Some pre-sales questions - can everyone help?

Hello everyone,

I’ve been looking around for an ERP solution for my company. I’ve been through a demo by one vendor but would like to seek more opinions. My company distributes equipment from Europe to Asian firms. We currently do not manufacture, neither do we have plans to do so in the next 20 or so years.

I was wondering if current users could share what they like and dislike about the software.

In addition, could someone advise me on the following (I know this involves the nitty-gritty but they will make a huge difference to me):

  1. Is there a function for us to export a sales order / proforma into Microsoft Word / Excel for further editing - such as adding additional lines of information, pictures, tables to organize the previous two items?
  2. On point 1, is it actually possible to attach pictures of what we are quoting in NAV itself adnd have it appear on the generated proforma / sales order?
  3. Is there a function to associate external files (Word, Excel documents, PDF) to individual items, transaction documents? (I’m referring to something like the ‘Attach’ function in Ms Outlook, not hyperlinking as some have mentioned here)

It would be great if any of you could provide some screenshots to elaborate your points.

Thanks a lot in advance.

  1. Yes and No. In the NAV 2009 Role Tailored Client you can export to Work and/or Excel, but if I remember correctly you can no longer use Style Sheets (customized templates, essentially) for that. So it’s sort of a “you get what you get”. This could of course be customized for your company by the developers at your NAV partner.

  2. Yes

  3. Yes, they are called Record Links. It is common to have a file share somewhere on your network and place all of the files in that one location. You can then link them in the database so that it stores the path to these files, but not the actual files itself. You could store the actual files in NAV, but your database would grow rather quickly.

There is a demo version of NAV available on MSDN. I would encourage you to download it and play around a little bit to see what you can find out.

You can also customise the product to fullfill you needs.

Good day Matt,

I test-drove the trial but was not able to find the features which you mentioned. Could I trouble you to give me some directions on where I should look?

One question - are they available in the basic package or is additional customization required?

I’ll continue searching in any case.

Thanks.

Hi Calvin,

The functions that Matt is suggesting is standard in the role tailored client whenever you stand on a data card or list, if you click on Actions and Send To. Here you can send it to either an email (as HTML), or Word or Excel.

But if you take a report, then if you instead of printing it to the printer, then just selects preview, then you have the option of exporting to either an PDF file or Excel document. That’s also standard.

Besides that you have a migration tool, from where you can export any data table from the system to an XML file or Excel, in the same way as you can use it to import data into the same tables. Without needing a developer for that, although it is not required to be used for all tables (such as orders and posted documents). That’s also standard.

Finally there is a lot of additional add-on tools which can help you further, for example a complete Business Intelligence - business warehouse solution to integrate with the rest of your company’s databases.

Good day Erik,

I tried looking for the options you described in the demo version but was unable to find them. When I select Preview, only a preview of the sales quote is displayed with no option to export. Right clicking only yields the zoom option. When I tried to Print, the only “printers” available were ‘Microsoft XPS Document Viewer’ and ‘OneNote 2007’.

Could it be that Ms Office was not installed on the demo machine?