Microsoft Great Plains in Advertising & Publishing – implementation highlights
By Andrew Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
USA
1-866-528-0577,
1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com
Microsoft Great Plains,
former Great Plains Dynamics is excellent fit for service oriented business and
in this small article we’ll give you magazine publisher and advertiser
implementation and reporting scenarios. The system we describe is not real, we
are putting together industry specifics, based on our consulting practice. In
the case if you do not see some unique features of your publishing business –
this just means that publishing industry is diversified and say, regional
newspaper publishing is quite different from magazine with narrow
specialization.
- Advertisement
Selling. This is the blood of
every publishing company/house. In Great Plains you usually deploy Sales
Order Processing module without Inventory control and all your SOP lines are
advertisement services.
- Multiple Magazines.
Publishing house has very turbulent life and it is industry norm when you do
frequent acquisitions and spin-offs. There is time lag between acquisition
and incorporation new magazine into your main company. In Great Plains you
typically create new company for your newly acquired magazine, transfer chart
of accounts, modules settings, enter beginning balances and you are ready to
go. There are SQL scripts that you can deploy for new company initiation
- Collection
Department. Advertisement sales
require very strong collection and follow up. In Microsoft Great Plains you
deploy Collection Management module. This module integrates with AR and SOP
modules and allows you create collection query, where you select customers for
your collections calls batch. For example, if you are in Houston – you may
create your East Coast clients batch for your morning calls and then by the
end of the day – another batch for California. And the most productive hours
you can use for day of the week specifics – say – on Monday your call large
collection accounts, on Tuesday – to who is almost hopeless and should be sold
to specializing collection agency, etc.
- Complex Financial
Reporting. Assuming different
size and data format of financial data, belonging to variety of magazines –
you need advanced FRx reporting technique: Reporting Trees for consolidation
and even combining Great Plains GL data with Excel spreadsheets. Also
turbulent publishing environment requires you to have reliable cash flow
report.
- Data Import.
Some magazines may give you their daily batches in text logs and you need
Microsoft Great Plains Integration Manager customization to handle various
data format import automatically with minimal user intervention.
- Customizations.
You probably need several industry specific Crystal Reports, we saw advanced
requirements coming from collection management department. Alternative way is
to do this in Great Plains Dexterity. If you have authors, writing articles
for honorary – you might need advanced 1099 filing scenarios and reporting –
this is Great Plains Dexterity customization candidate.
We encourage you to analyze your
alternatives. You can always appeal to our help, give us a call: 1-866-528-0577
or 1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at
Alba Spectrum Technologies (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ), serving Microsoft Great Plains, CRM, Navision
to mid-size and large clients in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia,
Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan