Microsoft Great Plains Jewelry ? Implementation & Customization Overview

Each Industry and market niche has business specific and unique requirements to ERP/Accounting System. Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains is ERP platform, ready for third party modules additions and customizations, plus being SQL Server-based system it opens you wide spectrum of integration options and tools. In this small article we'll give you Microsoft Great Plains implementation and setup highlights, typical for Jewelry retail network.

? Fixed Assets. Jewelry retailer owns the network of jewelry retail outlets and each one has relatively expensive set of fixed assets: counters, holders, computers, etc. Company has to track each individual Fixed Asset item and depreciate it accordingly: for IRS, State and probably several internal company management accounting depreciation scenarios and methods: straight line, DDB, etc. Due to the fact of reselling precision metals: gold, silver, gem stones and diamonds ? you should expect regular audit from IRS and State authorities. Depreciation plays substantial portion of company's non-cash expenses and so should be 100% accurate. Additional challenges ? bonus depreciation, introduced several years ago. Plus you must have comprehensive reporting on FA locations by store and region.

? EDI purchasing. In Great Plains you should be able to order your inventory via Electronic Document Interchange (EDI) mechanism. You have multiple options to realize EDI ? the simplest would be Purchase Order creation in Great Plains Purchase Order Processing/Receiving module and then exporting them into text EDI-fixed-length compliant format. This text file should be forwarded to your supplier and in Great Plains POP you set flags for POs being sent to your vendor

? Retail Management System integration. In the case when you use Microsoft RMS Store Operations and Headquarters ? you should consider seamless integration of your daily transactions into Microsoft Great Plains Sales Order Processing (SOP) or Receivables Management (RM) modules. The integration is realized as a set of MS SQL Server stored procedures. The other way would be implement both Purchasing and Inventory count on RMS Store Operations/Headquarters level and integrate General Ledger transactions only. If you have only one Great Plains Company ? you can deploy RMS->GP integration utility, coming to you with RMS purchase and support CDs.

? Reporting. In both cases ? Great Plains and RMS compliance reporting should be realized in Crystal Reports and the best way and design style is creating SQL views and stored procedures and basing report on these views and procs.

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Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), serving Microsoft Great Plains, CRM, Navision to mid-size and large clients in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan