Microsoft Dynamics NAV News & Tips
Making Hay While Clouds Loom: Preparing Your Business to Grow When the Economic Storm Blows Over

You put your heart and soul into your work and business and you are accustomed to facing challenges. It’s clearly time to batten down the hatches and weather the storm. But what are you doing underneath those hatches to ensure that your business will be in a position to grow when the storm blows over?

Right now you should be:

• Conserving cash
• Reducing inventory
• Reaching out to customers

And a thousand other things you know how to do better than we do.

What we do know is that Microsoft Dynamics NAV can assist you with these tasks in ways you probably haven’t thought of before.

1. Make Management Dashboards Work for Your Business

Well run companies typically have only 3-4 key indicators to monitor performance, but condensing the data to produce these indicators can take hours. Because of this, many business owners simply forego daily monitoring in favor of a weekly or even monthly review. With the emphasis on cash flow, production, customer service, and inventory required in today’s environments, getting these indicators in a timely manner is paramount. Microsoft Dynamics NAV offers several great tools to report on these metrics:

Native NAV Reports
Depending on the complexity of your indicators, you may already have the tools at hand. The native Dynamics NAV report writer is a powerful tool for crunching Dynamics NAV data. If you do not require visual cues, and can evaluate a more data-focused presentation, the native report writer can be used to create exceptional performance reports.

Jet Reports
For automated reports, data, and visual cues, Jet Reports is an excellent business intelligence tool that also utilizes a familiar interface (Microsoft Excel). Jet Reports can be scheduled to run periodically and be sent electronically, via email, to all required parties. Details can also be provided via drill-down from within Excel.

Business Intelligence
For real-time graphical reporting, including drill-down functionality, there are several business intelligence solutions available from Microsoft that integrate with Dynamics NAV. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) serves as the foundation for business intelligence and then there are many great tools that leverage SSRS. These tools produce graphically rich dashboards to present the information in almost any format you require. In addition, the data can easily be manipulated for “what if” scenarios.

2. Increase Cash Flow with Tighter Receivables Management

A 3 day reduction in Accounts Receivable balances (a very reasonable and achievable target) will generate $5,000 in cash flow for every $1 million in revenue. Thus, simply by making receivables management a priority, a $10 million dollar company should be able to generate $50,000 in cash flow. The Collections Management Solution for Dynamics NAV enables this process with a simple and elegant solution that takes only a few hours to implement and learn.

3. Improve Inventory Forecasting by Adjusting Your Average Usage Formula

Many businesses saw extreme sales declines in your product lines last fall. If your forecast model uses an average usage in its calculation, you may want to revisit the formula. If the average usage has a time period that extends back prior to that decline, it is most likely generating unnecessarily high forecasts. Instead, consider using a temporary usage formula going back only as far as the decline. Better yet, average the averages of a decreasing period from the sales decline (i.e., average (4 month usage, 3 month usage, 2 month usage)). If your forecasting algorithms require more sophistication than the simple scenario illustrated above, there are ready-made solutions available for NAV to address much more complex demand forecasting requirements.

4. Take Time to Consider What You'll Need in Recovery

Now is also the time to look at your existing systems to determine what works, what doesn’t, what’s unwieldy, and what’s a little thin. Take a good hard look at your business processes and strategize on what you’ll need to respond to the recovery. Here are some areas to be watchful of:

Eliminate Isolated Islands of Information to Increase Efficiency
Microsoft Excel is an amazing tool and is likely used in every organization. With its simple-to-use interface, graphical capabilities, and performance, it’s easy to understand why some companies build entire business management systems in it.

Microsoft Access is another fantastic tool and makes it very easy to build simple, yet powerful database applications.

A number of other tools exist today to help with personal or departmental productivity. Some of these run on-premise and increasingly, many of them run “on-demand” as a hosted, on-line application.

Over time, many businesses will unwittingly develop an excessive number of applications with these tools and become over-reliant on them. The problem is that these tools do not have the built-in integrity, the checks and balances business processes require, to bet your business on. Additionally, these “islands” hinder efficiency because the same data may need to be entered, often manually, into many different systems and conversely, compiling the data from all of these systems to support timely decision making may require genuinely heroic efforts.

Signs you may be too dependent on these systems:

1. Management reports utilize data from more than one of these systems.
2. Your employees rely more on the companion system than your business system.
3. Companion systems duplicate what your business system already does.
4. The companion system was created to “correct” your business system.

Implement Warehouse Management Systems to Increase Productivity and Customer Service
Remember just 6-8 months ago when you were so busy fulfilling orders you couldn’t imagine taking the time to reorganize your warehouse for optimal storage and picking?

How many missed opportunities did you have because you couldn’t find the inventory your system was telling you was there? What is your inventory accuracy, customer service level, and write offs?

Now might be an ideal time to consider a warehouse management system to fully automate your warehouse, receiving, and picking operations. It is not unusual to experience a 20% increase in productivity and a 10% or better increase in customer service levels - even after reducing inventory - upon implementing a WMS system. And the best part…no more physical inventory counts (well, maybe one)! Every situation is different, but an 18-24 month return is often achievable.

Replace Aging Systems to Transform Your Functionality
Now is also an excellent time to consider upgrading your system. If you are concerned that an existing business system may not start tomorrow or that your support personnel have become unfamiliar with your particular “version,” you may want to consider an upgrade or a change altogether.

Business systems like Microsoft Dynamics NAV offer more functionality and technology than ever before, including hundreds of industry-specific applications. Some of the more interesting improvements include:

• Web Services - extend or connect Microsoft Dynamics NAV to your Internet-enabled applications, or simply share data and validation rules with other in-house systems.
• Mobile Applications - extend your business application to your mobile workforce, such as field representatives, through their mobile phones!
• Workflow Management - let Microsoft Dynamics NAV manage your processes, alerting you only when tasks are past due. Managing by exception is one of the greatest benefits a business management system can provide.
• Internal notifications - communicate with others about specific transactions.

5. Be Ready to Pass Through the Eye of the Storm

There’s no doubt this is the biggest economic storm in memory, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop working on your business. Time will tell, but perhaps we’re just in the eye of an expansion and business will once again become the hurricane it was just a short time ago. To ensure that you are poised for growth in the aftermath, or the eye if you are an optimist, review your systems now and let’s discuss your requirements.

We also work with a number of consultants in the area of distribution and supply chain management, manufacturing, and IT strategy. Resources such as these can provide significant value in new theories and best practices, and provide a clear direction for your project.

For additional information or to schedule a meeting, please contact Mike Packard, Integrated Computer Systems Support at mikep@ics-support.com.

 

Microsoft’s vision for business intelligence is to help businesses perform better by enabling all decision makers - essentially all employees - to make better decisions.