Where Business Central Transformation Delivered Defence Force Outcomes

NORSTA North, a wholly Australian-owned maritime maintenance company, successfully implemented Microsoft Business Central to transform its financial operations and meet the complex requirements within its Australian Defence Force contracts.

Working with Wild Tech, NORSTA North was able to transition from a rigid SAP system to a cloud-based solution in just six weeks, creating a more agile and efficient operation for managing high-volume purchase orders and vendor quotes.

Background

NORSTA North Pty Ltd is part of the Varley Group, a long-established Australian business with extensive industry and engineering history. As a sister company to NORSTA Maritime based in Cairns, NORSTA North took on a significant ADF Navy maintenance contract quickly identifying the existing SAP system wasn’t fit for purpose

“We came in with the systems from NORSTA Maritime,” NORSTA North Financial Controller, Fleur Crowe, said. “We hadn’t been established yet, and we made the decision to try something else.”

Operating from a facility in Darwin, this relatively new operation needed a financial system that could match their specific requirements. Specifically, NORSTA North faced the challenge of managing high volumes of purchase orders while complying with strict Department of Defence reporting requirements.

The Challenge

The existing SAP environment presented several significant barriers to NORSTA North’s operations:

  1. Lack of flexibility: “SAP’s a big enterprise… if you don’t spend a lot of money customising it or getting people in to do the hard yards, it’s a bit of a clunky system,” Calvin Ossevoort, NORSTA Maritime Integrated Data Environment Manager, said.
  2. Accessibility issues: Being desktop-based rather than cloud-based created operational inefficiencies. “It was sitting in a desktop for security, and that made it painful to work with it,” Ossevoort, said.
  3. High-volume requirements: With approximately 3,000 purchase invoices processed annually, the company needed a system that could efficiently handle this workload.
  4. Vendor quote management: The business required a system to capture quotes from multiple vendors, a critical aspect of their procurement process.
  5. Governance and accountability: The business needed structured procurement approval workflows to uphold transparency, financial control, and compliance with internal accounting standards—ensuring that every purchase and expenditure was traceable, authorised, and aligned with budgetary and governance expectations.

The Solution

NORSTA North engaged Wild Tech to implement Microsoft Business Central as a cloud-based replacement for its SAP system, with an ambitious timeline of only six weeks from April to June.

The project involved:

  • Complete migration of financial data from SAP to Business Central
  • Custom PO template generation
  • Custom Power BI reporting using the Business Central API
  • Implementation of Continia for capturing vendor quotes
  • Configuration of approval workflows to meet defence requirements
  • Cloud-based deployment for accessibility across locations

“We implemented within two months, and we migrated everything from SAP into BC,” Crowe said. The time constraints meant the team needed to be pragmatic in their approach: “That’s what you get when you need something now… you make it work at a minimum viable level, and then you make it better over time.”

Rather than going through a traditional requisition process in Business Central, the team implemented a streamlined approach. “We go straight from a quote, feed it into the document reader, Continia, and generate a PO straight from there to then go immediately through the approval process,” Ossevoort said.

Results

Despite the compressed timeline, the implementation achieved its core objectives. The new system successfully:

  1. Processed high volumes: “We’re up to 2,190 purchase orders that we’ve created… and in terms of posted purchase invoices, it’s higher – up to 3,061,” Ossevoort said.
  2. Improved accessibility: The cloud-based solution allowed for better access across their operation, providing more flexibility in how NORSTA North’s teams were able to work.
  3. Enhanced vendor quote management: The integration with Continia allowed for better capture and tracking of vendor quotes.
  4. Streamlined approval workflows: The system facilitated the necessary approval processes required under their defence contracts.
  5. Achieved stability: The system is reliable, always available, and accessible at all times to those that need it.

The speed of the deployment was a particular highlight of this project, as Crowe, said: “Wild Tech put up with my crazy idea of having a General Ledger system in less than six weeks. Their speed was impressive, building rapport quickly while always coming back with thoughtful solutions. Best of all, they didn’t gatekeep knowledge – they taught us how to do it.”

The implementation process wasn’t without its challenges. “There were plenty of technical issues at the start, but we resolved them as they popped up,” Ossevoort said. The team worked through these initial hurdles with a comfortably agile mindset. “Making things better and communicating that through word of mouth rather than traditional documentation processes were critical for us to be able to deploy the solution rapidly,” he said.

This approach had additional benefits than just the accelerated timeline, too. “Our leadership specifically noted that we saved a lot of money through this approach, without compromising on our ability to address issues as we came across them,” Crowe said.

Looking Forward

With Business Central now successfully operating, NORSTA North is looking to leverage this foundation for future opportunities: “We want to be able to market the way we do maintenance here and the systems that we use holistically to the Navy and the Army,” Crowe said.

“The other thing we want to do in the immediate future is, roll over Business Central to NORSTA Maritime… now that it has been proven and effective.”

Finally, Crowe also expects that the solution will help the team to support acquiring new business. “There are some contracts coming up for army landing craft that have a similar sort of maintenance requirements as patrol boats – our system can scale to address those needs for the ADF too.”

NORSTA North’s implementation of Business Central demonstrates how a well-executed digital transformation can enable a business to meet complex operational requirements despite tight timeframes. By taking an agile, pragmatic approach to implementation, Wild Tech was able to work with the team to establish a stable financial system that supports their current operations and positions them for future growth.

As NORSTA North continues to develop its operations, the foundation provided by Business Central offers a platform for expansion both within their own business and potentially across the wider Varley Group.