Microsoft Dynamics GP Implementation in Retail Business

Retail businesses are very different and in our opinion the success of the operations is more related to the appropriate selection of Point Of Sale, Store Management system, where your Corporate ERP or Accounting application, such as Great Plains (or maybe SAP Business One or another Small Business ERP brand) often require just POS Daily Sales and Purchases integration in the batch mode (at the end of the shift or maybe even weekly, if the volume of transactions is moderate).  Let's review integration models and technologies and how specific POS systems could be integrated:
1. Generic POS integration model.  Most of the Point Of Sales applications allow you either exporting daily transactions into coma delimited text files or open their database via ODBC connection.  On the other hand - Corporate ERP application, such as Dynamics GP should have integration module, in the case of GP it is named Integration Manager (in the case of SAP Business One it is Data Transfer Workbench), where you can either create relatively simple text file based integration to Sales and Purchasing transactions, or build more advanced and flexible integration over ODBC connection directly to your Retail database.  You may need to review examples, as typically you face the small challenge to build integration from one file, where you have to group lines for building document header and then link this grouped line with one-to-many to document lines (Sales invoice lines with inventory items or the same for Vendor invoice in purchasing).  IM integration logic could be altered in event driven VBA scripts: Before Integration, Before Document Commit, etc.
2. Dynamics GP Integration with Microsoft RMS.  Here you have Dexterity chunk, which allows you to integrate GL transactions and to some extent Purchases.  This Dexterity coded integration is coming directly from Microsoft Business Solutions and is relatively simple and well documented.  If you would like to take more challenging approach and move transactions to GP Sales Order Processing module, you can build it in Integration Manager, as we are mentioning in paragraph #1.  Alternatively you can deploy existing configurable Alba Spectrum integration on SOP, RM and POP modules level, where you can map multiple stores in RMS to one or multiple companies in Dynamics GP - this integration is typically scheduled as SQL Server Agent job (over night)
3. Dynamics GP Integration with Counterpoint.  Counterpoint has preset integrations in the form of Data Transformation Packages (DTS).  Usually you have to intervene with SQL scripting if you plan to deploy Counterpoint user defined fields, or something not handled in predefined DTS for your accounting system
4. Master-Slave concept.  If you are running multiple stores with potentially various POS applications, you may consider the concept where you make Dynamics GP as so-called Master application, meaning that such original records as Inventory Item, Price List, Item Barcode Labels are originated in the Master application and pushed down to Slave applications, in our example various Point Of Sales systems in your stores.  This paragraph is rather for larger retail chains and it requires technology specifications to be worked through for each individual business
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