Merit Matters Blog

We recently asked the CEO of a large multinational organization why they were changing their ERP system. “To improve our business processes,” he replied, stating one of the most widespread drivers companies have to change their ERP systems. As you evaluate your ERP system with regard to business processes you should first assess the level to which any bad business processes are forced on you by your ERP system; and then identify the number of disparate and sidebar systems users have created to work around your ERP. If you find significant process issues in these areas, a change to a modern ERP system that can help you differentiate your business may be beneficial to your organization.

The functionality and capabilities inherent in your ERP software have a big impact on your business processes. As you assess the effectiveness of your current system, you must first review your core business processes to determine if they enable maximum efficiency and productivity. If they do not, investigate whether the software system imposes constraints on your processes. Are your users saying “I do this because that’s the way the system makes me do it”?

When ERP systems were introduced 20 years ago, they were rigid in their functionality. They forced companies to conform business processes to the dictates of the software, or required them to significantly customize the software to meet their specific requirements. However, business processes evolve over time while the software remains static. This causes a disparity between the way the software was originally implemented and the new requirements of the business. This evolution continues until you get to the point that the processes in the system actually constrict the ability of users to efficiently run your business. In common with the CEO mentioned above, this is a major reason why your company might end up implementing a newer, innovative, and proactive ERP system.

New enterprise ERP software applications like Microsoft Dynamics AX offer flexible business processes based on best practices and process tools such as workflow. Workflow is the ability to set up and change process flows within the system. It includes many capabilities such as electronic routing
of documents, event notification, and automated processes based on triggers. Many ERP vendors offer flexible rules-based workflows
that allow businesses to create custom processes based on their operations. These workflows can be changed as their preferences and requirements evolve. In some of the more sophisticated systems, power users are even able to diagram and implement new workflows with drag-and-drop technology. Such flexibility allows the ERP system to evolve with changes in business processes and practices in your company and industry.

As you assess the effect of your current ERP software on your business processes, you should consider the following questions:

• Do your current business processes decrease efficiency and productivity?
• Are they in place to make up for inefficiencies in the ERP system?
• Have they been dictated by the system because of lack of functionality?
• Have your business requirements changed over the years making the reasons you selected your current system no longer valid?
• Have users created many sidebar and workaround systems outside the ERP?
  

Implementation of a flexible ERP system like allows your company to take advantage of new capabilities, functionality, and fresh ideas. An implementation partner that understands business process optimization and is industry expert is an excellent resource for efficiently implementing the system and effectively setting up your business processes. Selection and implementation of a modern ERP system can reduce manual processes, eliminate redundancy, and reduce paper documentation giving your company the opportunity to:

• Review all business processes in place and determine which are required, which can be modified, and which can be eliminated.
• Identify and eliminate redundancy and manual data entry.
  
• Standardize business processes across all departments.
• Adopt the best practices available in new software to obtain greater efficiency over the current ways of doing business.
• Make use of flexible workflow functionality to take advantage of automated business processes, document routing, events, and alerts.

All businesses at one time or another have to weigh the costs and benefits of retaining an older ERP system against the costs and benefits of selecting and implementing a new one. Legacy systems, although on older technology, provide companies a level of comfort—comfort that is likely at the sacrifice of increased relevant functionality and technology.

Merit Solutions believes that many organizations are at a point of profound transformation that won’t be sufficiently addressed via a patchwork of business solutions. That's why we are committed to helping your business be ready for what’s next with the most comprehensive range of integrated solutions today and the most complete vision for the future.

Empowering Your People

For your people, we offer an unparalleled range of integrated, connected solutions that help provide a seamless experience across people’s personal work lives. Our approach is to deliver solutions that are integrated by design across devices and services. From productivity, collaboration, and business apps, to devices and security, our goal is to deliver a connected experience that works together seamlessly and naturally, the way people expect it to work. The result? Get more done, faster, without limits.

We live in an amazing time for technology. At home, when we use our personal devices, we’ve become accustomed to a highly connected experience where all of our apps and information are at our fingertips and the experience has become highly intuitive. It’s easy to watch movies, read books, play games, and share photos and documents. We also know that people consume information in a different way depending on the device they are using—tablets, PCs, or even business whiteboards. In each case, the Microsoft business platform makes it easy to personalize the experience and get it just right. By choosing the Microsoft platform, your company's devices and applications will truly work together - and these connected devices will give you the same version of the truth regardless of the device you are using.

