Andrew Karasev

Great Plains for Restaurant business: typical implementation and integration

Microsoft Dynamics GP allows you to automate many typical and classical businesses, restaurants are typical GP deployment example. 

In this small article we will review typical scenarios and technical questions.  As we often see that restaurant owners are not technical people or programmers – we will try not to use ERP and software academic language and be right to the point:

1.       Your server and network structure.  It is typical when restaurants are in several places across the city and you control and operate your business from central office or even the basement of your house.  You should place your Great Plains server to your headquarters.  If you have only few restaurants, consider purchasing Microsoft Small Business Server, as it will allow you to install and configure your Windows domain and create your users without or with minimal IT consultants help.  Also on your Small Business Server, please setup virtual private network (vpn) – this will be the gateway to upload transactions from your stores to central ERP: Great Plains

2.       Great Plains – which modules do I need?  You will need Great Plains Business Ready, allowing you to deploy typical modules: GL, AR, AP, SOP, POP, Inventory control and others.  If you are purchasing GP right now, March 2008, then you should check with your GP VAR

3.       Integration with Point Of Sale (POS) systems.  If you are purchasing existing businesses, then in most of the cases you are getting mix of various POS and Retail Management Systems: Aloha, Microsoft POS, Microsoft RMS, etc.  In this situation you would rather prefer something which will resolve your POS system dependence.  We recommend you Aspect – it basically works as Store Operation Management Software for Restaurant businesses.  Aspect will import your POS transactions or even more – it will allow you to run the restaurant facility on Aspect without POS.  Aspect has very robust features to export transaction to GP via Great Plains Integration Manager

4.       Barcoding.  We believe that if you are small or even midsize dining network, barcode scanners are not really required.  If you have warehouse management operations, the  you have to give us a call on barcode solutions

Article Tags: Great Plains

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR