Microsoft Dynamics GP Beverage production & distribution – Alba Spectrum
Microsoft Dynamics GP
9.0 Great Plains Beverage production & distribution – implementation &
customization highlights
Alba Spectrum Group,
USA/Canada: 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918,
help@albaspectrum.com skype:
albaspectrum
Microsoft Business
Solutions Great Plains has many years of successful implementation in multiple
horizontal markets. In today’s small article we’ll share our experience of
implementing and customizing Microsoft Great Plains, formerly Great Plains
eEnterprise/Dynamics in beverage production and distribution industries. These
examples will cover two scenarios: US regional distribution and International
fruit punch production and sales in US, Latin America and Europe. We’ll try to
be industry specific and at the same time technical – using Microsoft Great
Plains technical & customization terminology to address both – decision makers
and technical consultant / programmer.
- Concentrate and
Output. Usually company sells
concentrate to small and mid-size production facilities, where fruit punch
or soda is produced and company control the produced volume in Gallons or
Liters. In Great Plains you should have light production customization, the
natural way is to build it upon Bill of Materials (BM) module. This
production is very simple – you put some labor units and portion of
concentrate or powder to produce one Gallon / Liter of punch/soda.
- Marketing Reports.
Beverage produces are fiercely competing with each other for the market
share. In the case of fruit punch or soda – competition moves to emerging
markets, such as East Europe or Latin / South America. Company has to
control sales dynamics via monthly marketing reports, where marketing people
can compare sales comparing to the same period of the last year. You have
two options – first is to create data warehouse on SOP30200 and SOP30300
tables (Great Plains Sales Order Processing module) using MS SQL Server
Datawarehousing, Cognos or other datamining tool and second – use set of
Crystal Reports. Datawarehousing approach requires user training and might
be a bit less precise, Crystal Reports are very precise – but might be less
flexible.
- EDI.
Electronic Document Interchange – in the case of US regional beverage
distributor/wholesaler (beer, wine, soda, strong lemonade), we usually see
UNIX ordering system, working with EDI orders. In this case Great Plains
has to be integrated with this IBM AS/400/RS6000 box and as company manager
you should be looking for Microsoft Business Solutions VAR/Partner, who has
experience dealing with multiple platforms: UNIX/Linux/Windows/Oracle/Sun
Solaris
- Advertisement
Expense Allocation. Beverage
producer usually launches TV ads on local markets, especially difficult is
to track ads efficiency on the emerging markets: Central America, Caribbean,
Africa, South East Asia, Russia. You need to establish variable or fixed
allocation accounts mechanisms for ads expense tracking
About Alba Spectrum
Technologies. Alba Spectrum
Technologies is joint venture of several IT and business consulting companies,
now operating as single business entity. We have local presence in the Houston,
Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Denver,
Phoenix, New Orleans, Minneapolis, San Francisco, LATAM & Brazil, Germany,
Russia, South East Asia and Oceania. We believe in the coexistence of Java
(J2EE, EJB, Linux, Unix), Oracle and Microsoft (.Net, C#, VB) platforms and
systems and specialize in several product lines and cross platform integration,
customization, heterogeneous report design, plus we provide ERP/CRM systems
comparison and reviews, not being committed to just on MRP platform. We also
stake on XML cross-platform data interchange to be advanced in the coming
decade.
Alba Spectrum
Technologies websites:
http://www.albaspectrum.com
http://www.ronix-systems.de