Merit Matters Blog

Based on reports from industry analysts and the many conversations that our team has with clients, we believe four megatrends will radically change how businesses view enterprise IT over the coming decade.

• Mobility and social are the driving forces for change in business today, particularly as employees (and customers) increasingly expect to use mobile and social technology to interact in new ways. These two elements are becoming a competitive differentiator for business - for recruiting and retaining employees and for attracting and retaining customers.
• The cloud and big data are quickly becoming enablers for business success. The tremendous scalability and agility enabled by the cloud and the new insights made possible with big data can help businesses today get ahead of the competition and tap into new sources of revenue.

These trends represent not only what is most important to our customers today, but also what we feel are likely to be the dominant forces of change in the coming decade.

• The proliferation of new device types, along with the connectivity of the cloud, is making us more mobile and changing the way we work and play. Mobility answers the growing expectation from your employees to be able to work from anywhere, with the device that they choose. Mobile technology also delivers a great mobile experience to customers, bringing your business to them wherever they are through their mobile phone or tablet.
• As technology becomes more immersive, we also expect it to help us develop more personal and social connections with our colleagues and customers. Social networks build strong work communities, enhancing collaboration, information sharing, and productivity.
• The connectivity that the cloud offers is changing what we expect from technology. With an always-on connection, apps can provide innovative new services with instant scalability and attractive economics.
• While business intelligence (BI) has been important for a great number of years, the explosion in connected devices and apps is generating an exponential growth in data and the need to get better insights from “big data.” The challenge for today’s businesses is to make that data useful—to put it into the hands of their people to drive informed, forward-thinking decisions.

We’re not alone in identifying these megatrends. According to IDC, “In 2012, the ICT industry's shift to its third major platform of growth—built on mobile, cloud, social, and big data technologies—will accelerate.” In contrast to what IDC refers to as the first (mainframe) and second (PC/server) platforms, they estimate that by 2020, “…enterprises’ highest-value leverage of IT will be driven by these third-platform technologies as well as an explosion of new solutions built on the new platform and rapidly expanding consumption of all of the above in emerging markets.”

It’s amazing just how fast our world is changing today. Just think…

• Within 15 years, a little startup named Amazon has gone from transforming the book industry to changing the face of retail.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. In less than nine months, Facebook reached 100 million users. And in the space of just a few short years, social networking services have significantly changed people’s expectations of how we interact with each other and with businesses, particularly for the millennial generation.
• Within just two months of its launch, Kinect for the Xbox 360 changed the face of gaming and became the world’s fastest-selling consumer electronics device ever.

Each of these examples reflects the tremendous impact that the megatrends are having on our world - and the pace at which it is all changing. As we enter this new era in the enterprise, the question is - what can your business do to make the most of it?

Of course, technology trends on their own aren’t going to revolutionize your business or help you stay competitive. How you adopt new technology and put it to work in your business will ultimately be the responsibility of IT. We know how important it is to ensure that your technology solutions truly empower your IT professionals to deliver what the business needs. What are those needs?

• Integrate new devices and applications with their existing line-of-business apps, for a seamless experience that keeps people productive and connected to the business.
• Help maximize end user productivity, with solutions that put the tools users need at their fingertips, wherever they happen to be working from, and that connect them with the people, information, and content they rely on to do their jobs well.
• Ensure that corporate data and resources are protected and secure, even as access to those data and resources becomes possible from an increasing number of devices and apps.
• Fully manage all devices on the network, both local and remote - a task that is becoming ever more complicated as users bring more and more devices into the enterprise and work from more and more locations.

At Merit Solutions, our goal is to deliver ground-breaking technology solutions that empower IT to take advantage of the latest trends without compromise. By achieving this goal, we are able to provide your IT professionals with the tools they need to help you innovate and compete while meeting the core needs of the business in all new ways.

Learn more about how Merit Solutions can help you transform your business!

A while back we discussed some global business and IT trends that are slowly but steadily reshaping the ERP landscape. With our emerging economic climate, these trends are posing additional challenges for business and IT professionals who are struggling to improve profitability and retain IT agility.

Global market trends are creating the need for businesses to:

• Achieve operational insight and better decision making across the organization with faster, easier, and more pervasive access to relevant business information.
  
• Need for business agility to stay ahead of the competition and accelerate business growth.
• Reducing the cost of doing business by optimizing processes and driving productivity.
• Align business objectives with IT priorities and investments to ensure that IT systems and tools are enabling and supporting strategic business priorities and that they address changing business needs.

