OK, I am guessing that NSCs are no longer, so what do they call them now?
VAR?
Partners?
ISV?
MSDNSC. Microsoft Dynamics Nav Solution Center?
The Business Solutions arm is now “nearly” fully integrated to Microsoft and therefore the old NSC has to gain sufficient ranking points to be awarded “Microsoft Certified Partner” status, and if they are really good a GOLD partner status, so MCP or GMCP.
So I am an MCP at a GMCP who was an NCR at an old NSC but then I had to become a MCP (different to my other MCP) under Microsoft and another couple of exams I am a CM, or MBSCM.
Clear as mud I hope, and if it is any consolation I still refer to us as an NSC, I am having enough trouble remembering to call it Dynamics and not Navision [:D]
Money pits
If you feel that way you are with the wrong one [:D]
This is sort of what I thought. It basically means there is no differntiation between a company selling Windows XP and company selling Navision these days.
Surely this either a/ opens up Navision sales to just about any Gold Parner, or it makes it very difficult for the client to know if their partner really knows Navision.
Is this going to become a problem in the future? Selling dynamics and Implementing Dynamics are two completely diffent things, I hope we are going to have some mechanism to let end users know this.
David, from many of your posts, it seems that all though you love the product, you are not all that satisfied with the selling mechanism of Navision. As I am sure you know, I have worked in all aspects of Navision, and believe me it is very tough for NSCs to make big money in Navision, unless they really have a good plan, and a mechanism that continually creates happy customers. If you are not one of the happy customers, then it could be a problem with the overall sales process that you have been exposed to.
My experience show that of all the aspects of a Navision implementation, the most critical is the sales process. And whilst its easy to convince customers, of this; NSCs themselves never seem to see the importance of selling properly (well until they have to go in and fix up the mess of course).
From the many posts I have seen from you, I feel that your project could move a lot more smoothly, if you could sit with the Sales Manager, the Project manager, and one of the owners/senior VPs of your NSC. Do a Post Implementation Review of the system, and look at where the finally deliveries don’t make the expectations set by the sales team. Then work out a plan to get the system delivering.
Go into the meeting not to find faults, but to find a solution moving forward and ways towards a positive ROI on your investment (which I am guessing is quite substantial). Keep in mind that the NSC does not want to loose you,. and you probably don’t want to find a new NSC, so you both go into the meeting with the same objective of getting the system to deliver.
Following your posts, you are very rational in your comments, and the points you put forward make good sense. But I am disappointed that after all this time that you are still not getting results.
Good luck. (Oh and by the way, don’t forget that there are a lot of Freelancers out there these days, that can help give you a clear perspective on what you are being told.) And of course keep up your work on the forums, there just are not enough end users pushing as you are. We need more maves instead of just themave.
And after that speech, David would hand over his card and happily take your business :).
I agree though, it does sound like there were some unmet expectations there, and you have to address this with your solution center to get better results. Expensive? yes no doubt. But it should be worth every penny. If you feel you are paying too much for too little, you have to address it with your solution center and find a way tomake it better. Maybe a new solution center is the answer, maybe you will want to have an external independant review the situation.
It is not so much my solution center, as it is the whole Microsoft annual maintenance. I think it provides no value, and I feel Navision’s value is only getting weaker not stronger from an end user prospective, more on that later. When, we started in Navision in 1999, there was a maintenance fee, but I felt we got some value out of it, it was 12%, and included in the 12% fee, was a set number of hours equal to 2% of the fee at a my solution centers reduced hourly rate, that we could use for bug fixes or general programming, so each year, we at least got something out of it rather then just the right to the next version. Now, I realize that the Navision fee probably was only 10%, and the extra 2% was from the solution center, but it was an easier sale to my boss. 12% and we get so many hours of development.
Over the years since Microsoft took over our fee has increased to 16%, and there is no extra fee involved for additional work and for that we have the right to the future versions, but nothing else. And how could there be an extra charge, would you pay 18% of the license cost every year.
