This week's MVP is Mark Polino from Florida who is currently a senior consultant with I.B.I.S where he is one of the leading exponents of Dynamics GP and writes http://msdynamicsgp.blogspot.com/.

 

 

My first job working with Dynamics was with Darden Restaurants in 1999. Darden owns and operates Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants, among others, and was implementing Great Plains eEnterprise (the predecessor to Dynamics GP) for a portion of their business. I was hired as the accounting supervisor for that portion of the business and joined just as the implementation was starting. We had a short 4 month deadline due to Y2K constraints and with a huge collaborative effort we made it.

 

 

A number of really great consultants have influenced my career. Michael Johnson gave me a terrific core set of GP skills. Curtis Beebe and Dwight Specht gave me the opportunity to pursue those skills as a consultant not once but twice, and even today one of my colleagues, Ross Carlson, continuously pushes me to learn more.

 

 

One of my favorite achievements in Microsoft Dynamics is helping to broaden the Dynamics community. When I started blogging four years ago, there were only a few Dynamics GP blogs and their postings were pretty sporadic. My goal was to consistently provide value to users. Now there is this huge community that I can barely keep up with. Users now have more resources available than ever to get most from their Dynamics solution.

 

 

Microsoft has brought huge recognition and respect to the Dynamics community. The power of the Microsoft brand makes people consider at the Dynamics solutions. Companies can't ignore Dynamics because of that Microsoft name. Developers look at the solutions to extend the Microsoft skills they already have. The Microsoft name lifts the Dynamics solutions up out of a crowd of middle market options. User get to be part of the much larger Microsoft community with all of the existing support not just for the Dynamics solutions but for the related products like SQL Server and Microsoft Office.

 

 

I think the question should be why a user wouldn’t select a Microsoft Dynamics solution. Users get a great solution, an undeniably solid company behind it, fantastic communities for free support, boatloads of ongoing development money, extremely deep partners for implementation and strong links to the duct tape of every company, Microsoft Office.

 

 

The biggest challenges facing Microsoft Dynamics are still branding and recognition issues around the multiple Dynamics products. Microsoft has done a great job of raising the awareness of the Dynamics brand but they've done a poor job of differentiation among the individual Dynamics products. There is also a problem with positioning. The gap that the Dynamics ERP systems exist in between Quickbooks and SAP is huge. The companies in that space are more diverse than Fortune 100 or very small firms and Microsoft needs to better define it's positioning in the middle.

 

Personally, I would love to see a catch up release that fills in some of the gaps that each product has. Everyone has workarounds for these items and economically it makes no sense but that doesn't mean that I can't dream. I would also like to see some consolidation of products. Four ERP systems is too many but the marketplace gets crazy when it senses that one of the four might emerge as a "winner". I think ultimately two systems would be better. I could see positioning two systems as either upper market and lower market or service vs. manufacturing with plenty of overlap in the middle. It has to be hard spending development money on four ERP systems. I do appreciate Microsoft's slow movement on this though. I think ultimately it helps reassure clients about the longevity of their solution.