsewhere, and SoftwareOne saw the potential for this.