At the same time, shifting IT trends are creating the need to:

• Increase ERP adoption and access to ERP data across a broader subset of the workforce.
• Reduce IT operational costs by investing in systems that are more flexible and scalable, and simpler to configure, maintain, and upgrade.
  
• Put solutions in place that enable broad business strategies, and that enable IT to respond quickly to specific line-of-business (LOB) requests and industry needs.

When you frame this discussion with the research conducted by Forrester in 2010 detailed in our article, Key Challenges Companies Face with ERP Solutions, you can see how the needs produced by market and IT trends are affecting customers’ expectations of their ERP application.

Today’s world is increasingly flattened by technology, global complexity and new global competition - making it critical for a business to be able to rapidly see and react to signals, threats and opportunities. Going one step further, in this world where the pace of business accelerates, imagine being able to anticipate rather than react to those signals. Success today and tomorrow increasingly depends on information insight and efficient business processes.

So what would the next generation of ERP look like? See for yourself!

Today’s social connectedness, mobile devices, and growing opportunities for interaction “any time any place” have changed the way many live and work. People are increasingly dependent on connections across the global network—interlocked in this connected reality.

In order to gain the insight needed to make better decisions, organizations need an end-to-end business solution that integrates all areas of their business and provides managers - as well as individual team members and contributors - with the information they need to make the right decisions at the right time!

Modern business solutions like Microsoft Dynamics AX not only connect people inside and outside the organization, they also give them context and insight which drives better decisions and boosts productivity. An important focus of Microsoft Dynamics AX is to drive connections with people, with customers and with business partners across processes, data and the ecosystem in which organizations operate. This focus on connected organizations includes the vision of anywhere, in-context collaboration services that links people and companies to the right people in the right place, in the right context, at the right time, across multiple avenues of communications.

By implementing a fully integrated ERP system like Microsoft Dynamics AX - encompassing everything from sales and marketing to production and accounting - organizations can improve the accuracy of the information upon which decisions are based because each module of the software is tied together and information flows freely among them. Everyone from the top floor to the shop floor can have access to the business intelligence information they need to drive business success across the organization:

• Keep current on changing business conditions - Accurately monitor current business activity, and compare it to historical activity and future plans to give people the contextual information they need to keep performance on track. Microsoft Dynamics AX delivers many integrated monitoring tools to help your people access the most relevant, accurate, and timely information about your business.
• Gain insight into your business - It's not enough to gather accurate and timely data—people need powerful and easy-to-use analysis tools to help them understand context and trends. Microsoft Dynamics AX business intelligence functions provide people with the insight they need to take quick action and pursue opportunities.
• Budget, forecast, and plan effectively - Microsoft Dynamics AX offers flexible planning tools to help you compare budgets, forecasts, and plans to actual performance. It also gives you the ability to update budgets and plans on the basis of new data and analyses to help your business stay competitive.

Microsoft Dynamics AX removes the impediments that generate friction within the organization and provides people with a broader array of insights and actions across internal and external connections. With greater transparency, agility, and insight, your people can make better, more informed decisions - enabling you to transform into a Dynamic Business.

You and your employees share a common aspiration - to grow your business. To reach this goal, you need a solution that can support changing demands along the way. Microsoft Dynamics AX delivers the flexibility you need to accommodate new business processes and scale as your business grows without significant increases to your original investment—or your payroll.

• Conduct business internationally. Use international trade and multicurrency capabilities to maintain your general ledger in different currencies – enabling you to manage customer and vendor accounts in the appropriate currency.
• Connect your remote and roaming employees. Empower your mobile workers with direct access to enterprise resource planning (ERP) data and local resources over the Internet using a rich RoleTailored interface—and get even more from your investments.
• Choose the right solution for you. With flexible deployment options, you can choose the solution that works best for your business—and increase IT flexibility without increasing costs. Microsoft Dynamics AX supports both on-premises and Cloud ERP deployments.

With a Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP enterprise business platform, your people will have the innovative, flexible tools they need to be proactive and productive—keeping you ahead of the competition. As a result, your business can move forward instead of standing still.

