Solutions Corner

MIcrosoft Dynamics GP Best practices

Microsoft Dynamics GP (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions-Great Plains) offers integrated business applications and services that allow small and midsize organizations and divisions of large enterprises to connect employees, customers, and suppliers. The financial management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, and analytics applications work with Microsoft products such as Office and Windows to streamline processes across an entire organization.
Key components of the solution include:

  • Financial management
  • Manufacturing and distribution
  • Human resources management
  • Project accounting
  • E-commerce
  • Field service management
  • Customization and integration tools
  • Portal and reporting tools
  • Microsoft Dynamics GP is available in a standard edition for smaller organizationsand a professional edition for mid-market customers or divisions of larger organizations

The biggest challenges Microsoft Dynamics GP customers faced in achieving ROI from the solution were in effectively training and getting users to adopt the solution and in cleaning and converting data. Companies that were most successful followed similar strategies for partner and project management and training.


Partner selection
Most companies were very satisfied with the consulting partner they used to implement the solution; however, some companies found their needs would have been better met by an implementation partner that focused on working with customers more similar to them in size. For example, one customer using a large consulting organization found that although its consultants were able to effectively manage the deployment and deliver results, they weren’t “low end” enough to support ongoing questions or challenges that came up after the initial deployment – so the company switched to a smaller organizations for ongoing needs.
Organizations considering a Microsoft Dynamics GP deployment should keep in mind that their implementation partner requires careful consideration as well.
Checking references with similar scale and scope of deployment and establishing how much ongoing support will be delivered before you begin will help you to manage expectations and consulting expenses appropriately.

Project management
Having a clear timeline with specific milestones for customization, integration, testing, training, and deployment can reduce the risk associated with a deployment and ensure there are no surprises on the delivery date. Customers that developed their own project timeline and then managed consultants to meet were more successful in keeping their projects on time and on budget than those that didn’t.

Training
The biggest challenge Microsoft Dynamics GP customers had was in ensuring effective user adoption. In some cases, where companies were moving from “green screens” to personal computer access, training had to start with how to use a mouse and navigate through windows. In another case, a company made a
significant investment in developing a user interface that would be easier for users to navigate. Winning training strategies include:
Pilot. Giving users the opportunity to practice on the solution before it went live helped reduce the fear factor and gave companies insight on minor interface changes that could be made to smooth adoption.
Pace. You’ll want to make sure your trainer has reasonable expectations for users comprehension and moves at a pace that’s not over their heads. This may mean separate training classes for some users, or a train the trainer strategy that enables intensive training for some users and more basic training
for general users.
Promote. One company found in the course of deploying Microsoft Dynamics GP that they could realistically reduce the number of pricing configuration options for customers using the solution – reducing the salespeople’s time needed to get approval for orders. It promoted this real savings to users to
gain support for the other process changes the solution required.

If you wish to ask EcomNets about consulting assistance for Enterprise Applications, call 1-866-410-9400 or email support@ecomnets.com