"There’s no doubt we are moving from a growth economy to more of a cost-control economy,” says Jan Sillemann, director of global product management for Microsoft Dynamics NAV, one of Microsoft’s ERP and supply chain management solutions.

“It’s probably going to last for a while so logically there is even greater emphasis on internal efficiency, optimising processes, increasing productivity and the cost side of the business for most companies in the months ahead and maybe longer,” he says.

“In this respect, ERP and supply chain management solutions play a very significant role. In particular, They can provide customers a solution that offers them a very short return on investment, because that’s what a number of companies need to focus on.”

Microsoft launched Dynamics NAV 2009, the latest version of the solution, into the New Zealand market on December 1.

This example of the NAV 2009 user interface shows the Role Centre for a staff member working in a shipping and receiving role.

The staff member’s job involves managing the shipping and receiving of goods, and verifying goods movements against purchase orders.

The navigation pane shows the manager the areas in NAV which are relevant to their role.

The “Open Pick and Put-away” graphic gives a quick overview of the current day’s ‘receive’ and ‘ship’ orders. Outlook can also be accessed directly from the Role Centre.

The company says a key feature of the new release is the inclusion of personalised “Role Centres” – a concept Microsoft introduced earlier in 2008 with the release of another of Microsoft’s business management solutions, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009.

Corresponding to 21 typical jobs in organisations, the Role Centres give employees access to tools, alerts and efficiency capabilities tailored to the needs of their particular role from within a single location.

“We have for quite some time talked about what we call role-tailored design, or role-tailored user experience – really making sure that what we deliver is focused on the specific role, not overloading them with too many processes and screens, and providing them with what is needed by each individual user to do their role effectively,” says Sillemann.

“We’ve looked at what it is that takes place in organisations from both a process and a people perspective to define the different roles, all the way from the CEO to the CFO, sales order people, finance clerks, people in the warehouse, people in dispatch and production, and so on.”

Customisable roles
Chris Caren, Microsoft Dynamics’ global general manager, product management and marketing, says the roles within Role Centres can be further personalised by customers or Microsoft Dynamics partners.

“Also embedded in the Role Centres are sophisticated reporting and business intelligence capabilities, based on SQL Server Reporting Services, which enable employees to drill down into data to identify trends and generate business insights, and monitor how they’re tracking against key performance indicators.”

Caren says the new BI capabilities take advantage of the SQL Server database layer Microsoft has introduced into NAV 2009 as part of a comprehensive retooling of the solution’s architecture.

“In addition, we’ve created a set of Web services, based on the open .NET platform, which will enable partners and customers themselves to integrate data and business logic from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 with other applications to support a wide range of scenarios,” he says.

“Businesses wanting to deploy call centre functionality for a telemarketing campaign, for instance, can create a web service that makes customer data from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 available to callers without having to furnish them with full-blown access rights to the solution.”

Cutting implementation costs
Antony Zigliani, Fujitsu New Zealand’s NAV development manager, says local ERP implementations tend to be relatively complex because of the level of functionality New Zealand businesses need, and at the same time budgets are usually tight.

Zigliani says the improved integration offered by NAV 2009 will enable better out-of the-box implementation for local customers of the new product.

The richer feature set delivers “more bang for your buck” – something that is likely to appeal to local businesses shopping for an ERP solution or looking to upgrade, he says.

“A benefit of the web services technology is that it will allow more developers to become involved in the integration work. So a business with an IT department which in the past may not have been able to carry out that implementation work because of NAV’s previously proprietary technology now has the ability to do it,” he says.

“The opening up of the technology, allowing organisations to do more of the integration and reporting work themselves, should mean they achieve a more cost effective implementation. It also reduces the ongoing cost of maintaining the solution.”

Zigliani also sees benefits to local users from the role-tailored client approach of the new Role Centres.

“What we find is we’re often dealing with meeting the needs of a lot of varied roles within an organisation with different needs, so the role tailored client allows us to deliver a very specific set of functions to users,” he says.

“What it means is that users don’t need to learn the whole system to be able to carry out their tasks, reducing training, and retraining.”

Early deployment
New Zealand’s largest Microsoft Dynamics NAV practice, Intergen, plans to become one of the first organisations in the country to implement NAV 2009, upgrading from its existing NAV 5.0 solution early in 2009.

Intergen’s Microsoft Dynamics practice principal, Simon Bright, says the early internal deployment is part of the company’s strategy of adopting and using the tools it provides to its customers, and is also about getting early firsthand experience with the new solution.

He also sees internal process and productivity benefits from the move.

“With NAV 2009, we will be able to extend our use of the system by leveraging the Role Based interface available through NAV 2009, meaning our teams will have simple ways of interacting with the application,” Bright says.

“In addition, the new web services capabilities will mean we can better and more easily integrate our other Microsoft systems.”

Milking NAV’s potential
One local organisation already benefiting from a deployment of Microsoft Dynamics NAV integrated with other Microsoft solutions is Hokitika-based cooperative dairy company Westland Milk.

After out-growing its legacy systems, the co-op, with the assistance of Intergen, deployed a complete Microsoft solution including Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Office 2007, a database management system with Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and SharePoint Server 2007.

Westland’s chief financial officer, Wayne Leach, says the deployment has been hugely beneficial, with all employees now operating with one source of data.

“We have achieved bottom line improvement in a number of areas across the business, from production planning through to improving the accuracy of customer order processing,” he says.

“This has driven massive improvements throughout the business. We have reduced the amount of time involved in reconciling data across systems, as well as reducing the reliance – and risks –associated with siloed business spreadsheets. We now have singular visibility of the whole supply chain. All of these areas deliver a financial benefit.”

The co-op’s IS/IT manager, Darren Wilson, says from an employees’ perspective, the benefits of the new infrastructure were visible straight away.

“For our people, it meant that several repetitive tasks were removed,” he says.

“At the same time, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics NAV are not only easy to use, but enable confident decision making. This in turn creates a more positive working environment.”

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