I have heard alot about the new features of V3.6, but nothing about what has been left out. Rumour has it that the usage based granule is no longer available in V3.6, can anyone confirm this. If this is true what do people who are using it do now, especially if we want to upgrade to V3.6[:(!]???
Hi Derek I have a memory of the UBP granule originally being a 3rd party product that Navision integrated in NAD, then when they chose to integrate NAD into Navision 3.60 I believe they announced that this would be reverting to a third party product and would not be a core offering of 3.60. However, I cannot find any information to back-up my memory, so I could be talking utter rubbish, but it may also jog other isers memories. Apologies now if I have mislead you completely [:I]
Afraid I have to concur with Steve - don’t think it is any longer a core offering. …Can only imagine that despite it being a good module, that there was never much uptake in license sales and they couldn’t justify integration into the 3.6 environment. Shame - would have been nice to see a cut down version. Never had a customer ask for full blown UBP but often want related areas such as setting minimum stock levels based on turnover rates, setting budgets based on historical sales - that sort of thing. Couple of years since I worked with UBP so struggling to remember all that functionality…the joys of erratics and seasonal balancing…
Hi Adam As well as the level of uptake I also think it was the complete diversity of requirements, floodgates principle I suppose that they have now tried to block. Do you remember what they said about existing customers? I remember some glib comment about your NSC supporting you and then support received via the third party.
Don’t wish to sound glib Steve, but having never sold it, upgrading and supporting it is one thing I won’t have to worry about.
To all… UBP is being created and supported by the same team that originally created UBP for Adv. Distribution 2.5 and 2.6. Lanham and Associates will be releasing this for Attain 3.6 shortly. For more info go to http://www.lanhamassoc.com to get the scoop. As far as support goes, very few NTRs really had the ability to effectively support UBP originally and still had to go back to the Lanham team to get the specific answers. So really…nothing has changed here. Besides in the mind of Navision, there really weren’t that many UBP sales anyway, so supporting it wasn’t really a big issue
As an NSC who did sell UBP and supported it, we and the end user found it very limited and very buggy (they still exist). The end user had considerable on another product which also used a Graham-based UBP program; we found that it followed the Gordon Graham model in a general sense (although not completely)and it was very limited in how it could be used. Also, because there was no easy way to eliminate the effects of of such actions as item promotions, closeouts, etc. It was also EXTREMELY slow and locked multiple tables during the processing. Because this site had to process every day, because of these problems, the program was started at 2:00 a.m. to do the daily routines. Monthly routines ran the entire weekend. This was all done on the fastest equipment available at the time. Gordon Graham is only one of several UBP models in general use and if the problems noted above are cured in 3.60 AND the business environment is appropriate for the model (and the available features), then this might be a viable option.
Allen, I agree 100% with your statements. You’ve probably got as much experience and problem solving time invested in this granule as anyone in the Navision family. So everyone please take Allen’s recommendations of caution with this add-on. It’s my understanding…and I haven’t tested this with the product…that the 3.60 add-on version of UBP has addressed these issues and actually been virtually an entire re-write. Now I know we’ve all heard this before and the proof is in the pudding.