Now, we just finished an upgrade from 2.0c with advance distribution to 4.0. During the long process SP1 came out, we still were a few months from going live, so I wanted to see what it would take to go straight to 4.0 SP1 instead. Well my solution center wasn’t actually doing the upgrade, they were contracting out most of it to another company, (so, in a way I already have used David’s services, he just might not have know who he was doing the work for. And it was good work). Well, just to get a quote to go straight to SP1 it was going to cost me $1250 to get the quote, none of which would apply to the upgrade. My solution center was giving me a break by not marking up the quote, just passing on their cost. Their best guess was it would be an additional 7 –10k to switch and go straight to SP1, because of additional work and testing that would need to be completed. I would need to give a new database copy and basically start fresh, adding a few more months to the upgrade process. So, we stayed with the original plan and went to 4.0. Of coarse a month after going live, I came across a known bug that was fixed in SP1, a bank reconciliation error. I identified it, gave the info to my solution center. Who after going back and forth, fixed the problem at a cost of around $450. So, I pay the maintenance, I have a known issued that is identified by Microsoft, but to actually get the fix I have to pay my solution center to do it. Now, SP3 is coming out, what do thing that will cost to implement? Oh, yeah it is free because I paid the maintenance, oh but wait, I need my solution center to do it and that is not free. You say these are separate issues and the solution center needs to be paid for their time, I think it should be between Microsoft and the solution center to decide how they split the maintenance fee, and I should get the hotfixes and service packs as part of that price.
Now for the decreasing value of Navision. Our upgrade cost around 48K total, of that about 10K was additional license cost for features we had in 2.0 that were now separate granules in 4.0, for instance responsibility centers. In 2.0, you had the ability to assign users to specific departments in the user setup, and they were restricted to enter only for that department. Their sales orders and purchase orders, were all filtered by the user assigned department code. In 4.0 that is gone, the only similar thing is responsibility center at a cost of $3000. Now responsibility centers may do more then the 2.0 feature, but not much. To get useful financial statements you need advanced dimensions, and analysis views, that cost extra. There were several cases just like this, were we had something in 2.0, and now we had to license additional granules to get the same basic thing. As I look back at the 8 years of maintenance fees, 8 * (average) $15,000 = $120,000 plus the 48,000 upgrade cost. I think we were dumb to every pay maintenance past the first year. We should have paid for the application designer for $8000 and $26,000 for the solution developer granule, bought double the user licenses we thought we might need. And canceled the maintenance after the first year. That first year we should have used every resource we could to learn the program and have our solution center fix bugs we found. And then use freelancers to help fix bugs we can’t figure out, or do custom programming.
And further more, if you spend any time on this forum what you will quickly find is that Navision gets slower and slower with each new release. The biggest re-occurring problem on here is this, It started back at the 2.6 release, (probably earlier but I wasn’t using the forum before 2.0)
The theme is this:
I just upgraded from 2.0 to 2.6 and the system is so slow,
I just upgraded from 2.6 to 3.0 and the system is so slow,
I just upgraded from 3.0 to 3.6 and the system is so slow,
I just upgraded from 3.6 to 3.7 and the system is so slow.
I just upgraded from 3.7 to 4.0 and the system is so slow
I just upgraded from 4.0 to 4.0 SP1 and the system is so slow.
Now imagine what we came across going from 2.0 to 4.0, is was quite a shock, how much slower and less efficient the program is, and our database doubled in size over night, just from the conversion. That is how much bigger a 4.0 database is from a 2.0 database, I repeat doubled in size. So, there is no wonder the program is slower.
Now, I really do like Navision, I just wish I had been a little smarter when we purchased it. If we had applied $168,000 toward customizing our original 2.0 database we would have a better system them we currently have with our 4.0 database. And as far as moving to 5.0, just read David’s blog on the direction of Navision toward SQL and you will be able to guess it is not likely we will be moving to a newer version of Navision. During this last year of our paid maintenance I am doing a good study on our future user license needs and will purchase more then I think we need. In fact I will probably use the estimated $17000 in next years maintenance renewal to purchase user licenses.
One last ramble, from my perspective, everything Microsoft is doing is geared toward new users, not existing, since the cost to existing user to upgrade is cost prohibitive. That is new users who will be required to have the newest of all the Microsoft server product family to run Navision, I mean Dynamics NAV, they will need SQL2005 enterprise, Server2003, Office 2007, ect. Now, before you say you can still use the native database, and server 2000, or you don’t need the enterprise edition of SQL, ect. You wrong, if you really want to take advantage of all the newest wiz bang features, and if you are buying a whole new ERP program what would be the point in not taking advantage for the newest features. You will need all the newest and most costing versions of Microsoft products.
