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.

Traditional business applications evolved as passive, backward-looking systems of record.

Microsoft Dynamics AX already changes that model today, introducing embedded, declarative workflow that brings an understanding of business process optimization into the application and helps guide users forward through their work. When this is combined with pervasive embedded business intelligence that transforms the data captured in the system into insight empowering better decisions, the system becomes a more active, forward looking partner for the people who drive a business toward success.

Microsoft Dynamics AX also delivers innovative application scenarios today. These include, for example, a solution in retail that offers out-of-the-box connection from point of sale to the headquarters business system, and that unifies web and brick and mortar commerce in a single view of customer and transactions; as well as a system for manufacturers that supports discrete, process and lean manufacturing models in a single system instance, with planning and costing capabilities that work across all three models.

This is only the beginning. Microsoft Dynamics AX will evolve to embed constraint optimization and machine learning to deliver even more advanced, forward-looking capability to Dynamic Businesses. For example, Microsoft is currently developing systems that combine transaction history with information about key factors like weather, traffic, local event calendars and demographics to optimize daily order quantities for a retailer, minimizing out of stock and waste to drive greater profitability.

The four IT megatrends of the next decade - “Big data,” social connectedness, cloud computing, and mobility - will present new opportunities for business applications insight, and open up a whole new range of possibilities for business. Modern business applications won’t just make individuals and organizations smarter, but will go beyond this to new directions and new levels of impact we are just beginning to imagine.

Driving impact has always required insight but most systems today only focus on retrospective views and data. They are passive, reactive, and backward looking. Modern business applications will at the onset be proactive. They will inform with insights and possible actions while constantly evolving to point to what comes next.

Data continues to grow exponentially as does the ability to derive meaning from it. Social commentary has accelerated the pace of the review cycle, with likes, links and tweets providing instant clues to success or failure. Capturing this data and being able to tap into its rich and valuable insight is a new requirement.

Microsoft Dynamics AX helps people not only integrate and understand these new data sets, but also get to better answers with suggested actions so they can continually improve business performance. It achieves this by enabling people to calculate and/or recalculate business possibilities in real time. By focusing on connected, forward-looking systems, we can allow people to access actionable information with greater speed and agility – enabling businesses to respond more efficiently, effectively and proactively to changing market conditions.

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!

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.

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!

In today's cost-competitive world, Life Sciences companies require ways to sustain enhanced employee productivity. However, in order to truly empower employee productivity, these companies need software solutions that can give their people easy access to accurate, real-time information.

MAXLife ERP enables true productivity for Life Sciences companies by providing a software solution that employees will actually use. With MAXLife, employees are provided a familiar interface that quickly connects internal people—and even external business partners—to the right information and tools to work faster and smarter.

With a tightly integrated Life Sciences Software solution, Pharmaceutical, Medical Device, and Biotechnology companies can successfully:

• Eliminate time-consuming and error-prone data re-entry resulting from multiple, disparate systems.
• Help task workers communicate and collaborate across locations, departments, time zones and organizations.
• Enable employees to work with tools they already know and understand, such as Microsoft Office Outlook and Excel.
• Provide self-service functionality, enabling employees to perform a range of tasks that they would otherwise defer to IT.
• Provide role-based access to information, consolidating common tasks to a single screen.

MAXLife supports your people in their day-to-day tasks, helping them improve communication and collaboration and discover better ways to work with one another. By tying people to the right process in their organization, Life Sciences companies can now achieve new levels of personal productivity and collaboration.

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.

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.