Maximizing IT Flexibility

Our IT customers are entering a new era - a new era for the way they manage and deploy applications and devices. Between the consumerization of IT and the move to the cloud, a lot of what IT provided, from deployment to systems integration, is being radically revised and simplified. Throughout this transformation, we are here to help our customers maximize the return on your IT existing investment and best position you for the future. Our goal is to enable people to use the devices they want to use in the places they want to work - while also enabling enterprises to protect corporate information.

At the same time, we know that you will have more than just Microsoft solutions in your business, and so we are experienced at building bridges across technology. We believe this builds choice, drives innovation, and creates opportunities.

Accelerating your Business

Finally, we’re committed to helping you maximize the return on your investments in Microsoft solutions. Whether that means saving money, growing revenue, attracting and retaining customers, or driving innovation.

In today’s business climate, people expect the technology they use at work to be as simple as the technology they use at home. Today’s technology is expanding the possibilities for connecting people and helping businesses be more proactive and dynamic to change. For example…

• Across your business, we can help you foster a culture of innovation with a connected supply chain platform that embraces today’s social trends and makes it easier for people to communicate, whether through text, voice, or video.
• We can also help you maximize business performance with technology that enables people to make smarter, faster decisions with democratized business analytics tools and the power of big data. And this same technology can also help you reduce costs.

In summary, Merit Solutions offers companies an unparalleled experience across today’s devices, while maximizing IT flexibility and providing the business platform and process optimization services that can truly accelerate your business.

Please comment below if you have any questions or comments as we’d certainly like to continue this conversation and find more ways that we can continue to help companies differentiate their 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!

Merit Solutions has spent a lot of time over the past couple of months demoing our Microsoft Dynamics GP Risk Management Suite and its capabilities to new prospects while providing training to existing clients looking to upgrade. In both situations, two questions always seem to pop up:

1. How do we make sure that we get (got) the roles and users right?
2. How do we make sure we don't create a burden with tracking too many changes?

Interestingly enough, the answer to both is very simple. The implementation - not so simple.

1. The first thing that each client has to ensure is that their business processes are efficient and that their ERP system is setup in a way to support those processes. The Risk Management Suite will comply to any set of rules you require - helping you increase your efficiency while making sure you comply with regulations. To receive the maximum value, efficient business processes have to be in place - and, often, that is not an easy task to complete.
2. As for the second question, we recommend that tracking changes should be limited to business critical fields, tables, and processes, as that will make the system easier to implement, changes easier to track and will help a company meet compliance regulations.

On occasion, companies tend to track everything, including tables with high volume of transactions. While this is possible to do with Audit Trails, as with any other Microsoft Dynamics GP table, this is not recommended, as it will affect performance of your SQL Server, which will in turn affect all users and systems that use it.

In order to generate the highest value from the Risk Management Suite, we suggest that companies craft a smart tracking plan prior to implementation with procedures and policies in place that limit adding new tables to Audit Trails tracking without a strong business reason why.

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.

Modern business solutions 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 part of Microsoft’s mission is to drive connections with people, with customers and with business partners across processes, data and the ecosystem in which organizations operate. This commitment to 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. Microsoft business solutions include everything from email to voice to video to presence to social – all designed with a singular goal of giving people and organizations more effective ways of:

• Leveraging the exploding number of channels to connect with customers at the time and place of their choosing;
• Creating an inclusive, listening organization by extending collaboration scenarios that exist internally to include customers;
• Evolving from an organization that engages with individual customers to one that leverages the crowd to benefit the brand

Microsoft’s commitment to connected organizations is about removing the impediments that generate friction within the organization and providing people with a broader array of insights and actions across internal and external connections. With greater transparency, agility, and insight, people can make better, more informed decisions, and transform their organization into a Dynamic Business.

It is the impassioned individual equipped with the right tools that enables companies to stay ahead of the competition in this world of constant change. Microsoft transforms organizations into Dynamic Businesses that enable people to do their best work no matter where they are in the organization. We are already seeing the impact as customers make the transformation, and Microsoft is committed to delivering modern business solutions, built using the broad portfolio of Microsoft technology, with intentional simplicity as a core design element. The solutions are innovative, proactive business applications that help users work in new, more effective ways. Moreover, they deliver tools for a connected organization to drive data to insight to action any time anywhere, with the flexibility to deploy and consume business workloads and suites in a way that delivers on today’s needs while also providing the ultimate flexibility necessary to be ready for the future.

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.

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.

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!

