Microsoft Great Plains Implementation: Verticals - Wholesale Order Entry center – overview for consultant 

By Andrew Karasev

Alba Spectrum Technologies

USA 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains has substantial market share and strong support by Microsoft on the US market.  Currently we see the trend in the vertical markets when companies with custom-built accounting application, usually written on legacy platform are switching to standard and proven ERP solution and customize or tailor it to fit their vertical market requirements.  We’ll be publishing series of vertical articles: Logistics, Distribution Centers, Warehouse Management, Barcoding, Shipping/Receiving, eCommerce, EDI, Wholesale.  Today we’ll give you Wholesale tailoring scenario

Sales Order Processing improvements to work with large number of wholesale order takers:

1. Sales Order Processing stand alone Great Plains Dexterity application, which works with Microsoft Great Plains SQL databases to feed in orders.  This application, written as from scratch Dexterity application doesn’t requires hundreds of Great Plains user licenses and will work with SOP tables with improved functionality
2. Online Sales History by Customer.  If you are order taker and this is wholesale business – each customer has certain level of negotiated price, which it is comfortable to pay.  Also this customer is ordering known set of products from you.  It is nice to have list of historical items he ordered in the past several months and their negotiated prices
3. Recommend Items to your customer.  You can easily design items to recommend logic, when you link your new items or related items with the items your customer is usually ordered.  This is how Amazon book sale works!
4. Sales People Competition.  In addition to the above online sales tools you can have average profitability of the item per period and by sales person (assuming negotiation scenarios).  Here you can have logic implemented allowing certain level of negotiation room and variable commission, related to strong negotiation and sales skills

Considering Microsoft Great Plains – majority of the logic above is implemented and could be implemented in Great Plains Dexterity.  Alternative platform would be Microsoft C# or VB.Net ASPX web programming with Microsoft Great Plains at the back end.  You can use such tools as eConnect to work with Great Plains object creation and retrieving or go ahead with direct SQL Stored Procedure.  To certain level you could use legacy technologies, such as Great Plains Modifier with Continuum for VB, VBA scripting, etc.

Good luck and you can always seek our help in customization, implementation, integration and support.  Call us: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving Chicago, California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, Australia, UK, Canada, Continental Europe, Russia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK