Microsoft Great Plains: ERM from Microsoft Business Solutions and formerly Great Plains Software is fairly generic with its standard set of modules: GL, BR, AR, AP, IV, SOP, POP, and US Payroll. However, with approximately twelve years of implementation and customization history – Great Plains Dynamics, Dynamics C/S+, eEnterprise being Great Plains Dexterity – the written application has been and continues to be an attractive core platform for software development companies from third parties write vertical and horizontal modules, written as well in Great Plains Dexterity. If you have Microsoft Great Plains deployed or under deployment, you should have your options for in-house or outsourced customizations to fit the needs of your industry vertical.

Consider shipping, barcoding, and distribution/warehouse management

1. Consignment sales and recurring sales. If your business is bakery, sandwich making, or ice cream, you probably send recurring daily shipments/truckloads to your customers on consignment. You need an accurate system with daily predictions and lot size recommendation, based on historical data: weekday, season, holiday, etc. This is a very popular Dexterity customization, dealing with SOP (Sales Order Processing) and IV (Inventory Control) modules.

2. Truck Scheduling/Distribution. In the case of consignment sales, you can have your own fleet of trucks. Then for each truck you need to have a batch of SOP orders and you need to print pickup tickets. You need to print the collection tickets for the longest route first, and then one by one up to the shortest route. This is also the Dexterity customization for the SOP module.

3. Barcode, Warehouse Management. Lot number tracking, receiving, order fulfillment, inventory transfer, and cycle counting can be automated with barcodes. The barcode scanner could automate pick list assignment by first reading the pick list number and then scanning items and quantities, and by doing so assigning items to sales orders in sales order processing. Typically, you write a Visual Basic application or routine to work with the scanner, and then communicate with the Microsoft Great Plains SQL database, more precisely, the sales order and inventory tables – SOP10100. SOP10200, IV00100

4. Wholesale: Daily sales and comparisons, profit by item and seller. Yes, all of these calculations can be pulled from SOP working and historical tables, item sales analytics, etc. You can implement Crystal Reports and even a data warehouse solution to pivot your cube. If you need a fixed number of reports and criteria, you may again need Dexterity or the .Net application to organize the reporting data

Considering Microsoft Great Plains: Most of the above logic is implemented and could be implemented in Great Plains Dexterity. The alternative platform would be Microsoft C# or VB.Net ASPX web programming with Microsoft Great Plains on the back-end. You can use tools like eConnect to work with Great Plains object creation and retrieval, or continue with the direct SQL stored procedure. To some 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, [email protected]