Automate business processes and improve productivity by helping your people manage and track key business events. With Microsoft Dynamics AX, people across your organization can create and standardize workflows and set alert rules that deliver automatic notifications for critical tasks and actions.

Benefits of Alerts and Workflows:

• Easily automate business processes. Define custom workflows to standardize and streamline your organization’s business processes and stay agile at the same time.
• Simplify compliance management. Create workflows to address current risk and compliance scenarios, and help ensure that employees are following your organization’s best practices.
• Quickly create workflows using templates. Use out-of-the-box templates to quickly configure workflows for common business tasks and activities, without the need for developer assistance.
• Proactively monitor business activity with alerts. Easily create alerts to help monitor key events from any Microsoft Dynamics AX record or from a predefined template. With automatic notifications, your people are aware of bottlenecks and can take quick action to resolve delays.
• Provide flexible delivery for alerts. Give people the notification information they need in a variety of ways—as popup windows; e-mail messages through Microsoft Office Outlook or through their Role Centers via the Microsoft Dynamics AX client; or by using Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX.

View our Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Workflows Demo.

Streamline processes across the organization by defining workflows that address current business needs and that reflect your organization’s best practices. Help ensure that all tasks and approvals occur in the correct sequence, and configure escalation policies to prevent workflows from stalling. You can easily reassign tasks or approvals to another user. Review the automatically captured workflow history to verify the current status and evaluate workflow performance.

You can extend the functionality of custom workflows to include automatic notifications, which inform specific individuals about items that require attention. By simply checking their Role Centers, people can quickly see notifications, prioritize their work, and respond quickly.

Employees can set alert rules with easy-to-use templates that are designed to help manage business priorities. For example, you can define an alert to send notification when certain criteria are met, such as when a customer shipment arrives or when an account payment is delayed by a certain number of days. Users with administrative rights can also create, modify, and delete rules for others. For example, a warehouse lead might set an alert for a warehouse employee that sends notification of an impending delivery.

For our 500TH POST on the Merit Matters Blog, let's talk about manufacturing insight.

Accurate information and the ability to respond with fast, informed decisions are key requisites for agile, low-cost manufacturing. Unfortunately, many manufacturers continue to operate with aging and unconnected information systems. Growth through acquisition, plus the valid need for custom manufacturing processes, often results in an inability to gather and roll up data from diverse manufacturing execution and control systems.

Consequently, many manufacturing organizations struggle with insight issues such as:

• Manual forms and unstructured data not readily integrated or understood in relation to other data and systems.
• Limited visibility of manufacturing data in the context of overall enterprise processes and information.
• Critical machine, performance, tracking, and status information trapped in silos.
• Labor-intensive and untimely report generation.

The resulting lack of visibility of key data can greatly hinder an organization’s ability to implement common and shared business processes, practice lean manufacturing, or even understand machine center or process profitability. That’s why many companies are recognizing the need to move to a common and shared manufacturing solution architecture that enables implementation of shared best practices while addressing the needs of local language, regulatory compliance, and integration requirements of each operating unit or location.

When companies integrate data to make a single version of the truth visible across the organization, they can deploy an appropriate manufacturing solution in either an on-premise or cloud model to:

• Support the business across manufacturing, back office, and managerial processes.
• Provide an integration platform for manufacturing execution and control systems.
• Deliver accurate information to people who need it for proactive decisions and actions.
• Facilitate the standardization of data and the optimization of processes and value.
• Help reduce cycle times and costs through the elimination of errors, redundant or manual tasks, and data delays.
• Link to existing or corporate systems to better understand overall performance and plan continuous improvement.

With accurate, integrated data, business managers can more easily measure and analyze performance, run “what-if” scenarios and simulations, and better predict potential problems. When circumstances change, the right business management solution can provide fast access to the historical and plan data needed to assess the right course.

The end-to-end integration of Microsoft Dynamics AX means the right information can be available to the right people at the right time, with less data reentry and fewer manual procedures.

• Real-time, consolidated views of customer account and historical information, product data, and production or delivery status can help your sales and service teams step up their responsiveness to customers and deliver faster, more accurate quotes, pricing, and order status reports.
• Detailed inventory and replenishment information based on actual production and materials use data can help you reduce inventories, optimize purchasing processes, and gain leverage with suppliers.
• Automated alerts and workflows can help ensure prompt actions and keep processes on track when conditions change, while automatic posting of materials consumption, work in process, and finished production costs directly to the general ledger means less time spent on routine financial tasks.
• Comprehensive traceability and audit control can help you document components or ingredients and more easily manage source material tracking and chain-of-control compliance.
• Remote access to company data and processes, either directly or through the Web, boosts the productivity of field employees.

