Great Plains Implementation for Large Corporation overview

First of all you should be already over your former homework on Oracle EBusiness Suite, JDEdwards and Microsoft Axapta.  Comparing to mentioned above GP is very good competitor, coming from the budget-oriented approaches.  Budgeted doesn’t mean that you are not willing to pay, it rather means that you do not have to pay for rich ERP functionality, which you do not have plans to use in the foreseeable future.  Let’s take a look at GP strong points and potential weaknesses:

1.       Microsoft SQL Server DB platform.  Here you have scalability, which fits to variety of businesses, starting from one-person operations to large corporation.  SQL Server 2005 and 2000 are very robust competitors to such established DB platforms as Oracle, Ingress, MySQL.  The nicety about modern SQL platforms is the fact, that they are unlimited (by HD space addressing limitation, your Server RAM and things like these)

2.       Upscale GP modules.  Former name of the Great Plains Dynamics suite for corporate businesses was eEnterprise and later on Great Plains Professional.  Here we would like to briefly review such modules as Manufacturing, Collection Management, Service Management Suite or Field Service, Microsoft CRM

3.       Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal.  This is new platform, which coexists in the same information schema and is stored in GP traditional company database.  BP is Sharepoint web based application, which allows you to automate such functions as eCommerce (BP Order Management), Purchasing (Purchasing management), HR (Employee Self Service), Electronic Document Delivery.  BP will more likely be the Microsoft Dynamics e-commerce platform, as well as it will be substantially extending traditional Great Plains user licensing model, where thin users (your company employees, purchasers, extranet customers) will be incorporated

4.       Various routines.  Such important compliance routines as 1099 printing, W2 in payroll, accurate State Tax calculations, based on verified delivery address are available in GP with standard or third party logic

5.       Employee Self Service.  This is part of Great Plains Business Portal, module allowing you to avoid mailing cost to paper mail your payroll direct deposit stubs to your employees and W-2 contractors.  If you implement GP Business Portal with Employee Self Service, your insiders could simply print out their stubs from BP web pages

6.       Version Upgrades.  Modern Software and MRP vendors try to keep you on the short notice in compliance to their new version updates as well as on their annual software enhancement programs.  This is your internal decision – if you do care about modern technologies compliance, you should decide on where to upgrade and how many version updates to skip.  We recommend you to skip one version, in the scenario when GP has version 8.0 out and you upgrade to this version, the version 9.0 you skip and wait until 10.0 is released and you upgrade from 8.0 to 10.0