Business Portal for Great Plains: Requisitions, HR, Orders – implementation scenarios

The advantage of having these people use BP versus work in Microsoft Dynamics GP directly is licensing cost.  If your company is smaller in size, then you should evaluate BP deployment, in our opinion at this time BP requires strong Microsoft oriented IT department, familiar with such technologies as SQL Server, Sharepoint, .Net C# programming, GP ReportWriter, FRx reporting, hosting in extranet environment secured BP server, MS Exchange

• Requisition Management.  If potentially all your office employees are creating purchase requests: computers, furniture, office supplies, etc – RM is the module for you to implement.  It has pretty flexible approval hierarchy structure where you can submit purchase request to your approver, approver might be changed by purchase approving management, if desired (direct approver takes two weeks off situation, or the like).  When you will be doing implementation, you will figure out that RM and Dynamics GP are actually two “separate”, however integrated applications, so, when you do query in BP RM on the whole Requisition life cycle, starting with creation and then approvals, transferring to Purchase Order (which is now in GP), Receiving and Paying off the vendor invoice.  This means the report or life cycle query should be designed as cross-modules and as such directly in MS SQL Server, linking your company DB with DYNAMICS db (where RM tables reside for BP 3.0)
• HR and Employee Self Service.  If you implement Payroll or HR or both PR & HR for you Microsoft Dynamics GP, then extending this with BP Humane Resources Management Self Service Suite might be natural extension.  Here you people could update their personal information including  W-4, request vacation (if you have MS Outlook extension for BP HR – they can do it directly in Outlook).  Also, if you have contractors in staff, they will be able to submit their hours (however not associated with projects, be realistic here in expectations – you need Project Accounting and TimeCard & Expenses Entry extension for BP – this is different module of BP).  If you have technicians in the repair shops, this might not be very good idea as BP requires Active Directory user login to access BP.
• Order Management.  If you sell to your relatively narrow set of permanent customers and you can maintain relatively compact catalog of your product, you may benefit in implementing OM module.  Here, you should know upfront, that customers require Active Directory login and Customer ID in GP in order to place the order.  If you plan customer orders to be placed by your Sales People, then this is not the case.  Active Directory setup for your customers requires you to enforce IT security and support extranet environment
• Backup Scenario.  BP GP modules store their data in DYNAMICS and Company databases.  Probably these modules are predecessors of the future GP modules transformation from Microsoft Dexterity to .Net.  So, besides Sharepoint backup – you will simply need the above mentioned DB backup in regular fashion – either as scheduled SQL job or included in tape backup.