Testing e-mail functionality in your Microsoft Dynamics AX/GP application/customization using external e-mail servers has always been a frustrating process. If your test e-mail somehow avoids anti-spam and other SMTP server services, it will still take several minutes to receive. Sometimes, it can take 5 – 10 minutes for your sent e-mail to arrive at the destination - and you can never be sure if your test e-mail is late or if delivery has failed due to an error in your application.

Wouldn't it be great to have a mock application that pretends to be a SMTP server and shows you what you sent immediately? That is exactly what SMTP4DEV does.

SMTP4DEV is free and you can download it from CodePlex at http://smtp4dev.codeplex.com. All you have to do is unpack and run, and make sure your mock SMTP server is listening.

Once you have SMTP4DEV running and listening, you can use the sample C# code to send an e-mail to your mock SMTP server. Notice the From and To e-mail addresses; they can be anything.

Execute the sample C# code and your test e-mail will immediately show in SMTP4DEV.

Now stop listening on port 25 and execute the same sample C# code again. Since SMTP server is no longer available, SmtpClient will throw an exception.

 

Did you know that it is possible to create statements with financial dimensions expressed in different columns?

I recently discovered this interesting feature of Microsoft Dynamics AX while I was trying to help a customer with financial reporting focused on different financial dimensions. In our situation, the client is a medical institution with multiple clinicians on staff. The client needed statements calculated per each clinician so they can compare financial results during certain periods of time. For this client, Clinicians are custom made financial dimensions.

As in every other statement, the date intervals and raw definition have to be defined prior to creating the statement. Once defined, we have to generate financial statements and define their basic structures (General ledger>Setup>Financial statement>Financial statement). In the upper pane of the screenshot below, you can see that we give the statement a name and description - and then we can connect it to primary and secondary dimension sets (in this example, we only used primary dimension sets).

In the lower part of the screen, we can create columns that are going to show up on the statement we print out. In this client case, we set the account number in the first column and the account definition in the secondary column. Now, in our next three columns (or more), we can add our clinicians (or dimensions). For each of those columns we choose “current” as “Column type” and setup desired time intervals in “setup” tab.

After the statement structure is created and the columns that will present dimension data are defined, we can go ahead and add dimensions to them (General ledger>Reports>Transactions>Financial statement). The first tab is “Financial statement” tab, and under “Identification” we chose the financial statement we created before, and add to it the dimension set and row definition.

Under the “columns” tab we choose one of the columns we setup before (in General ledger>Setup>Financial statement>Financial statement). Click on the "Select" button in the upper right corner.

A new window will open. The upper pane is a graphical representation of tables and their connections. In lower pane we can add the desired dimensions to the chosen column (in our case that was one of clinicians). First we have to pick the “Field” (custom made dimension - Clinician) and then the “Criteria” (desired clinician to be represented in that column).

This is a great feature to compare and review different dimensions and it can be a great resource when creating complex financial reports.

You may read this and think: productivity improvements? Again?

Yes, improved productivity seems to be on every ERP vendor’s checklist of benefits whenever a new product or feature is released. And that’s because inefficient and rigid systems continue to be a major pain for companies and organizations everywhere.

Inflexible systems overwhelm, overload, and frustrate people – the employees, managers, customers, vendors, and partners who are working hard to make things happen and grow their business. According to a report from Forrester, there is a deep-seated dissatisfaction with business applications because they are inflexible, don’t address processes that cross business functions, and don’t match the business’ requirements. (The Future of Enterprise Applications, Forrester 2007).

Indeed, a study from AMR Research (The Enterprise Planning Spending Report 2005-2006, AMR Research 2005) found that only 15% of employees are licensed to use their company’s ERP system and that 46% of licensed ERP seats go unused. And when people don’t use the system, business productivity declines, growth slows, and even business critical processes can be compromised. Because, it doesn’t matter if standard operating procedures are in place if no one in the organization can access, see or enforce them.

Therefore, it’s not surprising when Forrester concludes that “poorly designed user interfaces can profoundly affect the bottom line. The expenses associated with a bad UI, over the course of the application’s lifetime, may end up being many times the cost of the application itself.” (The Future of Enterprise Applications, Forrester 2007)  The report continues on to explain the costly implications of a bad UI, including increased new user training times, a decrease in productivity and poor user adoption.

So why then is Microsoft Dynamics AX different? We claim improved business productivity, too, but does our solution deliver on this promise? And, if so how? What makes Microsoft Dynamics AX so special?

