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Microsoft Dynamics GP is definitely one of the winners and breaking
through ERP packages. In this article we assume that you are not small
or midsize business, where accounting options are well known and openly
available. Here we are giving recommendations to large corporate
businesses. First of all you should be already over your former
homework on Oracle EBusiness Suite, JDEdwards and Microsoft Axapta.
Comparing to mentioned above GP is very good competitor, coming from the
budget-oriented approaches. Budgeted doesn’t mean that you are not
willing to pay, it rather means that you do not have to pay for rich ERP
functionality, which you do not have plans to use in the foreseeable
future. Let’s take a look at GP strong points and potential weaknesses:
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Microsoft SQL Server DB platform. Here you have scalability, which
fits to variety of businesses, starting from one-person operations
to large corporation. SQL Server 2005 and 2000 are very robust
competitors to such established DB platforms as Oracle, Ingress,
MySQL. The nicety about modern SQL platforms is the fact, that they
are unlimited (by HD space addressing limitation, your Server RAM
and things like these)
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Upscale GP modules. Former name of the Great Plains Dynamics suite
for corporate businesses was eEnterprise and later on Great Plains
Professional. Here we would like to briefly review such modules as
Manufacturing, Collection Management, Service Management Suite or
Field Service, Microsoft CRM
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Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal. This is new platform, which
coexists in the same information schema and is stored in GP
traditional company database. BP is Sharepoint web based
application, which allows you to automate such functions as
eCommerce (BP Order Management), Purchasing (Purchasing management),
HR (Employee Self Service), Electronic Document Delivery. BP will
more likely be the Microsoft Dynamics e-commerce platform, as well
as it will be substantially extending traditional Great Plains user
licensing model, where thin users (your company employees,
purchasers, extranet customers) will be incorporated
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Various routines. Such important compliance routines as 1099
printing, W2 in payroll, accurate State Tax calculations, based on
verified delivery address are available in GP with standard or third
party logic
Employee Self Service. This is part of Great Plains Business
Portal, module allowing you to avoid mailing cost to paper mail your
payroll direct deposit stubs to your employees and W-2 contractors.
If you implement GP Business Portal with Employee Self Service, your
insiders could simply print out their stubs from BP web pages
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Version Upgrades. Modern Software and MRP vendors try to keep you
on the short notice in compliance to their new version updates as
well as on their annual software enhancement programs. This is your
internal decision – if you do care about modern technologies
compliance, you should decide on where to upgrade and how many
version updates to skip. We recommend you to skip one version, in
the scenario when GP has version 8.0 out and you upgrade to this
version, the version 9.0 you skip and wait until 10.0 is released
and you upgrade from 8.0 to 10.0
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ALBA Partners:
GP Business Portal
Great Plains Accounting
for DOS & Windows
Microsoft CRM
SAP Business One
ALBA Products:
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Posting Server
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RMS-GP Integration
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SOP Connector
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More...
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