The Dynamics GP Blog

What is a Workflow?

There are a number of definitions. Wikipedia has a fairly comprehensive description of the subject, however for busy Business Owners such as yourself, I’ve narrowed it down to what “Workflow” means within the Dynamics GP system.

As far as GP is concerend there are 2 definitions:

1. Workflow is a System - Workflow is a system that you install with Dynamics GP. It provides that functionality that you need to create indivual workflows and or approval processes.
2. Workflow is an Approval System -  It’s an approval process for a document or a ‘batch’. Bascially, it is the ‘rules’ for how a document or batch has to ‘flow” through the system and be approved by someone and under what conditions it can be approved.

Lets take this example;

In this Purchase Order Approval Process, the workflow shows who must approve purchase orders and under what conditions.

Ali Submits a Purchase Order for Rs.2,000. In this sceanario, the Purchase Order must be approved by Abbas. If the Purchase Order was for Rs.8,000 the it would need approval from both Abbas and Feroze.
Benefits of Using Workflows

There are many benefits to using Workflows in an organization. Here are some of the Key benefits.

Consistency
The Workflow system enables you to define the approval process for specific documents and batches, such as purchase order documents and Receivables Management batches. By using the Workflow system, you ensure that documents and batches are reviewed and approved in a consistent and efficient manner.

Automatic Notification
Users can be automatically notified when a document or batch is assigned to them for approval, or when a document or batch they submitted is approved. Users can be notified via desktop alerts or e-mail alerts.

Access through Office SharePoint Server and Outlook
Users don’t have to log on to Microsoft Dynamics GP to approve documents and batches. Users can approve documents and batches by accessing the Workflow web site, which is built on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, or by responding to e-mail messages in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007.

Reports
There are several Workflow reports you can generate. These reports help you monitor the Workflow system and identify specific workflow steps or approvers who may be slowing down an approval process.

Mariano Gomez has just reveled some excellent insight into what Business Owners of the future will be expecting their technology investments to deliver.
If you use or are considering a Dynamics GP implementation, then this post is a must read.
Read his full post here

ERP Discrete vs. ERP Process

People often ask “what’s the difference between process and discrete ERP?” Here’s a rough overview of the difference.
A quick definition from APICS (The Association for Operations Management) describes discrete manufacturing as “the production of distinct items such as automobiles, appliances, or computers,” whereas process manufacturing covers “production that adds value by mixing, separating, forming, and/or performing chemical reactions. It may be done in either batch or continuous mode.” Now let’s look at a few examples.

Think about what your company manufactures. Does it require mixing chemicals? If so, you may need an ERP system that does things like calculate ingredient quantities. If your industry produces the type of product that doesn’t lend itself to being disassembled into its individual components, it’s likely you need to consider a process ERP system. On the other hand, if your company assembles products from many component parts, you’ll require discrete manufacturing functionality.

You Cannot Put the Juice Back into the Orange
In his article Process Manufacturing Software: A Primer, IT consultant Joe Strub explains the difference with this example:

Once you make a can of soda, you cannot return it back to its basic components such as carbonated water, citric acid, potassium benzoate, aspartame, and other ingredients. You cannot put the juice back into the orange. A car or computer, on the other hand, can be disassembled and the parts, to a large extent, can be returned to stock.
In addition, process manufacturing is scalable. If a formula calls for 1,000 pounds of cake flour, but you only have 500 pounds, you can still bake cakes—just not as many. Conversely, in discrete manufacturing, one missing part means waiting for it before the finished assembly unit can start rolling off the production line.

At Axone we model functionality for manufacturing in discrete or process industries under the following categories.

If you’re talking about requirements involving bills of material (BOMs) that list the component parts for assembly, you’d find those covered through the discrete manufacturing categories. But if you’re talking about functionality for formulas, recipes, or ingredients, those would tend toward the process manufacturing categories.

So, be on your toes when you are buying an ERP manufacturing system from a vendor. Make sure that what your buying can support your manufacturing processes. There are quite a few vendors who will generally “tout” GP to a ERP Processes Customer, and that customer discovers well into the implementation that their unique process industry needs cannot be met by GP.

Lets be clear on this GP, can only effectively support DISCREET Manufactures. It does NOT have the functionality to support Process Based Industries and Companies. So, Caveat Emptor (Let the Buyer Beware).

Boom Boom, Bust! So in the end, especially right now, it’s all down to 2 facts of life.

1. How much is it going to cost me to get GP up and running in my business?
2. How much cash am i going to get back from this investment?

So let’s start with the first one. Well like all good consultants I can only answer that with a industry standard, “It depends….”. That may not satisfy you, but really if i could tell you that without even meeting you and understanding your requirements then either I’m a magician or I’d be bending the truth. However, what I can tell you is that GP ranks right at the top in terms of 2 important measuring criteria for a new business management system.