The answer is usability. The easier a software application is to use, the faster employees are able to adopt it and thereby enable the organization to reap the benefits the system provides. A study conducted by the consulting group, Keystone Strategy, found that companies who have successfully deployed IT capabilities throughout the organization – meaning that people are really using the software – have been able to profitably grow their revenues.

At the core of more agile, usable applications is the human experience, or what Forrester calls Design- for-People requirements.

“Design-for-people requirements place the businessperson’s work at the center of business applications’ human interface. The businessperson’s work is the organizing structure for a workplace into which we plug transactions, business processes, content, unified communications, social networking, and tools. Instead of people having to figure out how to apply collaboration tools to their jobs, ad hoc activities are integrated with structured work in these unitary, contextual workplaces.” 

Microsoft Dynamics AX has been designed to meet “people-ready” requirements; specifically, to improve business productivity by improving usability and increasing the reach of the solution so a larger percentage of employees have access to the system.

Learning a new software application or having to learn many different ones can slow down productivity. If a new user is familiar with the application, learning and using new applications becomes much easier and faster. The user interface in Microsoft Dynamics AX has been changed to improve the user experience, the learning experience and leverage the successful design concepts from the popular applications most users spend time in on a daily basis: Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint, Windows, and Internet Explorer. Working in Microsoft Dynamics AX is like working in other Microsoft programs that most people are familiar with. 

Yes, Microsoft Dynamics AX delivers on the promise of productivity – by offering unsurpassed usability, easier collaboration and communication, and comprehensive business insight capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics AX was designed with people in mind – making it easier for them to work, collaborate and make informed decisions more efficiently.

IT teams are responsible for the computers, networks, and software applications that manage a company’s operations, track financial transactions, and enable people to communicate and collaborate throughout the company. Without a smooth flow of information through a company’s IT systems, operations would not be efficient or even possible in some cases. IT managers need to monitor the day-to-day health of complex systems while simultaneously tracking innovations in technology that might create competitive advantages.

Microsoft Dynamics AX makes the job of connecting systems and exchanging information easier for IT professionals, and in many cases, it happens automatically. Microsoft Dynamics AX enables your end-users to access information by themselves, so IT professionals can concentrate on higher-value tasks.

• Reduced costs. Microsoft Dynamics AX is built on a standard Microsoft platform, which helps your company reduce costs. You may already use many of the supporting technologies, such as Windows, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Office, or Microsoft SharePoint. If so, you won’t need costly, time-consuming retraining to benefit from Microsoft Dynamics solutions.
  
• Familiar user experience. Microsoft Dynamics AX operates like other familiar Microsoft applications, such as Microsoft Office. The RoleTailored user interface provides access to the data and insights needed for individual roles or departments, making Microsoft Dynamics easier to learn and use and helping to reduce IT support requirements.
  
• Responsive to change. With a flexible and standard architecture that takes advantage of Microsoft .NET components, Microsoft Dynamics AX enables you to quickly and easily respond to changing business conditions. This helps ensure that your business software is adaptable to your changing business needs.
  
• Simpler end-user reporting. Microsoft Dynamics AX helps make important business information more widely accessible in your organization, giving the right people access to the right information at the right time. By using Microsoft Dynamics and Microsoft SharePoint, you can provide straightforward access to information via a Web browser. And because Microsoft Dynamics AX is built to work with familiar Microsoft Office programs such as Outlook and Excel, your people can use familiar tools to perform additional analysis.
  
• Flexible deployment. Microsoft Dynamics AX is available either on-premise or in a Cloud ERP model, providing you with flexible and cost-effective deployment options.

Microsoft Dynamics AX helps you gain more value faster with a single, powerful solution that supports industry-specific and operational demands across your global enterprise. It's unprecedented agility adapts and grows with you, allowing you to expand business operations, modify processes, and differentiate your business. Microsoft Dynamics AX is simple to use, deploy, and manage - and delivers real-time access to the data and processes needed to drive your business forward.

There’s plenty of incentive for overcoming today’s business information challenges. Although it can be difficult to put financial values on faster, smarter decisions, the ability to make them is still widely recognized as critical to success in the highly competitive global marketplace. Moreover, it’s not hard to identify organizational dissatisfaction with the relevance, availability, and accuracy of the information people currently do have at their disposal.

