Taking Navision to it's limits

We are currently looking into installing Navision (version 3.70) with one of our bigger subsidiaries, but are a little uncertain about the performance. We are talking about:

  • 2.5 million CRM contacts
  • 800000 active customers
  • 5000 CRM interactions a day
  • 100 simultainius call center users
  • 1000 sales ordres per day
    I would like to hear all your experience with such large installations. Have anyone tried it? Succesfully? Is it unrealistic or must we just buy the best of the best hardware available? Should we forget about Navision? I’m eager to hear from you.

Hi Erik, I know that there are some perfomance issues regarding WMS. The 1000 salesorder that you mention, are the going to be booked throught the WMS module as well, and how many saleslines do you expect? Last question, is this going to be a Native or SQL DB?

Yes we are considering the WMS. The 1000 SO’s have an averrage of 2 lines each. We use MS SQL 2000.

Hi Erik, About 2 lines each, is that the same as 2 WMS entries, or like 2 lines with 10000 items, that are going to be shipped individually. I ask, because Navision has warned for implementations with WMS with large number of orderlines. I don’t think this is a issue. Keep us posted…

It’s a lot och customers and contacts, but the number of orderlines isn’t that high in my opinion. WMS and a lot of dimensions might slow it down though. In terms of data growth there should be plenty of installations out there which is bigger. You might think about reports and such which loops customers or contacts. These might take a while to run with that number och records. Just remember to bye a lot of HW. I think You should start thinking in terms of 4xZeon, 4Gb RAM, One controller for each channel and a LOT of 15k rpm disks.

Lars, If you say there are a lot of installations “out there which is bigger”, then couldn’t you tell a little more about them? Do you know of any NSC’s who are experts at with big CRM installations?

Nop. But i’ve read about them on this forum[:)]

Erik, Lars, we have a customer with over 1.2 million contacts and 600.000 customers. Benchmarks showed that, in a situation on SQL and with enough hardware (not extraordinary), all 600.000 where invoiced within 40 hours, which is enough to run during the weekend. The amount of relationships won’t be the issue I was told if your key setttings and indexings are allright. Regarding the interactions: with recordlocking (SQL) in stead of tablelocking (Navtive) and the back of my head, i presume that this won’t be an issue too. It will not happen very often that your employees will be modifying the same data, as an interaction is a personal thing…

Peter, How much campaign management are they doing currently? How many daily interactions? How many concurrent users? And what is “not extraordinary” hardware?

Erik, the data consuming and adding is unfortunately hard to say because they are not live yet, these were all benchmarks. But about interactions: if you are on SQL, I understood that that wouldn’t be a problem because it would be very hard that while you register an interaction, someone else will edit this interaction (is it even possible) or the information of this relation (especially because people tend to relate customers / relations to persons, thus having a contact per relation). To-do’s are also designated to persons, so I do not see any problems about that either. As for CRM, this must be possible (well, that’s my opinion). About WMS: I understood that their was some memo stating that the maximum number of orderlines able to process with exceptable performance at this moment in 3.70 SQL would be around 5000 a day. Can anyone confirm that? Our customer starts with 50 users, in a half year 70 will be added.

Does anyone have a database size calculation tool that works for 3.70 SQL? Microsoft (Navision) used to have a spread sheet to this purpose earlier!

I think a very important question to ask is where you see the growth of those figures, and how many more users you may or may not have to accomodate. Needless to say, you are certainly at the upper end of Navision’s capabilities, and I think it would be a good idea to also look at some other solutions. Staying in the family, have you looked at all at Axapta or anything like that? How much customization do you think you will be doing?

Axapta is NOT an option! Navision is implemented globally and is already running in 14 out of 17 companies. Had we started today we might have been looking at Axapta, but not now.