Microsoft Great Plains Beverage production & distribution – implementation & customization highlightsWritten by Andrew Karasev
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 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 produced volume in Gallons or Liters. In Great Plains you should have light production customization, 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 market share. In 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 same period of 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.
| | Microsoft Great Plains Implementation: Placement/Recruiting Agency example – overview for consultantWritten by Andrew Karasev
Microsoft Great Plains does wonderful ERP job for horizontal markets and clientele. However in our opinion placement software market is underserved and needs custom modules to be developed. In case of Microsoft Great Plains we see numerous examples of in-house or outsourced customization done for Great Plains Dynamics/Microsoft Great Plains in order to automate placement agency workflow and processes. In our opinion Great Plains is good choice, considering side of placement and recruiting companies: mid-size or even small. Let us give you highlights from our consulting practice.•Full-Featured custom placement business system. Technically Great Plains gives you functionality to develop integrated custom application, where you could build custom logic, extending Great Plains Receivables Management, Payables Management and other modules. You could implement complex recruiter commissioning schema, based on number of months of placed employee work, etc. This is most typical case – placement agency contracts Great Plains VAR to implement their custom Business Management System. •Payroll Outsourcer. If you do payroll outsourcing – this is popular customization for Microsoft Great Plains. You usually have to create new Great Plains company for your client – who is typically placement agency
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