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Microsoft Great Plains Manufacturing – before you jump there – advices to IT specialist  by: Andrew Karasev In this small article we would like to try to save your company software and services money. As the result of recent economic recession, many companies here in the USA have now outsourced or in process of outsourcing manufacturing routines abroad and are still using manufacturing applications for data entry. Some of our clients had strange situation when they had more people for manufacturing data entry than real manufacturing workers. Our strong advice is – consider using simple bill of materials with probably some advanced reporting instead of going for full featured manufacturing application/module purchase. Yes, as many clients indicated – they just needed advanced reporting, something like Microsoft Great Plains Bill of Materials / Inventory control based Crystal Reports. And Crystal Reports is only k$0.5 software plus you could find Crystal Report designer for reasonable price. Let’s go to the topic. Microsoft Great Plains is main Microsoft Business Solutions product, targeted to mid-size companies. Currently Microsoft is in progress of transforming several ERP products it has: Microsoft Great Plains, Solomon and Navision into several business suites - Microsoft Financial, Microsoft HR, Microsoft Manufacturing, Microsoft Logistics. These suites may be (in the future) put together and work for your company as integrated ERP solution with web interface (Microsoft Business Portal). If you are midsize company with some manufacturing - you should make the research on light manufacturing packages available on software market. In the case of your commitment to Great Plains (if you use it as your accounting system) you should probably first answer this question - do we need full featured manufacturing or we should implement just bill of materials and have missing functionality be filled with custom Crystal Reports and light Dexterity customization? And one more thing to consider - Microsoft Manufacturing will be more likely build on Navision manufacturing base. If you have process manufacturing - you should not implement GP manufacturing - it is discreet manufacturing. If you answer yes on most of these questions, you do need manufacturing Do you need Manufacturing Resource Planning? Are Cost Centers required? Do you base your production on the specific Sales Order? Do you track working shifts and allocate the cost? Now - this is what you can have in Bill of Materials Samples bills of materials - to do the replacement of the items Purchasing configuration, based on ABC codes and other criteria Historical bills reporting With Crystal Reports you can have this information, having just Bill of Materials Sales/profitability by customer, item, region or custom criteria Future Sales predictions, based on your criteria Employee time and cost allocation Simple Cost Centers, based on product line, specific order or other user defined information Good luck with your research – we are here to help with Bill of Materials or recommend the best GP Manufacturing partner! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-630-961-5918, 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com About The Author Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, based in Chicago, California, Arizona, Minnesota, Texas, Florida, New York, Washington, Georgia, Canada, UK, Australia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( www.albaspectrum.com ), he is CMA, Great Plains Certified Master, Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer. You can contact Andrew: andrewk@albaspectrum.com akarasev@albaspectrum.com This article was posted on December 17, 2004 Read More Articles from the "Computers and Internet" Category: Microsoft Great Plains PM: Payables Management by Vincent Ong Great Plains Accounting Migration to Microsoft Great Plains - overview for IT Specialist by Andrew Karasev How To Get Listed With Google In Less Than 24 Hours by David Hennebery Why Should You Switch To VoIP? by Keith Gilbert The Top 10 Reasons You Need A Computer Point of Sale System For Your Business by Jerry D. Wilson Top (4) Reasons Why You Should Celebrate Cyber-Awareness Month-EVERY MONTH by Invisus Security Solutions (originator) and Independent Security Advocate Clifford Wall (submitter) Amazing Corel Draw Brushes by Blur Loterina How to β€˜Download’ Your Old Computer to the Highest Bidder by Donald Lee 5 Tips For New Internet Surfers by Franck Silvestre Finding Places To Access The Internet For Free by Ron King << Back to "Computers And Internet" Index

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