Fortunately, new solutions are emerging to help solve these problems. Today, the right BI solution can:

• Provide self-service convenience for the average user, with immediate, out-of-the-box analysis capabilities, while still helping to maintain a secure environment and offer the depth and power necessary for sophisticated analysis.
• Improve business agility with a range of flexible options for generating, viewing, analyzing, and distributing BI.
• Integrate and connect disparate legacy systems and business applications, information sources, departments, and locations to provide comprehensive, one-stop BI for the entire organization that’s optimized for the capabilities of the ERP system.
• Expand in reach and capabilities as the organization grows and its BI demand increases. Ideally, this growth can take place as an integral component of a scalable enterprise-wide solution that also adapts and extends readily as needed.
• Offer a quick return on investment through initial cost efficiency, long-term scalability, and a low total cost of ownership.

The following steps provide a guideline for incorporating BI into your organization. By following these steps, you can identify key business considerations prior to deploying a new BI solution.

Step 1: Replace complex user interfaces with intuitive, convenient self-service

Ease of access is a primary consideration. An inquiry, analysis, or reporting solution that is too complicated may be powerful but sit mostly unused. On the other hand, a solution that’s too simple may not be robust enough to serve the business decision-makers who need it most. But when the BI solution is easy to use right out of the box and users can access information via familiar interfaces, applications, and tools, everyone in the organization can achieve greater insight without relying on costly IT resources to generate reports or run time-consuming analyses. The ideal solution works the way your people want to work.
A self-service–focused user interface also minimizes training costs and startup times and enables team members to work with information in a collaborative environment. At the same time, managers can control information access based on functional roles or individual authorization to help protect sensitive information and prevent inappropriate or unintended modifications.

Step 2: Expand options for analysis, transportability, and dissemination

To turn information into actionable business intelligence, people must be able to extract and analyze the specific information they need, in the order they need it, and with the detail that addresses their interests. Tailored functionality is critical, both for customizing the solution to industry and organizational needs and for adapting operationally to the interests of diverse functional roles. Finally, the right solution can make it easier to share, present, and distribute the results of analysis, not only within the organization but also with trade partners. Therefore, solutions that incorporate Web services, portal compatibility, or other measures to ease communication across platforms provide a definite advantage.

Step 3: Integrate disconnected information and systems into the knowledge base

A strong BI system must be able to incorporate information from across the enterprise while also connecting with line-of-business applications, including document repositories, and the desktop productivity tools employees use every day. The ability to access and consolidate information from multiple production management and manufacturing control systems, warehouses, distribution channels, and companies or subsidiaries is also valuable for providing managers with comprehensive, enterprise-wide insight.

Step 4: Scale to fit changing business models and needs

A BI system is only good while it fits. Given the rate of change in today’s business environment, it’s imperative to find and implement a solution flexible enough to adapt to business growth, whether that growth comes through acquisitions, vertical integration, international expansion, or shifts into entirely new lines of business. To continue supporting personal, team, and organizational BI needs, solutions must be extensible to new users and locations as the company grows. Such scalable solutions, when they also accommodate add-on or tailored functionality, offer strong cost efficiency, consistency, service, and fit over time.

Step 5: Deploy cost-efficiently and with long-term adaptability for a low TCO

For a business solution to be implemented at all, it must be cost-efficient to license, deploy, and maintain, while remaining accessible across the organization. Ideal solutions give all people responsible for strategic, tactical, and operational decisions access to the information they need at a low total cost of ownership (TCO). An effective BI solution can quickly provide a strong return on investment while retaining the

flexibility and scalability for future growth to provide long-term performance that maximizes your investment.

Microsoft Dynamics AX is an end-to-end business management solution for enterprise and mid-market organizations, including manufacturers, distributors, retailers, service organizations, and firms with diverse or vertically integrated operations across the global supply chain. An ERP system with an intuitive user interface, robust analytics, and flexible, familiar information delivery capabilities, Microsoft Dynamics AX serves a wide range of business intelligence needs right out of the box. And because it builds on the Microsoft technology stack, including Microsoft SQL Server® and SharePoint technologies, and is tightly integrated with Microsoft Office and other Microsoft desktop productivity solutions, it is uniquely positioned to help you solve today’s most pressing BI and performance management challenges.

Merit Solutions, a leading Microsoft Dynamics AX Consultant, is looking for a talented Microsoft Dynamics AX Consultant to join our rapidly growing organization!

Responsibilities

• Project Scope
• Analyze, define, and document client requirements.
• Assist in development of project scope, cost estimate and schedule.
• Project Delivery
  • Perform client-facing business process analysis, training, software configuration and other implementation processes as required.
  • Develop and implement creative solutions that drive increased business success for clients.
  • Execute our proven implementation methods and practices leading to successful outcomes for clients.
  • 50-70% travel.
• Client Relationships
  • Maintain all project documentation and client reporting.
  • Provide user training and create user documentation.
  • Provide post Go-live and on-going support as required.
  • Identify opportunities for new/added business and assist with closing these opportunities.
• Professional Development
  • Participate in company sponsored job related activities and training to further develop skill set.
  • Develop and meet annual personal goals for enhancing Microsoft solution offering skills.

Skills & Qualifications

• Education – Bachelor's degree in Business or IT-related discipline.
• Professional Experience – 2+ years of hands-on software implementation experience.
  • Microsoft Dynamics AX or other ERP implementation experience.

Learn more about Merit Solutions.

For consideration, please send your resume to hr@meritsolutions.com. Merit Solutions is an equal opportunity employer.

Microsoft Dynamics AX is designed to empower your people to be more productive and your systems to last longer, with the ability to scale to accommodate growth while delivering the insight you need to respond quickly in an ever-changing world of business.

Simple to Learn and Use
Simplicity is at the core of Microsoft Dynamics AX. It is easy to learn and use because it works like and with other familiar Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft Office. And Microsoft Dynamics AX works the way you work, so it’s easier for you and your employees to make better decisions and get more done. Simplicity is built into every aspect of your experience—from initial purchase and deployment to ongoing maintenance and upgrades.

Delivers Agility in the Face of Rapid Change
Today’s business landscape is changing at an ever-increasing pace. To stay ahead, you need a business management solution that is designed to help you meet evolving demands. Microsoft Dynamics AX delivers the agility you need to adapt new business processes and extend functionality quickly, making it easier to enter new markets, add capabilities, or reallocate existing investments. In addition, Merit Solutions offers Microsoft Dynamics AX Cloud ERP to give you flexibility to expand or contract as business conditions change.

Drives Value for Your Business
Microsoft Dynamics AX delivers value for your business in three important ways. First, you can increase your return on investment as you boost productivity and create new ways to control expenses, helping to drive profitability. Second, Microsoft Dynamics AX offers interoperability with the other technologies you already use in your organization to help lower your total cost of ownership. Finally, you can achieve maximum benefit from your technology investment through improved time to value, especially when you don’t want or need an extensive IT infrastructure.

Whether you choose an on-premises or a cloud ERP deployment model, Merit Solutions RapidOn Implementation Methodology can get you up and running quickly with tools to accelerate installation, set up and extend core functionality, and migrate data from your legacy systems. And there’s more. Microsoft Dynamics AX is backed by a commitment from Microsoft that includes a 10-year support life cycle for each major release—combined with an ongoing investment in research and development—so that you can grow your business with confidence, knowing that your business management solution can keep up with your ambition.

The cost of regulatory compliance can be significant, but the cost of failing to comply with legal requirements or mandates from customers can be far higher. An enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that enables your business to respond to external requirements or changing business conditions—and that helps you prove that these requirements have been met—is a critical ingredient for business success in a changing economic climate.

Are you looking for a solution that can help you transform compliance challenges into business benefits and accomplish these critical objectives?

• Strengthening your ability to comply with regulatory legislation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 21 CFR Part 11, the Food Safety Modernization Act, or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
• Enforcing compliance with company procedures or quality initiatives by automating workflows.
• Giving employees easy access to information tailored to their role within the company.
• Providing executives and managers with easy access to key risk indicators.
• Collecting and analyzing information from multiple departments and processes.
• Improving security and reducing risk by controlling access to sensitive information.
• Strengthening your auditing processes with automatic transaction recording.

Microsoft Dynamics AX provides the transparency, traceability, and accountability businesses need to comply with complex regulatory requirements, simplify compliance, and to manage risk. Here’s how:

• Providing easy-to-use tracking and tracing tools to ensure regulatory compliance.
• Giving employees an overview of business operations and role-tailored views of their work and tasks that need immediate attention.
• Creating internal controls to contain and monitor identified risks, while maintaining regulatory compliance.
• Providing one-stop access to key risk indicators.
• Ensuring compliance while speeding up approval processes by enabling remote users to enter electronic signatures.

Microsoft Dynamics AX Compliance Management gives you a cost-effective way to simplify the challenges of compliance by helping your organization improve internal controls and increase visibility into compliance-related processes and activities. By actively managing a balance between compliance requirements and agile business practices within the organization, organizations can realize the benefits of reduced risk, increased operational efficiency, and the continued building of a foundation on which to grow.

Accurate information about how your business is performing is important at any time - but in difficult times, it is absolutely essential. Getting the right information to the right person at the right time has never been more critical to your business. Finding the right enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that can bring insight and intelligence into your business is a must.

Are you looking for a solution that can accomplish these critical objectives?

• Giving employees quick insight into predefined views of data tailored to their jobs.
• Enabling employees to do more ad hoc analysis without engaging IT staff.
• Enabling sales people to create customized pricing while on the road or in customer's office.
• Increasing customer satisfaction and reducing costs by giving customers and field staff online ordering capabilities and round-the-clock visibility into order status.
• Providing real-time access to a common set of accurate business information and helping your business operate more efficiently.
• Giving you access to business information stored on employee computers, or on systems that don’t easily link with each other.
• Analyzing project or contract profitability more efficiently.
• Helping you quickly analyze all aspects of your business so that you can make better business decisions in high-risk situations.

If any of these objectives are in your business plan, Microsoft Dynamics AX can help. Microsoft Dynamics AX provides rich business intelligence capabilities to companies of all sizes, with specialized functionality for almost any industry. No matter what your business is, Microsoft Dynamics AX can erase boundaries between data silos and deliver the critical information needed for rapid, effective decision-making to key executives and staff, whether they’re on the road, in a customer's office, or at corporate headquarters.

Microsoft Dynamics AX can give you the business insight that will guide you to success. Here's how:

• Accurate, up-to-the minute information about product costs, sales trends, and profit margins to inform strategic decisions about where to spend money, how to grow revenue, and how to strengthen margins.
• Access to critical information about current sales—no matter where it's located.
• Integrated sales and revenue forecasts from subsidiaries and recent acquisitions—even data in disparate systems—into all-up company reports.
• Executive views of production schedules or resource availability on demand, without waiting for reports.

Business intelligence can mean the difference between an organization’s modest performance and real success. A business that can use its own data and information to help employees gain insight and make smart decisions will have a clear competitive advantage. Microsoft Dynamics AX's powerful BI capabilities make it easy for all employees—not just a select few—to access, work with, share, understand, and interpret data and information from across the organization.

To empower your entire organization with insight—at the personal, team, and organizational levels— business intelligence tools should be where your employees need them—on the desktop. Making BI tools accessible and easy to use no matter what application is used is paramount to making the most of data and information. Microsoft Dynamics AX provides extensive built-in BI functionality with capabilities that enhance productivity and facilitate collaboration.

Simplicity, ease of integration, and flexibility are Microsoft Dynamics AX hallmarks. And because Microsoft Dynamics AX can be integrated smoothly with other applications,  businesses can deliver essential intelligence throughout the entire organization. Businesses can also take advantage of their existing IT investments and grow and extend to meet changing needs, so that everyone throughout your organization is empowered to make better, more confident decisions.

Challenged to do more with less, many IT departments are finding that the cost of maintaining outdated, legacy business systems is simply too high. The cost of not having a system—or the wrong system—however, can be much higher. With the right tools in place, you can eliminate many of the costs associated with IT.

Control your IT costs with a business solution that can help you:

• More easily manage data during implementation and initial migration, as well as across disparate systems.
• Leverage common skill sets, helping to ease customization requirements and reduce training time for new IT staff.
• Increase productivity and efficiency by simplifying and streamlining common IT tasks.
• Reduce support requirements by eliminating duplicate data entry.
• Integrate your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with existing IT assets to increase productivity and maximize return on investment (ROI).

Microsoft Dynamics AX is built to help IT teams simplify and streamline common IT tasks, ease integration to help your business get the most out of its existing IT investments, and help reduce costs. Here’s how:

• Microsoft Dynamics AX runs on Microsoft products that you may already be using, such as Windows Server or Microsoft SQL Server. By reusing existing servers and licenses, your company may be able to lower its total cost of ownership.
• Extending the reach of ERP with a series of programmable tools that enable quick integration with outside data sources, such as Web services and legacy applications.
• The skills needed to deploy and maintain Microsoft Dynamics AX are readily available - often from your current IT staff.
• Handle custom configuration and modification easily by taking advantage of a model driven layered architecture and an object-oriented development environment.
• Providing employees with rich, self-service functionality and easy-to-use tools to ease the burden of tasks commonly placed on IT, such as updating personal information and reporting tasks. Quickly scale your ERP system to accommodate new companies or multiple sites.

