Andrew Karasev

Dynamics GP Development Project Automation in Sure Step Notes

If Dexterity, eConnect or Extender custom programming project scope is small, you may decide to take a look at Sure Step Change Request form or Technical Design Document and use one of these as the project description and sign off.

If your organization carries dedicated technical consulting department with Dexterity, eConnect, MS Visual Studio C#, VB programmers and SQL coders, we recommend you to consider full featured project management with Standard, Agile, Enterprise or Upgrade type.  If you think about modification projects and their comparison to the full featured Implementation counterparts – the project management might have similarities and could be driven by the specialist with general Project Management Certification.  In technology oriented organization the PM person should have reasonable exposure to Corporate ERP customization, reporting, integration, migration and conversion tools for the selected Microsoft Dynamics ERP platform.  We are also trying to help pioneering for the Sure Step in the international Corporate ERP implementation (likely to be Enterprise project type).  Where to pay special attention to the specifics of the custom development project?  Let’s take a look at several key points:

1. Fit Gap Analysis and Solution Blueprint.  This document is important, and it probably should follow Requirements and Processes review Decision Accelerator Offering.  However you may expect higher percentage of gaps, as the standard solution with setting is already implemented and GP is functioning in production mode.  The important emphasis is probably Blueprint, or how future customized solution should work, after custom coding is designed, developed and deployed

2. Solution Design Document .  If you are dealing with high end customization coding, try to pay special attention to the templates of the Functional Design Document (FDD) and how it is provided with exact details in Technical Design Document.  For example, if you are implementing Microsoft Dexterity customization, your Functional Requirement Document  and Gap Fit Spreadsheet should be written in very precise manner, otherwise your Dexterity department manager with his or her programmer might be confused in compiling FDD and TDD

3. Status Reporting and Issue Management.  Programmers by their nature have to concentrate and it might be difficult for them to be on the phone with the customer to report about the status or if something is not yet done (but according to the schedule it should be already finished).  Software developer needs help from Project Manager and Application Consultant to monitor the budget for their programming activity (in fact programmer profile fits to introvert type of personality, meaning that such a person typically prefer to work on her/his own and avoid calling to somebody else).  In multiple organizations we were observing similar problems, associated with poor project management – programming activity goes over budget without letting the customer know and have it sign change request form

4. Development and Deployment Phases.  In our opinion it is critical to create Test Environment, as custom programming projects are often customer data driven and it is not really efficient to do Quality Assurance and test scripting against Dynamics GP Lesson Company database.  Coding freezing for deployment, consider deploying MS Visual Studio Source Control features to support versioning.  It is common problem, when several Dexterity or eConnect developers are working on the project and each of them has local copy of the source code, leading to the bugs rolling back (fixed by the fellow programmer)

5. Reporting Projects.  Here we recommend you to pay attention to the recommended separation of the report presentation layer from its data pulling base.  This means that report designer (Crystal, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services, Microsoft Access Reports, Excel, Dexterity or Modifier with VBA via ADO).  SSRS or Crystal Report Designer might be too excited about report interface professional outline with customer logo, nice fonts, etc.  He or she might be underestimating data pulling challenge and begin with Wizard to build table relation directly in the reporting tool.  Designer may eat all budget and finally you as project manager may notice that report is not producing correct results (lines duplications, incorrect summaries and calculated fields).  Our recommendation is to bass TDD on exact table relations and methodology to base report on SQL Stored Procedure or View.  These views and procedures might be created first and tested via quality assurance.  And only after we suggest to begin design of the report layout

6. eConnect Projects specifics.  Here you typically deal with integration projects (something like real time ecommerce shopping cart integration), or you may extend Dynamics GP user interface in non-Dexterity based realm (custom Web or Windows.Net user interfaces).  As the majority of eConnect programming projects are done in Microsoft Visual Studio C# or VB, we recommend you to follow MVS guidelines, related to project management and source control

7. Extender specifics.  If you plan to do custom coding (Dexterity Sanscript codes) in the Enterprise version of Extender (available from eOne), as project manager, be aware that there is no option for debugging.  This means that you have to sit and watch your Sanscript coder to do testing and quality assurance (in the test environment, where customer production data is copied into the test company)

8. Data Integration and Conversion with Integration Manager.  These projects typically go safe, as IM validated business logic.  We saw however the problems, where your technical consulting resource is trying to do everything by choosing text source file approach.  In complex integrations and data conversions it might be a good idea to import data into SQL database and use SQL Views to enable integration data massage via SQL Select statements.  IM allows you to deploy ODBC connection, which opens for you cross-platform data integrations, such as from Oracle, MS Access, DB-2, MySQL/PHP/Linux, Pervasive SQL, Ctree, FoxPro, etc.

9. Data Conversion via direct SQL scripts.  If you are project manager, we recommend you to be very suspicious about developer suggestion to do direct SQL data feeding.  This method will likely to compromise data integrity.  Consider Integration Manager instead.  If your SQL programmer has numerous years in Great Plains technical consulting, this method might be OK, but it typically requires some additional reserve in QA hours and potential rework, even if the programmer himself is very confident in his experience and skills

10. Dynamics GP and its positions internationally.  You should check first if GP is available in the targeted country if you are expanding internationally.  It is localized in English speaking countries (USA, Canada, UK, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania), in South East Asia, where English is used as the language of business (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan), Oceania.  It is also available in Mexico and Spanish speaking Central, South America and Caribbean basin (not in Brazil, however, where they speak Brazilian Portuguese and Dynamics AX or NAV are recommended).  Arabic version of Great Plains is popular in the Middle East and Northern Africa: Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, OAE.  There are certain challenges to implement GP in China, as Dexterity doesn’t support Unicode (Chinese hieroglyphs) natively (some support is possible by deploying NJ Star extensions and other third party products).  Also, please be aware about such challenges as Corporate ERP Localization (not only supporting local language, but also being compliant to targeted country tax code), this is especially difficult to achieve (if your Corporate ERP platform is not localized) in such regional powers as India, Brazil, Russia, China, Germany, France

11. If you feel that your concerns are not addressed or your question is not answered, please feel free to contact our office.  Support domestically in the USA, Canada, Mexico and internationally.  This option is possible via Web Sessions, Skype or Phone conferences and direct visits onsite (in the case of the large scale project).  Our consulting team speaks English, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Filipino.  Feel free to call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904, or email help@efaru.com

Article Tags: Sure Step, Visual Studio, Project Management

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