Dynamics Top Add-Ons

  Over the last three years we have established a list of the Top Add-Ons within Microsoft Dynamics. This has been based on a number of criteria, including a secret shopper exercise, which has enabled us to gain a fantastic insight into the effectiveness of the Add-Ons in the Microsoft Dynamics Channel. Whilst it can be suggested that a hedge fund will have different requirements from a health authority, and therefore the needs from an Add-On will be different means that for end users there are a number of requirements that are germane to all businesses. Value for Money Ease of implementation Product support The increase in effectiveness due to use of the Add-On Simplicity of integration Add-On Functionality Number of installations These are the main criteria and the remaining elements that make up the final list are Client Recommendations, DynamicsWorld Popularity, Certified for Microsoft Dynamics and our networks Secret Shopper Profiling. So there will be a vote but please remember the list of criteria as you make your choices. The voting procedure will begin in October and run for 4 weeks and the results will be announced in November and December The Top Add-Ons will be for Dynamics AX Dynamics CRM Dynamics GP Dynamics NAV Dynamics Retail Dynamics SL BI Sharepoint Nominations from our network can be found at http://www.dynamicsworld.co.uk/addonnomination/ You can find last year’s Top Add-Ons http://www.dynamicsworld.co.uk/top-add-ons/ should you need ideas. To begin with we do need your nominations, if you can nominate your preferred Add-Ons with reasons why they should be considered to chris@dynamicsworld.co.uk

Interview With Ben Grech

Ben Grech 2011 Ben has been working in the IT industry for the last 13 years. He has designed, consulted, managed, implemented and supported various system roll outs for multinational companies including Safeway Stores, FujiFilm, Demajo Group, Microsoft, and Phonak. How many years have you been a Dynamics VAR / ISV? I have been in Dynamics for the 11 years+, having working on different versions of MS NAV and also MS Retail Management System. I was fortunate to implement NAV in different countries across a range of industries. Why should an end user purchase Microsoft Dynamics? The track record of the Microsoft Dynamics products speaks for itself, before and after Microsoft started acquisitions. They are very trusted, stable systems which steadily continue to deliver solid business benefits to the end users coupled up with operational cost savings. And with the innovations which came about, and still to come around in the system platforms and UX areas, I’m sure things will get more interesting, both for partners and for end users.   What has been your biggest success within Microsoft Dynamics? Two big successes come to mind right now. One of them was when I start off a Dynamics NAV Division in a software house I work for 8 years, to end up having built and trained a good number of Developers, Consultants & PMs. Another one is when together with a team of Consultants and Industry Experts we build a product (a NAV vertical) which was rolled out in different countries, and was fantastic seeing the product performing exceptionally well and delivering the benefits. What is the biggest competitive advantage you have added to a client? I had a egaming/ebetting customer and we had to build a complex billing engine for them. It was a great challenge due to the amount of billing exceptions, but when we delivered and implemented the finished product, the client was able to process the billing cycle in less than 4 hours, whilst before it used to take around 200hrs processing, also risk having human errors. And no matter how many customers they were adding to the system, the billing cycle processing time was still very contained. Another big competitive advantage was interfacing NAV with SAP for Order/Delivery/Invoice Processing including product attributes configurations…..it was an amazing experience, apart from the long nights at work!! But the process streamlining and subsequent gains were well worth it!!! How can a client best maximise Microsoft Dynamics? First you have to look at your processes and make them lean. Sometimes people forget about the KISS concept (Keep It Simple) and make their systems unnecessarily complicated. If there is a strong case to have a complex process, then let it be, if its delivering the required benefit. But complex processes require more investment in customisations, training etc, and people should ask themselves if the complexity is really necessary. To maximize on your Dynamics Investment, people should focus on simplifying their core operations, and automating most of them, so you let …

Interview With Derek Warburton

Derek Warburton May 2011 Derek Warburton; TenDigits Vice President, Sales. He is responsible for developing and executing the corporate sales strategy, including growing and managing the sales teams in support of corporate growth plans. How many years have you been a Dynamics VAR / ISV? TenDigits has been Dynamics CRM ISV for 7 years. During that time, we’ve been 100% focused on delivering robust mobility solutions for Dynamics CRM. It’s all we do. Many customers and partners have said that we were ahead of the curve as the market demand for Dynamics CRM (and by extension, mobility for CRM) 6 or 7 years ago was not that great. Our R&D and customer experience from those early days, has served us very well though, as our products a now very mature and comprehensive. It’s great that we got in this game early, as it’s allowed us to stay far ahead of the new entrants into the space. Why should an end user purchase Microsoft Dynamics CRM? With respect to Dynamics CRM, Microsoft has done a great job with recent versions and especially CRM 2011 to provide a world class CRM offering that is highly adaptable and configurable compared to others, relatively cost effective to implement and maintain, all for a fraction of the cost of similar caliber CRM systems. If that’s not enough, the integration with Outlook is far superior to that of other CRM’s. What has been your biggest success within Microsoft Dynamics? The best successes are when we win in tandem with a Dynamics VAR and/or Microsoft. A great example of this is from a little over a year ago. Microsoft and a Dynamics CRM VAR were competing against SalesForce for a 6000 seat CRM deal. Mobility was a key requirement and SalesForce brought in their CEO who told the customer the reason to go with is offering was that the mobility solution for Dynamics CRM was weak. Microsoft and the VAR called TenDigits for help. Within a few days, we illustrated to the senior executives at the customer that the TenDigits Mobile CRM solution was in fact far superior to the SalesForce mobility solution, and a much better fit for their business requirements. This became a key turning point in the sales cycle, causing SalesForce to be quickly ruled out as a potential vendor choice, and leading to a collective a win for Microsoft, the VAR and TenDigits. What is the biggest competitive advantage you have added to a client? With HealthSouth http://www.healthsouth.com/ , a multi-billion $ US based healthcare company, their use of Dynamics CRM combined with the TenDigits Mobility solution, has allowed them to re-engineer a critical business process. In the US, healthcare is private (not run by the government), and healthcare companies compete for customers (patients). They had a need to improve the process by which their 1000 Patient Liaisons (effectively sales staff) accessed and updated patient information, to ensure they get referred to the appropriate rehabilitation healthcare facility and doctors. The business process was quite manual, and was costing the company significant money, while at the same time negatively impacting the effectiveness of and efficiency of …

Hosting Dynamics

Why Hosting? The IT industry is nothing if not predictably unpredictable. The predictable part of the IT industry is that it is by its very nature revolutionary and these revolutions take place every decade. Be it the switch from mainframes to thin clients to achieve better firmware capabilities like virtualisation, and the operating system were carefully designed to achieve very high processor utilizations and fast response times to high volume transactions, as well as very high reliability, Or the amount of information available that is now available to companies as data has meant there have been advances in data storage, transmission and processing have transformed Business Intelligence and Customer Intelligence from a consultancy led industry to a staple of every SME. What is unpredictable is what will be the next revolution, it would have been impossible to predict that the rise of social media would allow companies to capture data from those that are not even clients and to integrate this within Dynamics CRM. But we now stand on the cusp of the next revolution in ERP, which for once is predictable. The successful move into Cloud-based CRM is the use of Internet technology to deliver a software solution for data management. Has shown the way the thinking has always been that a CRM system should embrace data that includes all your business activity past, present and future which for most companies means your customers and clients and all your sales prospects and leads. A CRM system should enable the client to be able to have an easy way to access all of this information. If you think about it this from a logical stand point all of this information should to a lesser or greater extend also be present in your ERP system. While most clients do not utilise an ERP system to monitor and access sales prospects or leads the business activity will exist in an ERP system. So if the cloud works for CRM then it will work for ERP. Microsoft Dynamics CRM has the advantage that when used as a cloud based solution it seamlessly fits in with the clients existing systems like Office, SharePoint and LINQ. The same can be said of Dynamics AX 2012 and the soon to be released Dynamics NAV The benefits of the cloud are numerous and when set against the on premise alternative the majority of them are financial, by ensuring that the start-costs are reduced without the need for upfront licences or hardware investment, this has the advantage that because the hosting partner will be responsible for hardware investment you will be able to ensure that your hosting partner will invest in the latest hardware ensuring you have the advantages that this entails. You also have that advantage that you will be able to utilise one of the prime advantages that of scalability that fits to your organisations exact needs and can be adjusted as your needs change. There have been fears in the past that security can be …

Emperor’s New Clothes

Talent Management Software – Emperor’s New Clothes. There are few software revolutions that have so patently been an obvious case of The Emperor’s New Clothes. That of Talent Management is a phrase that in 2011 has even trended on Twitter, yet in 2009 was still seen as being a “good man manager”. In recent months we have seen major ERP and CRM players talking up Human Capital Management. But what is Human Capital Management – it is employee and talent management software, or to the uniformed smart HR functions trying to establish a metric for the perfect employee!! The acquisition of SuccessForce by SAP for $3.4bn and SalesForce’s multimillion dollar purchase of Rypple shows it is time to assess what the reason for this is. Rypple is a social performance management tool which helps managers track employee performance. One of the key areas of Rypple is to award “badges” for employees. Now whilst it is possible that a gold star from a teacher can be rewarding for a 5 year old at school, using it in what is little more than an updated version of an intranet should not motivate employees, nor be thought to. In a recent study it was shown that employees in firms that utilised talent management software accessed these tools on average for 2 hours a week. If that is true a more effective management tool would be for managers to give these employees the 2 hours off instead, now that would motivate everyone. It might be considered an old fashioned view but surely the most social tool that a manager can use to assess the effectiveness of their team is a conversation, or even an actual face to face meeting. It is difficult to remember when we stopped thinking about employees as individual and started to think of them as a homogenised group where everyone works in the same way and for the same reason. We have all worked for some companies where we have been more or less successful and when recruiting the decision between 2 equally talented individuals will all come down to that most intangible elements that of who will be the best “fit”. This is something that skilled HR Managers can spend years developing a sense for; this is not something that a software tool can help you with. In larger organisations it is clearly true that career paths and monitoring those in the organisation can be tricky and directors can be seen as distant. This though can be achieved successfully by implementing management structures. In the Roman Empire Centurions were in charge of 83 men, 2000 years later Regimental Sergeant Majors look after more than 500 men. Over time we are meant to have become better at managing and understanding the welfare of those that work for us. If you want to monitor an employee the tools already exist. In a sales company a CRM system can monitor, calls made, the sales pipeline and number of new leads created. A …

2012 Dynamics Predictions

- By James Burke January 2012 Year of the Dragon, the Cloud, Retail, Mobile and the Add-off.   2012 is the Chinese Year of The Dragon, and after several Mother-in-Law jokes failed to get me any laughs from the wife, and saw me relegated to below the cats and goldfish in the pecking order at home I decided to suspend by fledgling career as a stand-up comedian and try something else instead, such as predicting what 2012 had in store.   I’ve always shied away from making predictions for the year ahead when I talk about Microsoft Dynamics as I fear I fall into the familiar trap of seeking out too much evidence for my hunches and end up merely forecasting.  This year though I’ve decided to take the plunge.  Naturally I’m not claiming to have a crystal ball to hand – because if I had I’d be playing next weeks lottery instead of musing on what 2012 holds in store for the channel – instead for once I’m going to go with my hunches and hope that if I’m wrong everyone will have forgotten what I said when we reach December.   Not The Cloud again! I know it’s hardly a prediction or indeed a forecast for me to climb upon my current hobby-horse and sing the Clouds praises for the coming year, but as AX 2012 is upon us and NAV 7 just around the corner I have been giving it more thought than usual, if that’s possible.  There is no doubt that its going to grow this year, however, VARs are still uncomfortable with the whole thing for several reasons and but I really can’t see Microsoft hanging around waiting for them to come on-board or relying just on hosting companies to evangelise for hosted Dynamics ERP.  My prediction is that while everyone waits to see who blinks first, and for the larger customers to stop thinking it and actually get on with it, Microsoft will focus on the lower end of the market where most of the activity is at the moment. Commensus have already produced a top solution and a rock bottom price for hosting Dynamics AX and now it only needs Microsoft to offer smaller customers either existing on-premise or new ones a deal on hosted licenses they will find hard to refuse.  But, while I’m not sure if any significant Microsoft Dynamics customer will park their ERP in the Cloud this year – at least not fully –  I do think Microsoft will hoover up a lot of small businesses, focusing on giving them a successful value for money hosted solution and then hold them up as an example to larger fish.  Sometime this year some VARs are going to blink first and decide that making a grab for market share will compensate for customers moving to the cloud, and then the fun and games will begin.      Retail sneaked in under the radar last year, according to most news outlets since …

Every time you write a line of C/AL

Every time you write a line of C/AL a fluffy kitten dies.   IF <I write C/AL code> THEN <Fluffy Kitten Dies> [ELSE <Fluffy Kitten Lives>] My plea to you all in this article is to stop what you are doing. Lay down your keyboards and sit a while to contemplate. OK, no fluffy kittens are really going to suffer, but the time has come to take stock and ponder a life in which no NAV add-ons are written in C/AL. All those hundreds of applications (anyone remember when they used to print a catalogue? – throw that at a passing feline and it would feel something), all those versions to support and test and upgrade. Sometimes looking at a customer’s Object Designer screen was like visiting 9 million-range purgatory. Microsoft has contributed fully in making add-on reality maddeningly confusing: frequently changing the licensing; changing the rules behind reselling add-ons and not telling anyone; asking you to fill in the world’s most obtuse spreadsheet in order to get your objects; printing all the instructions in Danglish. Oh, how we chuckled! In one case I know of it took over a year for a partner to get their objects, and when they finally did they realised that the number sequence issued wasn’t going to be big enough to accommodate V2  – so they had to re-apply and re-number the lot!  Such mirth! Oh, and then of course we took away forms, and reports, and matrices etc etc. Now, I have nothing to sell here, I merely offer my observations of talking to happy and unhappy customer s and VAR’s/ ISV’s over the last six months.  Hopefully I will provoke some debate and comment. My thanks to those who have given generously of their opinions (hey, this is NAV, what did you expect), and if I plagiarise your thoughts, remember the wise words of Tom Lehrer – you say plagiarise, I say “research”. What I look forward to is a world in which all the finest add-ons sit outside of NAV, written in C# or some such, connecting beautifully through web services and the RTC client, when that is necessary.  As time progresses (and we know that all the NAV proprietary pieces are unlikely to be developed further) NAV ISV’s are in danger of falling further behind. Look at the attempts to provide iPad apps – building from NAV tables out, and producing dull apps that nobody wants. Look at the multitude of time and expense recording systems out there – none of them as good as the industry’s best. Look at payroll – oh woe is me look at payroll. Look at procurement, demand management, workflow (!!), BI, mobile apps… I could go on. But there is light at the end of this tunnel. Before Christmas I was in North Dakota looking at a world-class, popular and growing practice management suite being sold and developed by a NAV reseller. No kittens had been harmed in its production. NAV itself sat unmolested …

HostedAX for £50

The future is bright the future is £50 The start of the Microsoft Dynamics Hosted AX revolution is beginning with what could be the best value for money for any ERP platform. The ERP environment is rapidly changing, moving away from the traditional server-based IT model towards a virtual environment accessed through the internet. The 2 key areas of concern have always been reliability and security, and through the delivery of a private cloud, and advances in Cloud Enterprise Services, these areas have been quashed. The private cloud now offers those that migrate a faster more secure and reliable way of computing. The delivery of those that have previously chosen to host their internal server infrastructure have already taken advantage of the chance to minimise waste and have shown the advantages that can be gained from hosting Microsoft Exchange Servers, Microsoft SQL Servers and Microsoft Sharepoint Servers so what is it that has stopped those same end users from hosting AX. It might just be that there has been a lack of understanding of the benefits. A private cloud enables the end user to have their physical servers virtualised into a private and dedicated environment. This is seamless and offers a guaranteed uptime. But the biggest change is that of the costing. It is now possible using Dynamics AX 2012 Hosted for an end user to reduce the cost of ownership dramatically. A 100 user site can now reduce the cost of the licence substantially OnPremise v Hosted Monthly Cost Annual Cost Upfront Cost Maintenance Plan AX 2012 OnPremise £160 000 £25 600 AX 2012 Hosted £50 per user per month £60 000 £4500 So with the potential to deliver Dynamics AX as a hosted solution for just £50 a month per user this has to be the an incredible effort on behalf of Microsoft and the hosting partners to be able to deliver a truly affordable ERP Platform for today’s financially impoverished times. Hosted v OnPremise Monthly Cost Annual Costs UpFront Costs Maintenance Plan SAP £216 000 £32 400 Oracle £220 000 £44 000 Dynamics AX £50 per user per month £60 000 £4 500 But it is against the ERP competition that Dynamics AX 2012 Hosted comes into its own A client choosing Dynamics AX 2012 Hosted over Oracle now has a simple task, over the first 3 years they can spend a total of £208 800 against £352 000 in fact it would be take 10 years for the total licence cost of Dynamics AX 2012 Hosted to be more expensive and that is without taking into consideration the value of saving the upfront costs to the end client. This is a massive step change in the ERP market, one in which Microsoft have nailed their flag to the mast, they clearly want to increase market share and the battlefield they have chosen is that of price. At DynamicsWorld we are talking with Microsoft and Hosting partners about how to assist in the delivery of private clouds …

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