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Posts Tagged ‘software’

Microsoft presents Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

September 2009, Holmdel, New Jersey (NJ)

Clients First Business Solutions is proud to present the following announcement.  We have been an active member in the design and testing of this breakthrough release.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, a comprehensive, innovative business management solution that helps people work faster and smarter, and gives businesses the flexibility to adapt to new opportunities and growth.

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 release offers breakthrough user experience and technology innovations while maintaining the simplicity that has always been a core value of this solution. Never before has so much effort been put into a Microsoft Dynamics NAV release – from extensive customer research and a complete architecture redesign, to a concentrated focus on quality. The product has been thoroughly tested by partners resulting in more than 10 customers live on Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009.

“Customers and partners are facing complex issues today. Customers need to streamline operations and find ways to use resources more efficiently, while partners are looking for strong opportunities to create and maintain vertical solutions,” says Kirill Tatarinov, corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions at Microsoft. “Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 allows us to squarely address the needs of midsize businesses in today’s economic climate and to support our partners’ investments. By using the role-specific, user-friendly ERP solution, both groups can boost productivity and work smarter, maximizing their effectiveness in driving business impact.”

With Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, businesses can:

•Provide a streamlined, RoleTailored user experience to help people work more effectively.

•Adapt to meet changing business needs with improved agility and enhanced flexibility.

•Connect Microsoft Dynamics NAV easily to a wide range of applications with .NET Web services.

•Provide new options for designing reports that are intuitive to work with and easier to distribute.

•Maximize existing investments in Microsoft products and technologies, including Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft SQL Server 2008.

“One of the biggest challenges faced by customers using ERP systems is how to get started using the right functionality in the applications. With the release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 and its new RoleTailored client, we finally have a great answer for that challenge. Those capabilities allow users to focus on the 20 percent of the application’s functionality that they need to do their job and push the rest into the background,” says Scott Brennan, managing consultant with Sikich, a US-based solution provider and Microsoft Dynamics NAV reseller.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 introduces several new capabilities designed to increase usage of ERP and fuel individual and organization-wide productivity, including the following:

Personalized Role Centers corresponding to 21 key job functions. Based on research into the way employees really work, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 delivers simplified access to RoleTailored views and business processes through Role Centers designed and delivered out-of-the-box for more than 21 key employee roles. Role Centers change the work paradigm for the traditional user by providing a single overview of job-related tasks and information. By helping people to organize, prioritize, and access their work from a single location, Role Centers can increase productivity and effectiveness. With an easy-to-navigate window into their work world and the ability to personalize their Role Centers to fit their own unique work styles, employees have a powerful way to get work done accurately and efficiently.

Improved business intelligence and reporting capabilities based on the new Microsoft SQL Server database layer introduced in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009, enable employees to drill into data, identify trends, generate business insights, and monitor how they’re tracking against key performance indicators. The new Business Analytics in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 delivers powerful new features designed to make it easier for your clients to create and consume business information. In this new release, Microsoft Dynamics NAV focuses more than ever on simplicity and making information available in and intuitive and easy way so all employees can gain the insight they need to act on behalf of the business.

.NET Web Services allow partners and customers to integrate data and business logic from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 with other applications to support a wide range of scenarios. For example, businesses wanting to deploy credit check functionality to enable employees who normally do not have access to the ERP system to run credit checks on a new customer can easily create web services that make the process simple and efficient in providing the employee with access to recent and accurate credit data.

“Our employees have enthusiastically embraced Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 because it fits their individual needs rather than force-fitting them into a one-size-fits-all system,” said Henrik Dam Jespersen, CEO of Hurup Furniture. “The ease of setup and tight integration with the Microsoft products we already use allowed us to get up and running quickly and smoothly, and we’re already seeing increased productivity, reduced costs and smarter decision-making.”

Dynamics AX 2009 Technology Enables User Experience Customization

Monday, October 5th, 2009

Dynamics AX 2009’ technology provides the capability for users to modify screens easily in Dynamics AX 2009 to meet their requirements and make their jobs easier to perform and data entry much more efficient.

Here is a screenshot of a standard Dynamics AX 2009 customer record screen, showing the general tab:

AX Morphx_2

The user may find that many of the fields are not needed in this form and that navigating between the needed fields is time-consuming.