Nucleus Research has found that Microsoft Dynamics AX customers achieve returns in areas of increased visibility, increased productivity, and reduced costs. 44% of Microsoft Dynamics AX Customers were able to reduce IT costs. Read the full report: The Real ROI of Microsoft Dynamics AX.

Feel free to use our Microsoft Dynamics AX ROI Calculator to calculate the potential annual savings you could achieve by implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX!

To work with miscellaneous charges, you must create miscellaneous charges codes. You create these miscellaneous charges codes in Accounts Payable and in Accounts Receivable in Microsoft Dynamics AX as follows:

• To create the miscellaneous charges codes in Accounts Payable, click Accounts Payable, expand Setup, expand Misc. Charges, and then click Misc. charges codes.
• To create the miscellaneous charges codes in Accounts Receivable, click Accounts Receivable, expand Setup, expand Misc. Charges, and then click Misc. charges codes.

The following are the codes that you can use when you configure miscellaneous charges codes.

In Accounts Payable

• The Item - Vendor charge code is used in purchase orders.
• The Ledger Account- Vendor (Expense - Vendor) charge code is used in purchase orders.
• The Ledger Account - Ledger Account (Expense - Ap Accrual) charge code is used in purchase orders.
• The Item - Ledger Account (Item - Ap Accrual) charge code is used in purchase orders and in purchase invoices.
  
  To use these charge codes in a purchase order, click Accounts Payable, click Purchase order, click Setup, and then click Misc. charges

To use the Item - Ledger Account (Item - Ap Accrual) charge code in a purchase invoice, click Accounts Payable, expand Inquiries, expand Journals, click Invoice, click Misc. charges, and then click Adjustment.

In Accounts Receivable

• The Customer - Ledger Account (Customer - Income/revenue) charge code is used in sales orders and in free text invoices.
• The Ledger Account - Ledger Account (Expense - Ap Accrual) charge code is used in sales orders and in free text invoices. To use these charge codes, click Accounts Receivable, click Sales order, click Setup, and then click Misc. charges.

NOTE: You cannot select the Item option when you configure miscellaneous charges in Accounts Receivable.

Charge codes for foreign currency

When you use foreign currency in miscellaneous charges, you must consider the configuration of the miscellaneous charges code that is used in the transaction to achieve the expected result.

In Accounts Payable

• Use the Item - Vendor charge code when the currency that is used by the miscellaneous charges code is the same currency that is used in the purchase order. The exchange rate is taken from the purchase invoice posting date. The exchange rate cannot be changed.
• Use the Ledger Account - Vendor (Expense - Vendor) charge code when the currency that is used by the miscellaneous charges code is the same currency that is used in the purchase order. The exchange rate is taken from the purchase invoice posting date. The exchange rate cannot be changed.
• Use the Item - Ledger Account (Item - Ap Accrual) charge code when the currency that is used by the miscellaneous charges code may differ from the currency that is used in the purchase order. The exchange rate is taken from one of the following:
• The exchange rate is taken from the purchase invoice posting date. You cannot change the exchange rate.
• The exchange rate is taken from the invoice adjustment after you specify the currency and the exchange rate date.
• Use the Ledger Account - Ledger Account (Expense - Ap Accrual) charge code when the currency that is used by the miscellaneous charges code may differ from the currency that is used in the purchase order. The exchange rate is taken from the purchase invoice posting date. You cannot change this date even though the currencies in the purchase order and in the miscellaneous charges are different.

In Accounts Receivable

• Use the Customer- Ledger Account (Customer - Income/revenue) charge code when the currency that is used by the miscellaneous charges code is the same currency that is used in the sales order or in the free-text invoice. The exchange rate is taken from the sales invoice posting date. The exchange rate cannot be changed.
• Use the Ledger Account - Ledger Account (Expense - Ap Accrual) charge code when the currency that is used by the miscellaneous charges code may differ from the currency that is used in the sales order or in the free-text invoice.

The exchange rate is taken from the posting date of the sales invoice or from the posting date of the free-text invoice. The exchange rate cannot be changed in the currencies in the sales order.