Enough ramblings, I have to get back to work, after all I am an end user and we have to make some money, selling products unrelated to Navision.
I had to laugh, when I posted the above comment and then visited the general forum active topics the one right below this topics was
Nav 4.0 SP2 runs slow on SQL Server 2000 SP4 ,
Of course it does, and with a lot of tuning and programming, and maybe highering a skilled SQL administrator, he will be able to get a system that runs as well as our original 2.0 native database did, back in 1999. of which we had to do nothing to keep it running that well over the following 6 years. but Now in 4.0, we need to keep on top of everything to keep it running well
We killed our Maintenance after one year.
We do everything ion house now and Upgrading any further is not going to happen.
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is the bosses motto.
We’ll probably run this version for 5 years or more before looking at a new one.
Hi David
Currently there is still a differentiation as NSC’s are MBS partners, and to be one you need to have accreditation in Navision (this altered “again” recently), but essentially my understanding is that Microsoft are going to push Navision down the route of a simple software sale, the partner will not need to be skilled on the software as they can sub-contract this out. However Microsoft have also indicated the margin on the software will be taken away, Microsoft are not here to make the partners money on the software they write, what they need to do is make money on the services and the implementation. You say that selling and implementing are two completely different things, they are and Microsoft see them as being separate, a partner simply sells the software, and project manages through sub-contract to a services partner for the implementation, or the customer buys the software and then employs a service partner to implement it.
There are two things you should know about these comments, the first is Microsoft never actually “state” anything, these are my interpretations of the information and partner meetings being given. Secondly I think it is fundamentally flawed in so many ways it illustrates that after 4 years of owning a business wide software suite of packages they still have no real understanding of the process and mechanics of selling and implementing the software.
With Business Ready Licensing the maintenance fee will be 16% and EVERY Navision customer will be on this by 2010 (or is it 2008 I cannot remember).
As an employee of an NSC I can comment on the difficulty of “selling” the maintenance, what does it get the customer? The “right” to upgrade. Does this include the time of the NSC? Of course not as Microsoft get the money not the NSC. Maintenance is compulsory Year 1, but if you are a medium sized site it is probably cheaper if you are planning no changes in 4 years to quit the maintenance, it will then be cheaper to buy the software all over again, but can you guarantee this? We offer the maintenance, and then we offer our support services separate so the customer understands (hopefully) what they are paying for. Microsoft want the NSC’s to make no money from the maintenance or the software in the future, just the services, so imagine then where it is going. The NSC and Microsoft to come to an arrangement? Currently the NSC’s pay to log support calls, and the NSC’s are finding and fixing the bugs in teh new versions - we actually provide code fixes to Microsoft when reporting the issue, as it has been fixed for the customer as a matter of urgency, does the NSC get anything for this? Yes - they are not charged for the support call as it is a bug!
Paying for a quote? I think I said that this surprised me previously, but different countries different cultures - could you negotiate it off the final price if you accept the quote? Glad I am not in those shoes, and it will be no comfort but we issue all our quotes free of charge - it is considered a selling overhead. I also know what the average British company would say if we tried this tactic [:D]
With the move from versions there was a cross reference sheet, if you used departments and projects in 2 you got dimensions free, although no advanced dimensions as this was not an equivalent, this was a significant enhancement. I am not saying you did, but you may have paid for granules you did not have to.
By the way I am not defending NSC’s although it may sound like it, I cannot speak for them all, and I know there are some bad apples out there. However the NSC and Microsoft are not in cahoots over this, in fact I believe Microsofts long term plan is to get rid of the NSC altogether and have them a service based business supplying the implementation and upgrade needs of each client, at least then it is clear - everything they do you have to pay for.
Yes, we had departments and projects, which was upgraded to basic dimensions, But we also used BIN’s which was a standard field on the item card. But to post to bins in 4.0 you had to have the full bins granules, Bins for $1600 and Bin Setup for $800, for a total of $2400. Instead of doing that, we had all references to BIN codes cleared, and purchased Advanced dimensions for $3000, and then set up a dimension representing our old bin codes. So, we paid an extra $600 for the advanced dimension so that we could have an equivilant bin entry. If we had just wanted to continue with the bin codes as is, we would have had to pay the the $2400, but our NSC and several post on this forumn warned that bins were still very buggy, and recommended we not use them.
Bins are buggy? Never heard of that before. Are you refereing to warehouse management?
It might be different in different countries but we had a customer upgrading from 2.60 to 4.0 over a year ago, they used the shelf/bin funcitonality, and as they did they were able to upgrade to the bin funcitonality for free at the time. They also have had no problems with it, but they use it in a simplified manner.
I have to agree 100% here. There were a lot of Warehouse related issues that seemed to be dumped on bins. Bins and Serial nos in 2.xx were implemented at the Item Ledger Level, where as in 3.xx they were moved to seperate tables, And where as this was a problematic transistion for Serial (and Lot) numbers, sinc ethey are factored into costing method, Bins naturally belonged in a seperate table, and worked fine.
Yes bins in 3xx had problems, but I would say that the majority of those issues are related to Warehouse management, or to people misinterpreting Serial Number issues as Bin isssues.
.By the way 3.xx should have had had two costing options for Serial Numbers: Specific Costing, and Batch Costing. In Serial costing, the serial number should be recorded on EVERY line on the purchase order, and then transfer one to one on the Item ledger Entries. Batch Costing should basically just be FIFO, but using an extra table just to record serial numebrs (all of which would have the same unit cost no matter what), and these would be used for Printing reports only.
Definitely this si not country specific, it relates individually to the model of each NSC (I AM still going to call them that I guess) as to how they do it. There are good arguements for both.
Everyone knows that nothing is free, and the customer knows that they are going to pay for the quote, its just that some cusotmers dont like seeing it so obvious on an invoice. (Personally I like to know exactly where my moeny is going, but that's just me). Basically a Quote can be 1/ Free = we will hide the cost somewhere int he final Invoice, plus a factor to allow for Quotes that don't convert. (From my experience this is the most expensive for the client). 2/ Charge at actual hourly rate for T&M = pay for what you get. Everyone gets a fair deal. 3/ Fixed Price for a quote = we have to add some fluff to cover losses but its not too bad. (In my experience, this is ALWAYS the cheapest for the customer, and the NSC always looses out. And rememebr I am talking ONLY about how the NSC charged the customer for the quote I am not talking about the actual cost of doing the work if the customer accepts the quote).I have seen all three methods implemented in different countries, though as Steven says, British customers generally did not want to see a bill for quoteing, they are normally happier to know that its hidden somewhere. Like when you tell the contractor that you really don’t want a very expensive teleport unit installed ina big black spacehip that is intended to be driven into a sun.
When it comes to quoteing though, I do try to get NSCs to become flexible, and talk with they clients about how they would prefer to be billed for quotes. Most sustomers when I first ask them abotu paying for quotes, say they want option 1/ but a large percentage go for 2 or 3 if explained to them properly.
A compromise solution, is to do it in phases, where you say to the client:
This mod will probably cost between 15 and 40 hours. If you want a more acurate estimate, then I need 3 hours to review it in detail which will be chargable no matter what. Or we can give you a fixed price based on 40 hrs plus 20% safety margin i.e. 48 hrs.
But in reality you need to decide with your client base, as to what is the correct way of billing.
This all leads to a story about quoting that I was getting ready for my book, but I might just blog it …
Oh and YES, I have seen scenarious where a client has been invoiced more just for the quote than what should have been the actual cost of doing the job it self. But lets not go there.
Our NSC said he heard the same thing, he pitched it to Microsoft, they told him no, He said I may have better luck, my NSC gave me the contact info at Microsoft and I called and asked directly, they said and I am para-phrasing:
…bla bla bla we value your business, bla bla bla. we are glad you have been a long time loyal customer, bla bla bla you renewal isn’t due for 6 months on the annual ehancement program, bla bla bla, you will still have to renew one more year to make it through your upgrade, bla bla bla, we don’t care if we loose you after that, we arn’t giving you the bins, if you want them pay for them, you whinning little business who we don’t care about one little bit.
that is just my rough rememberance of the conversation. It might have been slightly different, but that was the jist of it.