Microsoft Dynamics AX helps multisite businesses operate more efficiently with immediate connectivity across locations by using one business application and a single business object data model. You can, for example, create and update sales and purchase orders across your locations in real time. Minimize stockholding costs by making stock-on-hand inquiries in all subsidiaries and sourcing raw materials across locations. Support for multiple companies, locations, languages, currencies, and tax and legal requirements for more than 30 countries is built in. Employees, customers, and suppliers can work in their own languages and currencies, while smooth conversion and reporting functions help ensure full insight and visibility at the highest levels of the organization.

Microsoft Dynamics AX enables companies to reduce time to delivery and increase customer satisfaction by automating procedures and improving connections between all company departments, from sales and customer service through production and delivery to accounting—the entire “order to cash” process.

In a global buyers’ market influenced by low-wage competitors in developing countries, the need to reduce costs drives many manufacturers to seek efficiencies anywhere they can find them, including reductions in inventories, outsourcing, and new partnerships with downstream service and third-party logistics providers. Each can represent an effective strategy for cost or quality control, but also introduce new challenges of transparency and communication. Global manufacturers need to connect not only with their own network of facilities, but also with other key supply chain partners. And as more warehouse and logistics management moves outside the scope of internal control, companies deal with greater risk of misplaced goods, costly transportation mistakes, and traceability errors or gaps through multi-tier distribution systems.

Meeting this - or any other challenges already discussed in previous articles - demands much greater two-way communication and collaboration throughout an organization and between all participants in its supply chain, despite increasing supply chain complexity. Knowledge that exists anywhere in the company or the supply chain must be easily accessible to partners both upstream and downstream so they can respond to changes, improve decision making, and safeguard customer satisfaction.

Microsoft Dynamics AX offers a wealth of tools to streamline and automate processes throughout your supply chain operations, including purchasing, warehouse, and logistics activities. One-time data entry and real-time visibility—both internally and with trading partners in the supply chain—can mean fewer errors and less wasted time. Extend the transparent data delivered by Microsoft Dynamics AX to the people and organizations that help your supply chain succeed. By giving customers, suppliers, and logistics providers direct access to order status, inventory records, load plans, shipment information—whatever data is needed—you can save time, avoid redundant data entry, automate supply chain interactions, respond more quickly to change, and increase customer satisfaction.

With Microsoft Dynamics AX, businesses can:

• Optimize warehouse operations from automated receiving and directed put-away through timely materials draws and electronic Kanban systems.
• Synchronize the movement of goods and materials to achieve just-in-time shop floor or distribution center provisioning.
• Consolidate pick/pack activities, generate labels effortlessly, and easily prepare shipments or build loads.
• Automatically create manifests and send advance shipping notifications (ASNs) and proof of delivery.
• Track shipments and provide customers with self-service access to the status of their goods.
• Reduce order-to-cash and procurement-to-cash cycles by eliminating manual procedures and data delays between supply chain activities and invoicing.

Proactive event management keeps managers and employees on top of the flow of goods and information and helps avoid costly exceptions and missed deliveries. People internally and throughout the supply chain can receive automated alerts and notifications for a variety of conditions ranging from cost changes and order updates to purchase order approval and task completion. When such information quickly reaches the appropriate people and partners, they can take action to keep deliveries on track and provide the service that builds customer loyalty. And since Microsoft Dynamics AX works like and with your familiar Microsoft Office system software, including Outlook, you can save time and money on training and people can get working more effectively after a shorter learning curve. People in your organization can extract and share product and operational information by using familiar desktop tools such as Microsoft Office Word, Excel, Microsoft Office Project, Microsoft Office Visio, and Microsoft Office PowerPoint.

When your business management solution is familiar and easy to use, your people are free to focus on customer satisfaction. And when you and your trade partners can swap information in formats and files that they use themselves, everyone is better able to add value and respond to changes.

According to a study from AMR Research, on average only 15 percent of employees are licensed to use their company’s ERP solution and 46 percent of ERP licenses remain unused. Because a limited portion of the organization is using the solution, the potential for productivity benefits and growth remains untapped.