• The payback is the quickest
• 50-60% more functionality than any other Small Business Management System

So whilst, I can’t tell you just yet what it will cost, I can tell you that GP offers the best value for money of any business management system.

Now, onto the second fact, namely “What’s in it for me?”.
GP can positively put cash back in your pocket. How?  By either or a combination of the following:

• Help you sell more…..so many times this is actually overlooked in the Pakistani Market, where buyers of GP tend to focus more upon the financial management controls that GP can bring to an organization, rather than also looking at how GP, can actually increase sales.

• Clean up the inefficiencies in the business. Let’s be honest, we all have them, hundreds of nonsensical processes and procedures that just stop us from serving our customers to a decent level of satisfaction. GP can streamline and cut out all the non productive (I.E non value addition) practices that we all face.

• Get a grip on your stock. If you’re in a business with Inventory or Manufacturing, stock control is the biggest weakness that you can have. It’s not just about making sure that theft does not occur or that you have a good ‘Gate Pass” system. As a business owner it’s about the ROI of your investment in stock. For years, I’ve been espousing to everyone who’s got inventory problems, to stop thinking on inventory as an asset but rather as an expense. Yes, I know the CFO won’t agree, but start thinking of inventory as something you need to satisfy a customer, and then use your GP system that you have only enough (Inventory) to satisfy your customer.

Now, let’s look at some sort of numbers that the above can translate into. Let’s take an average business in Pakistan and breakdown a few typical P&L and Balance sheet items.
(This is a fictions set of assumptions, hopefully it will serve its purpose, which is purely for illustrations)

(PKR.000)  All figures assumed at per annum
Sales: 180,000
Gross Profit: 81,000
Op Exp: 72,000
Net Profit: 9,000

Now let’s assume that by utilizing GP fully with the sort of examples that I mentioned earlier you were able to make some modest gains.

Sales increase by 2%
GP increase by 1%
Op Exp decrease by 3%

The outcome of this would result in a Net profit of Rs.11,970 which is a 33% increase in profitability!

More gains are possible if you look at a typical scenario with inventory.
Let’s assume that for the above Sales at Cost, with a stock turn of about 5 you would need Rs. 19,800 of inventory.
Let’s also assume that you were able to, by using GP’s excellent Inventory Module, increase your stock turn by 1 to 6 times a year. Now let’s again assume that you increased your sales by 2%. The actual stock required with even higher sales is now Rs.16, 965.

That equates to just under 3 million Rupees of working capital for stock reduced for this fictions company.

So getting right back to the basic reason for this post. Can investing in a business management system like GP actually put cash back into my business? Well based on the above  assumptions the answer has to be, absolutely yes it can! In fact, investing right now in your own business with a software system that can truly benefit your cash flow seems to be the only attractive investment opportunity you can make in Pakistan these days.

Back on our home page you’ll find some new demos of GP that show you first-hand how the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics GP can benefit your business.

Tom from our UK Team has a new blog posting about Environmental Management for Microsoft Dynamics GP. It points to some great stuff on this topic. Check it out!

Click Here

Thanks,

You’ll need Microsoft Silverlight to see this great Demo of GP. Silverlight can be downloaded from here and the GP Demo can be viewed from here.

Enjoy!!

From time to time, they’ll be some posts about some of the great set of features that GP has and the sort of capabilties that it can give a user and an organization. Today we’ll start off with Audit Trails.

Audit Trails captures a snapshot of a Microsoft Dynamics GP document every time a change is made, then makes a record of the time, date and User ID associated with the change. It also captures the before-change data values and the after-change data values associated with the change.

When an audit trail is attached to a table within Microsoft Dynamics GP, the following changes occur:

• An audit table is created in the audit database that duplicates the table you are auditing. Audit Trails adds fields to each table with time, date and user ID information related to the change.

• Triggers are added to the audited tables. When a change occurs to an audited table, the triggers pass the change information to the audit database.

For example, an Inventory table might contain the following columns:

• Item number

• Item description

• Cost

A record in that table includes the following information.

Immediately after applying the audit, the audit table includes the following
information. (The time also is included in the audit database, although it’s not
shown in the illustration.)

If a user changes the cost of the item, this is reflected in the audit database and the
SmartView (Audit Trail) window includes the following information

One of the most respected business orientated software selection sites, The Accounting Library, published some time ago a report titled, ” Top-Ranked Business Management Systems of 2006“.  A few changes have occured since then. For example, Dynamics GP is now at version 10.0 with about 30% more functionality than ver 9.0.

Some of the other vendor offerings have improved considerable since 2006, however SAP B1, still refuses to publish a road map for its product.  It’s a puzzle through out the industry where SAP b1 is heading, obviously without a road map it doesn’t look like it’s heading anywhere. I’ll leave the SAP discussions for another time.

In the meantime, if you are evaluating which business management system to consider, research as much as possible, ask the right questions and use the software selection tools at the Accounting Library.