Microsoft Dynamics NAV News & Tips
What's in Your Toolbox?
Efficiency. That’s the bottom line of every “how to weather the economy” article we’ve read lately. To be fair, it’s labeled as cost reduction, expense control, inventory management, sales performance and whatever discipline the author is skilled at, but they are all discussing efficiency.
But with an increasing barrage of tasks being assigned to all of us, how can we take the time to develop efficient processes?
This is where ERP can provide the greatest benefit. ERP is not simply your “accounting” system, but the complementary software solutions that comprise your business management system. Here are a few additional tools you might be interested in to help your company become more efficient.
KnowledgeSync Business Activity Monitoring
Have you ever wished your ERP system would automatically alert you to specific conditions as they occur instead of discovering them on your own days later, or worse still, learning about them from your customers?
Have you wished your system would automatically order common inventory items when they reach reorder points and send the purchase order to your vendor?
KnowledgeSync Business Activity Monitoring will do just that. KnowledgeSync provides an engine that monitors specific conditions that you define, and takes action in the form of emails, text messages, faxes, reports and more. At its most basic level, it monitors events and alerts you to them. At its most advanced, it automatically generates reports, sends them to external partners, and records the event within your ERP application. An unlimited number of conditions can be monitored.
With KnowledgeSync, your ERP system will truly work for you.
Jet Reports
Microsoft Excel is a wonderful tool that every business person is familiar with, but there’s one crucial drawback. You have to manually enter the data you need to analyze and, let’s face it, if you manually enter the amount of data required by most useful analysis, you're very likely to make mistakes.
Jet Reports overcomes this limitation, saving you valuable time and energy chasing down incorrect data.
Jet Reports enables you to define Excel based “templates” that connect to your ERP systems (and other databases) and extracts the data directly into the Excel report. Since you can rest assured that your data is complete and accurate, you can spend your time concentrating on building and auditing your formulas. Once the template is defined, you can “refresh” the data over and over again - no longer will you, or anyone else, have to rekey data every time a report is required.
Business Intelligence
In the past, business intelligence software was both expensive and difficult to understand and implement. This is no longer true. Today’s business intelligence tools are easy to learn, integrate with your ERP systems, and are affordable.
What is business intelligence or, as it’s more commonly referred to, BI? BI tools provide you with deep insight into the trends, statistics, and financial health of your company, and present it in a simple, easy to understand (i.e., graphical) manner.
BI tools differ fundamentally from ERP systems in the way they look at your data. Your ERP system looks at transaction processing, while BI looks at the same data and connects different pieces of it in ways conducive to deeper analysis. BI tools allow you to craft relationships among your different pieces of data using visual, drag and drop wizards. The reporting engine then builds “data cubes,” or multi-dimensional tables of your ERP data, based on your definitions to use in analysis.
BI tools usually provide a visual presentation of your analytical results through graphs, meters (think of the gas gauge in your car), indicators (such as stop lights) and other “at a glance” representations. Deeper insight comes from the ability to drill into the indicators to understand the details. Often there are multiple layers of analytical data, which ultimately relate to the originating ERP data.
BI tools are commonly used as daily dashboards that quickly alert managers to poorly performing areas of the business.
As you can probably tell from the description, BI is not a casual tool. If your current ERP and Excel reports leave you wanting more, then Business Intelligence is for you.
Visual Production Scheduling
What is Visual Production Scheduling? It's a way of looking at and analyzing your planning and production in an easy-to-understand visual format that takes into account all your resources, tools, labor, and materials. Imagine having a graphical representation of your manufacturing load. Then imagine changing the load simply by dragging a task from one work center to another. And then - imagine the scheduling tool immediately telling you what the impact of that move was!
PlanetTogether’s Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS) does all of this and more, in an easy to learn, easy to use, manner. It will visually alert you to changing conditions, to production orders behind schedule, and to capacity issues. It can even reschedule tasks automatically if materials are not available (alerting you to the change, of course).
It is easy to identify the efficiencies APS will bring to your planners - and to your production floor.
Integration
Dynamics NAV is a powerful ERP application with a set of development tools we can use to enhance your efficiency. Many of our recent projects have focused on integrating NAV with other business systems, such as patient history for billing, customized web store for sales order processing, and electronic data interchange (EDI) service to reduce data entry and improve customer communication.
If your current system requires hours of manual data entry to keep synchronized with Dynamics NAV, call us to discuss how we can help you streamline and integrate efficiently.
All of the tools mentioned above are surprisingly affordable with a clear return on investment, and they can be implemented quickly. If you would like to learn more, or see a demonstration, please contact Mike Packard, Integrated Computer Systems Support, at 425-284-5426 or mikep@ics-support.com.
Dynamics NAV is a powerful ERP application with a set of development tools we can put to work for you to enhance your efficiency.