MultiNational Corporation ERP Implementation ? Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains

If you look back to the history, you will see that ERP for large publicly traded company had to be built upon very reliable hardware (more likely non-Intel hardware: mainframe, Sun sparc, etc.), powerful database platform: Oracle, DB2, Ingress, Sybase and reliable OS: UNIX. 10 years ago Microsoft had Windows NT first tries, plus Windows 95 was kind of revolution, but not the one to stake on for corporate users. Nowadays hardware (from Intel side), Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, WindowsXP Pro, and Microsoft SQL Server could be considered reasonably reliable plus it is certainly easier to support these products, because of the large pool of Microsoft-oriented IT professionals available Worldwide. Microsoft Business Solutions offers several lines of ERP systems: Microsoft Great Plains, Microsoft Navision, Solomon, Axapta. We don't want to state here that in the future Microsoft will be only ERP systems provider, but it certainly is and will be one of the major players on the ERP/MRP market. In this small article we'll consider the ways to implement large corporation required features in Microsoft Great Plains.

? GL Consolidation. If you do business exclusively in the USA ? you probably do not need this, however if you have to operate in the multicurrency and under multiple countries regulations ? you need this feature. European ERPs of late 1990th had this GL consolidation as separate module. Microsoft Great Plains doesn't have this feature out of the box, and you have to implement it via MS SQL Server Data Transformation package, Stored Procedure or Great Plains Dexterity customization. The alternative approach is to use Enterprise Reporting or FRx with multicurrency to provide consolidated reporting

? Internal Audit reports. Internal Auditor should be provided with reliable random selection of documents to review. Great Plains is MS SQL Server based application and if you base your Crystal Report on the stored procedure in SQL Server ? you can easily get random selection

? Intercompanies Transactions. This is probably complicated with multicurrency ? but Great Plains has the module to address this issue

? Customer/Vendor Consolidation. You might deal through agents on your local or regional markets and based on the results you pay the agent or subtract from it. This feature is covered in Customer/Vendor Consolidation module

? Multiple languages support. Great Plains had support to all the major languages in version 6.0. When Microsoft acquired Navision Software ? it staked on Navision in continental Europe and all the emerging markets (Russia, East Europe, Brazil, China). The way you implement local language or Unicode characters support ? you translate several screens for GP local users and extend Dexterity with Unicode enabling software utility.

Do your homework with regards to implementation, customization, integration and if you have issues or concerns ? we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-866-528-0577! [email protected]

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ? USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving clients in Chicago, California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, Arizona, Minnesota, UK, Australia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is CMA, Great Plains Certified Master, Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer. You can contact Andrew: [email protected]