Why aren’t ERP solutions adopted more broadly, by more employees, and for more of their daily tasks? Unfortunately, these solutions are often identified as too difficult to use; too rigid; or both. In one of their reports, Forrester Research concluded 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 negative impact of low usability can include increased training times, a lack of user adoption, and a decrease in workplace productivity. Additionally, when people don’t use the ERP system, mission-critical processes can be compromised because there is no access to or enforcement of standard operations and best practices. Furthermore, individuals often track pertinent business information using separate spreadsheets because using a centralized system is too complex and time-consuming.

Although user productivity can be difficult to calculate, it should be a critical factor when evaluating, purchasing, and implementing an ERP solution. Overall, ERP solutions have demonstrably improved user productivity. Research conducted in 2007 by Keystone Strategy included an analysis of widely accepted usability tests, such as Software Usability Measurement Inventory (SUMI), which showed that business productivity is a product of six factors. These factors include:

• Collaboration, including the ability to submit work for review, obtain comments or approval from others, and share information and tasks with trade partners.
• Business insight, including visibility across departments and real-time access to accurate, relevant data in context of the process or decision where it will be used.
• Flexibility, including the ability to depart from transactional tasks to manage problems or exceptions.
• Usability, including easy navigation, the number of steps required in tasks, instructions and prompts that are helpful rather than cryptic, and the user’s overall command of functionality.
• Familiarity, including how easy and intuitive the system is to learn and the sense that information and tasks correlate with the user’s job role and activities.
• Transactional efficiency, including speed and reliability in accomplishing or automating common, repetitive tasks.

Research has shown that after an ERP solution is implemented, users often struggle to learn how to use it and find the information they need. Complaints range from “it’s hard to learn” and “it’s not integrated with my other tools” to “it’s hard to extract information” and “it’s not flexible enough for real-world situations.” Such objections, which are addressed by the six dimensions of user productivity, account in part for the low user adoption rate discovered in the AMR Research study. These challenges are a reflection of solutions designed with a focus on transactional and functional processes, rather than user productivity and comprehensive, end-to-end business processes.

Microsoft Dynamics AX provides the flexibility you need to optimize user productivity, improve organizational agility, and accommodate future growth. Role Centers and the RoleTailored user experience can be easily personalized for individual users to streamline tasks and speed decision-making. A variety of options for accessing business information - including Enterprise Portal and the Microsoft Dynamics Client for Microsoft Office - make it easy to extend Microsoft Dynamics AX functionality and productivity tools to workers across the entire organization and throughout the supply chain. Full integration with Microsoft technologies and products helps you maximize existing IT investments and minimize user training time, resulting in a low total cost of ownership (TCO). The flexible, scalable platform gives you the ability to easily add users or functionality as your business expands. In addition, the solution is readily tailored and can be extended / adapted precisely to your needs now and in the future.

Learn how you can increase productivity and efficiency with Microsoft Dynamics AX.

The easier a business management solution is to use, the faster people can to adopt it. The right solution can improve business productivity and lead to a fast return on investment (ROI) by enhancing collaboration, extending contextual business insight to people who need it, and increasing the reach of the solution so that a larger percentage of employees can gain access to it. Finally, a comprehensive solution can support the needs of both frequent and infrequent users. When assessing business management solutions, it is important to find solutions that are:

• Familiar and comfortable. The right solution works the way your people work. Minimize training time and encourage user adoption with a familiar interface, navigational features, and views, such as desktop views, menus, or Web browser interactivity.
• Focused. Simplify information overload by providing individuals with only the tasks and information most relevant to their jobs. 
• Proactive. Increase efficiency with the ability to prompt users with urgent tasks, create alerts for items needing special attention, and automatically deliver meaningful performance results. 
• Integrated. Connect disparate legacy systems, manufacturing control systems, and business applications to save time and enhance communication. Integrate real-time data and documents internally, across organizational boundaries, and with trading partners. Tight integration also enhances the connectivity and transparency of business processes and information that cross job functions and departments, helping organizations achieve end-to-end visibility and process automation.
• Flexible. Improve your organization’s ability to respond to change by adapting business processes and functionality to meet your unique business needs. A flexible, scalable solution can adapt and grow as your business changes by enabling you to add more users, helping you achieve a low total cost of ownership (TCO).