This is not a problem because Dynamics AX 2009’s technology makes is a simple matter to change the look of this form (and any other forms) to meet the user’s needs.

The user can right click on an unneeded field, or field group, and one of the options includes “hide” as shown below.  Now the user can go through the form and hide any fields or groups that the user does not need.

AX Morphx_1

Here is the same form, after the user has spent some time re-organizing it:

AX Morphx_3

Notice that numerous fields been hidden and that the landscape that the hidden fields used to take up has been automatically rearranged as well.  By the way, this change took less than 2 minutes to make.  Now the user only sees what needs to be seen, thus speeding up data entry.

Keep in mind that access to this functionality is permissions-controlled and that changes made can be done for individual users or system wide.

Contact us through our website or by calling 888-222-8827 to learn how Dynamics AX 2009’s technology can help to make the user experience more efficient and productive.   Ask us also about other features and benefits that Dynamics AX 2009 delivers.

Dynamics AX 2009 Workflows Automate Business Processes

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 features a powerful workflow capability that allows companies to mirror their business processes in the system and then automate those processes.

Here are a few examples of workflow templates that come with Dynamics AX (Formerlly Axapta) 2009 and how you can use them to automate and control your processes.

Purchase Requisition Approval

Tom works in the quality department of his company and needs a new test instrument.  His user role in Dynamics AX 2009 does not allow him to create purchase orders but he can create requisitions.  So, he creates a requisition for the test instrument that he needs. (more…)

Dynamics AX 2009 Role Centers Improve User Productivity

Friday, September 11th, 2009

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems contain a wealth of data and information that decision makers in the organization need to access in order to be as informed as possible about their company’s current state and to enable a proactive approach to managing the business.

Many ERP systems require individuals to navigate through various modules and menus to get to the data in the system relevant to the information they need or tasks they need to perform.  Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 provides users with a Role center to streamline and enhance the user experience.

(more…)

Efficiency Never Goes Out of Style

Saturday, August 8th, 2009

Today’s business world is filled with buzz words that change from year to year as business improvement techniques come and go. I recently read an article on résumés that emphasized such terms as “team player”, “results oriented”, etc., have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Process improvement models such as TQM (Total Quality Management) have given way to Six Sigma, and JIT (Just in Time) to Lean Manufacturing. But the processes themselves have never gone out of style, and never will, although the next management fad may hang a different moniker on them and package them in a slightly different way. Efficiency and process improvement will never become obsolete, no matter what you call them.

When you purchased your current software system, you went through an installation process with the help of your Clients First implementation team where you defined your requirements, configured your software, set up your processes, and trained your employees. For the first few months on the system, your Clients First software support team helped you work on your issues, write or modify reports, and get to the point where you are probably pretty self sufficient, depending on the size of the company and the role of internal IT staff.

If you have a ‘mature’ implementation, you probably only call Clients First when you have a problem or software related issue. But did you know that we’re much more than “Software Repair People”, we’re Consultants and can help you with your business process requirements beyond your software related needs. If fact, as your business partner, we have a more in-depth perspective of your company than you probably realize. Not only can we do an Account Checkup to see if you’re using your software to its full potential, but we can help you when you’re planning on adding product lines, changing the way you do business, acquiring subsidiaries, downsizing and needing to streamline processes, just about anything that has to do with business processes. There is no need to go to an outside consultancy firm, when you’ve already got one that knows your business, but is still far enough removed from day-to-day operations to provide the objective eye you often need when trying to make improvements.

Is it taking too long to get an order out the door? Do you need a job description for an IT employee? Do you need assistance doing long term planning? Are you adding a department and need to develop process flows? Has the way your company does business changed? Are you using workarounds because you believe your software doesn’t support a function? Has your system been implemented for more than 2 years without a review to ensure that you’re using it in the most efficient way? We’re your business partner and many of our Project Leaders and Implementers are also Business Process Consultants. Call us in the planning stages and we will probably be able to save you a lot of pain later on. Don’t know what your pain is? Call us, and we’ll help you define your pain areas and develop a plan to remediate them. Don’t think your primary support rep has the knowledge? Call and find out. If the primary doesn’t, he/she will bring in someone from our staff that can help you out.

So whether you call if efficiency, good organization, total quality or whatever word they use next week, let Clients First help ensure that it describes you.

Please contact Clients First for more information.  Thanks to Karen Wevick from our Alabama office.