Microsoft Great Plains Jewelry – implementation & customization overview
By Andrew Karasev
Alba Spectrum Technologies
1-866-528-0577,
1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com
Each Industry and market
niche has business specific and unique requirements to ERP/Accounting System.
Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains is ERP platform, ready for third party
modules additions and customizations, plus being SQL Server-based system it
opens you wide spectrum of integration options and tools. In this small article
we’ll give you Microsoft Great Plains implementation and setup highlights,
typical for Jewelry retail network.
- Fixed Assets.
Jewelry retailer owns the network of jewelry retail outlets and each one has
relatively expensive set of fixed assets: counters, holders, computers, etc.
Company has to track each individual Fixed Asset item and depreciate it
accordingly: for IRS, State and probably several internal company management
accounting depreciation scenarios and methods: straight line, DDB, etc. Due
to the fact of reselling precision metals: gold, silver, gem stones and
diamonds – you should expect regular audit from IRS and State authorities.
Depreciation plays substantial portion of company’s non-cash expenses and so
should be 100% accurate. Additional challenges – bonus depreciation,
introduced several years ago. Plus you must have comprehensive reporting on
FA locations by store and region.
- EDI purchasing.
In Great Plains you should be able to order your inventory via Electronic
Document Interchange (EDI) mechanism. You have multiple options to realize
EDI – the simplest would be Purchase Order creation in Great Plains Purchase
Order Processing/Receiving module and then exporting them into text
EDI-fixed-length compliant format. This text file should be forwarded to your
supplier and in Great Plains POP you set flags for POs being sent to your
vendor
- Retail Management
System integration. In the case
when you use Microsoft RMS Store Operations and Headquarters – you should
consider seamless integration of your daily transactions into Microsoft Great
Plains Sales Order Processing (SOP) or Receivables Management (RM) modules.
The integration is realized as a set of MS SQL Server stored procedures. The
other way would be implement both Purchasing and Inventory count on RMS Store
Operations/Headquarters level and integrate General Ledger transactions only.
If you have only one Great Plains Company – you can deploy RMS->GP integration
utility, coming to you with RMS purchase and support CDs.
- Reporting.
In both cases – Great Plains and RMS compliance reporting should be realized
in Crystal Reports and the best way and design style is creating SQL views and
stored procedures and basing report on these views and procs.
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