Curious to learn about the experiences of business owners that have implemented Dynamics CRM, GP, NAV and/or SL. What are some of the major gotchas? What should you watch for? What advice would you give a business owner making the first step into Dynamics?
Ben;
There was a long & detailed thread about which platform to choose (with descriptions of differences):
http://dynamicsuser.net/forums/p/216/1006.aspx#1006
This is a home-reading to get overall idea, but actually it is Partner’s task after serious business process analysis to recommend you the solution, which may include variants to match different budgets etc etc. By no means it is not a half-page text after a hour-long negotiations - it must be serious document(s) and should take month(s) to prepare - never forget that this will be your system detailed description and a “task list” for Partner… What’s not included - can be done afterwards, but for additional payment…
Analysis phase may take even up to 80-90% of time, if you don’t need many modifications and non-standard functionality. Many business owners think it’s not right approch, but believe me - standard NAV North American version I could install on your PCs in less than one full working day, and off you go… If it appears on the next day, that such solution doesn’t suit your needs, you are left with your problems alone, look previous paragraph…
Main “gotcha” [;)] is to get the right MS Partner company, which will perform analysis and implementation process for you.
In US there are plenty of them, and best way might be if someone you trust could recommend one to choose.
Partner’s websites normally contain some success stories, they use to enlist their biggest clients, which you might call and ask only one question - are they satisffied with implementaton as whole and Partner company in particular.
If Partner says info about its previous Cliens is “totally confidentional”, it is first signal to become suspicious about his capacities to perform the implementation for you.
As an end user of Navision since 1999, the biggest gotchas have to do with upgrades. the program is so easy to modify, from simple things like making forms look like you want, Changing reports, to integrating credit card processing. etc. Which is one of the big selling points. you can make it work how you want. But once you do that, even applying a service pack can get very expensive. Since a service pack in the ERP is so different the a service pack in the operating system. the actual code has to be compared to the code in your database. For example our database is considered lightly modified, based on number of objects changed, we have two add-on, one for credit card processing and one for drop shippments. I have modified a lot forms and reports to look like we want. our upgrade estimate to go from Nav 4.0 to NAV 2009 classic client (which is the cheap route to go) is nearly 40,000 dollars. we had a quote to apply a service pack of between 5 and 10 thousand dollars.
so, you pay maintenance and you have the right to upgrades, you just have to pay to actuall apply those upgrades.
things you should do, is work with your partner, so they understand that you want them to code changes with the idea of making upgrades easy, they can make new objects instead of modify standard objects, you can leave standard reports as is, and instead copy them to your own number range.
But in general I would say this is one of the biggest gotchas there is. If you modify the program then you have to pay a lot more to upgrade or even apply a service pack.
Dear all,
Could somebody have good idea on how to break rock–get NAV sold?
Thanks in advance,