Microsoft Great Plains Chemicals & Paint Industry implementation & customization notes

Microsoft Great Plains fits to majority of industries, in case of Chemicals & Paint you should consider implementation with balanced approach of utilizing existing Great Plains standard module and light customization and reporting with Great Plains Dexterity, MS SQL Server stored procedures, Modifier/VBA and direct .Net publishing from Great Plains Company database. Let’s consider industry requirements and their implementation in Microsoft Great Plains:

•Raw Materials Labeling. Microsoft Great Plains ReportWriter supports Barcode fonts and you can print out barcodes off inventory control items list. You should modify existing report or create new report – in case of new report – you should train GP users to change report restriction to print labels for your raw materials batches •Quality Check & Bin Locations. Great Plains Inventory Control (IV) module supports bins and you can allocate items from specific bins, quality check should be implemented as either light Dexterity customization in IV or set of Crystal Reports to print checklists •Quarantine/Blocked inventory. In Great Plains you deploy sites and when you need to quarantine your Inventory – you move it into quarantine site. The other way is to quarantine bins •Accident Procedure Sheet (APS) – this and others compliance reports should be printed off IV tables via Crystal Reports

Microsoft Great Plains Beverage production & distribution – implementation & customization highlights

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.