ERP Software & Business Accounting Software to Support Your Growing Business Needs

Popular ‘shrinkwrap solutions’ Quickbooks and Peachtree have been the launching point for many a business. These products are easy to use, flexible, and with the built-in two dimensional reporting, are outstanding for accounting, and even some advanced application areas like project billing and procurement management.

When is it time to move on, some company owners may ask? While there are probably 50 or so good reasons, but for the purposes of this article, I will highlight a few. If you are running a standalone Ecommerce solution that does not tie to your accounting system, that may be reason one. If you are running a simple sales force automation system like ACT!, Salesforce.com or Goldmine, and the quoting and customer master records are not tied to your accounting systems items, that may be another. In both these examples, integrated systems allow you standardized pricing by customer, item, promotion, or even dealer (partner).

The biggest justification may come with people running simple production planning and scheduling functions on spreadsheets. By passing around spreadsheets, companies are wasting time, and errors can be easily made. Also, once your production scheduling is complete, there is usually no ‘put back,’ to the accounting system. The justification for a systematic planning and scheduling system tied to your back office may be in inventory reduction, improved customer service, or lead-time reduction. If you can add an ‘available to promise,’ to commit an order to a key prospect or customer, you may be able to improve your top line as well.

From an IT infrastructure standpoint, you may start to wonder why the servers in some hidden room in your company are growing. Well with all these disparate systems, it is often time easier to add a server than to try to consolidate applications on one server. This adds complexity and increases your reliance on costly IT personnel.

Find an online, subscription based solution that combines ERP, CRM, Ecommerce and business intelligence in one simple solution. All you should need is a web browser and a high speed line. In summary, small companies can benefit by:

1) Reducing the ‘islands of automation,’ that require rekeying and are conducive to mistakes
2) Reduce the dependence on internal systems and IT personnel
3) Dive into advanced integration application areas like aftermarket service, planning/scheduling, Ecommerce and configuration management and comprehensive sales force automation.

Great Plains ERP In eCommerce Environment – Combining Hosted Website With Business Portal

After seeing reasonable and multiple concerns, we would like to give you some directions for your homework, when you consider transitioning for your let’s say “legacy” e-commerce website to new totally data driven eCommerce. Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 has pretty advanced Business Portal, where we recommend you to research Order Management module, which in turn is redesigned version of former eOrder. eOrder went to the history, the last version of the product was 7.5. For version 8.0 Microsoft Great Plains redeployed and improved old eOrder logic on Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal platform, tightly integrated with MS Sharepoint. After a bit complicated introduction, we would like to explain your options in simple language:

1. Where to host: in-house or outsource? Well, this question doesn’t have direct answer, in essence it depends. Self hosting gives you complete control over the functionalities and future directions, as you do not have to “comply” hosting company requirements. However it is not necessary to switch to total self hosting over night. You can keep your website hosted outside and move its data driven portion to hosting internally. If you have complete understanding on how to split your website across multiple IP addresses, then you can skip the hint, for the rest of the auditorium we’d like to say, the all you need to do is to login to your domain registrant website and add something like that:

Ecommerce.mycompany.com 11.11.11.11 – this would be the placeholder for your in house dedicated IP address. Domain name and IP are fictitious here, you would need to provide real ones.

Then, assuming you have Microsoft Windows domain, you make the settings on your Internet Information Server to resolve e-commerce traffic by named header on your IIS

2. Business Portal Order Management Module. Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal 10.0 is too dependent on the technology layers, such as SQL Server, Sharepoint, Active Directory – so we recommend you disregard BP hosting outsourcing (maybe down the road in the future you can revisit the idea, but for 2008 probably it doesn’t make any sense). What is good about Order Management – you are virtually sharing GP inventory control and Sales Order Processing modules with OM, including pricing updates, promotions, customer price levels (and of course secured customer logins on the Business Portal level)

3. If Business Portal is too complex or simply doesn’t do the job for you. BP is not something easy to install and implement. If you need light touch to your existing e-commerce application, you should consider do this either in eConnect, which in essence is Software Development Kit, allowing programmer create such necessary object in GP as Sales Invoice; or you consider Great Plains Integration Manager to do overnight transaction move from eCommerce to Great Plains

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