Microsoft Business Portal for Great Plains – notes on Requisition Management Implementation

Good example of such solution among Microsoft Dynamics family of products is Microsoft CRM.  In the case of ERP products, MBS moves them into Business Portals.  This small article is about Requisition Management module, which is built on Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal platform

• Sharepoint.  Business Portal in turn is based on Microsoft Sharepoint and it could only be installed on the Sharepoint extended web server.  If you are not very comfortable with this statement and expect that you will have to learn a bunch of stuff about Sharepoint, this is not the case – if you don’t have Sharepoint Business Portal Installation will install Sharepoint in MS SQL Server select
• eConnect.  Technically eConnect is the set of stored procedures, which allow you to create, modify, delete GP objects: Account, Customer, Sales Order, etc.  eConnect is a connector, which allows such products as Microsoft Business Portal for Great Plains do not use traditional technology as Microsoft Dexterity or former name Great Plains Dexterity and deal with GP data manipulation via eConnect.  Business Portal utilizes eConnect seamlessly behind the scenes, all you should take care of is install eConnect properly following installation guide for Microsoft Great Plains Business Portal
• Licensing.  Business Portal user license cost is typically a way lower than Microsoft Dynamics GP System Manager user license.  And this is natural – you do not expect all your employees who places Purchase Request (probably all your permanent employees, or at least all your office inhabitants) to be Great Plains users – instead they will be just Business Portal users, creating purchase requests in Requisition Management and using others BP modules: HR and Employee Self Service, for example
• Approval Hierarchy.  Requisition Management is geared toward the needs of large public corporation, where each purchase request is subject to tiered approvals with email notifications.  In certain steps of approving, Purchase Request should be considered as Requisition, which potentially will be send to vendors for bids collection.  When you decide on the Vendor, Requisition lines will be transformed into Purchase Order to this vendor – at this step we are already leaving Business Portal Requisition Management and arriving to Microsoft Dynamics GP Purchase Order Processing module, where we have good-old-days known business logic
• Installation and Microsoft Technologies.  As you can see – BP deploys various Microsoft technologies: Sharepoint, eConnect, MS Exchange (notifications), Microsoft Dynamics GP as back office, Terminal Server (in BP you can open GP backoffice screens and do ERP routines if needed).  This deployment process may mean that strong IT department is required, especially considering some customization, integration, modified reporting, and BP version upgrade