Microsoft Dynamics AX is an end-to-end business management solution for organizations with diverse operations across the global supply chain. Because it works and feels like familiar Microsoft desktop productivity tools, and is tightly integrated with Microsoft technologies and products, including Microsoft Office and Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Dynamics AX is uniquely positioned to solve common user productivity challenges:

• Deliver RoleTailored Information with Role Centers. Role Centers are personalized home pages that are based on an individual’s role within the organization. Role Centers enhance personal productivity by presenting job-specific information to help people prioritize their work and focus on the most relevant information and tasks. Role Centers are based on Microsoft SharePoint® technology, so they are accessible through the Microsoft Dynamics AX client or by using Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX, which further enhances flexibility and control. You can easily personalize information and reconfigure your Role Center based on work preferences or current business needs. Role Centers provide current ERP data, and they can present information from other applications, such as an agenda, a document library, or community site news items.
• Empower Your People with a Familiar Solution. Microsoft Dynamics AX looks and works like familiar Microsoft Office products, including Microsoft Office Outlook and Windows Internet Explorer, helping to minimize training time. The streamlined user interface presents information in a simple, accessible way, requiring fewer open windows and reducing the number of clicks required to get to the right information. The intuitive, user-friendly navigation enables users to quickly open their Role Center, application areas, lists, or forms. The Navigation pane streamlines information by displaying the modules for which the user has access permissions, and it provides an at-a-glance reminder of the current selection. Users can speed routine work with My Favorites, and with the ability to add shortcuts to the forms, reports, and queries used most.
• Increase Productivity, Prioritize Tasks, and Keep Processes Moving. By proactively presenting information where and when it is needed, Microsoft Dynamics AX can help companies save time, ensure timely response to change or unexpected events, and keep critical business processes on track. A unified Work List provides a single, at-a-glance reference to items that require the user’s attention, including circumstances or changes that have triggered an alert, and actions or approvals required by standard workflows. Task cues provide a visual aid that prioritizes tasks and prompts necessary actions, helping to ensure that processes stay on track and that the most important activities are clearly identifiable. And configurable alerts can appear as pop-up windows, as e-mail messages in Outlook, in Role Centers, or in Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX.
• Enhance Connectivity and Collaboration. As a comprehensive business management solution, Microsoft Dynamics AX helps you connect related data and functions, enhance collaboration, and automate processes across your business so people can work more efficiently. Microsoft Dynamics AX includes workflows which support management of end-to-end processes, such as order fulfillment, that span multiple business functions, improving efficiency and coordination between departments. Users can also quickly document processes by using the Task Recorder. When activated, the recorder automatically tracks and records your actions in the application for a given business process. And because Microsoft Dynamics AX works closely with the other Microsoft Office products your people already use, they can easily share information inside and outside the organization.
• Improve Agility with an Adaptable, Long-Term Solution. Microsoft Dynamics AX provides the agility and flexibility you need to optimize user productivity, improve organizational agility, and accommodate future growth. A variety of options for accessing business information make it easy to extend Microsoft Dynamics AX functionality and productivity tools to workers across the entire organization and throughout the supply chain. And full integration with Microsoft technologies and products helps you maximize existing IT investments and minimize user training time, resulting in a low total cost of ownership (TCO). The flexible, scalable platform gives you the ability to easily add users or functionality as your business expands.

Empower your people with a business management solution that places them at the crux of business operations and frees them to exercise the creativity, agility, and collaboration that can drive success. As an end-to-end business management solution built on the Microsoft technology stack, Microsoft Dynamics AX provides an adaptable, scalable solution with familiar tools to help you improve productivity, automate business processes, achieve the insight needed to drive success, and manage growth and change.

Sales productivity is built on twin pillars: efficiency and effectiveness. To be a high-performing company, the sales organization requires both. The key isn’t to bring on more people to make your company grow. The key is making the ones you have more efficient and effective.

Efficient means they are discriminating in how they spend their time, less on activities such as:

• Account maintenance
• Administration
• Travel
• Planning

Effective means they spend more time on high-value sales activities and are more effective at those activities, such as:

• Needs identification
• Solution development
• Product demos
• Proposal development
• Closing (negotiating, pricing, contracting)

A survey of 841 sales professionals at 500 companies with large sales forces (2,000 employees) showed that salespeople at high-performing companies spend 40% more time each year with their best potential customers and 30% less time on administrative tasks compared to salespeople at low-performing companies. High-performing companies demonstrated faster sales growth and better financial performance compared to industry peers. (Driving Profitable Sales Growth: 2006/2007 Report on Sales Effectiveness, Watson Wyatt Worldwide)

With any challenge comes opportunity. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is uniquely positioned to provide measurable business benefits for sales organizations.

Specifically, Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps organizations:

• Increase time with customers.
• Improve close rates.
• Shorten sales cycles.
• Achieve real-time insight.

Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM.