Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision) is business management software that delivers comprehensive business management functionality, from financials and accounting, to inventory and supply chain management, human resources and customer services. It connects the many moving parts of your organization, giving you better visibility into and control over what's going on in your business. It supports highly specific industries with powerful solutions created by Microsoft partners. Microsoft Dynamics NAV helps increase your organization's productivity and improve your company's growth.

Dynamics NAV helps to replace as much or as little of your existing system as necessary. You choose from application areas for financial management, manufacturing, distribution, customer relationship management, and e-business.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV offers growing small and midsize businesses a powerful yet cost-effective solution that can be personalized for your company. It can support customization and add-on software to meet industry or other specific needs. Most importantly, it can adapt as a growing business needs more power and functionality.

Dynamics NAV also has superior integration functionality that allows you to 'talk' to other systems automatically via processes such as XML, web services integration, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange for mobile devices and many other systems.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV addresses the following business needs:

• Financial management
• Manufacturing
• Business intelligence
• Sales and marketing
• Distribution
• Integration with your systems
• Fixed Assets
• Service Management
• Jobs (Projects)
• Purchasing
• Resource Management
• Human Resources

 

Microsoft Dynamics NAV versus SAP B1

From an analysis published in magazine Computerwoche based on the study of Association for Software Testing, Microsoft Dynamics NAV wins in the direct product comparison over SAP Business One which was demonstrated as follows;

Sales Management

The Microsoft product is leading in ERP software in terms of sales management. Business One has only one text field for a report on a customer visit. In contrast, Navision offers a comprehensive template to collect information on customer visits, which are also displayed in the activities protocol of the sales employee. In addition, it is also possible to indicate the costs incurred for the visit, making it easier for the sales manager to determine the total costs involved in customer acquisition.

Financial Management

The two systems do not differ significantly in the core functions of financial accounting, such as invoicing or profit and loss statement; only the user prompting is designed differently. The jury was also of the same opinion, which was why the difference in points between the two ERP products was minimal in this department. Business One, however, also showed weakness here, since overviews ("Journals"), such as "Sales per Article", have to be exported in Excel, while Navision makes it possible to already process them within a corresponding module.

Manufacturing

A comparison of the functions for production control was deliberately left out of the test because Business One does not have the required module, which caused some people in the audience to winkle their brows. "How do you want to go about capacity planning?" one surprised visitor asked the Protask team. All they could say was that other SAP partners are currently working on corresponding developments. That was why the event organizer purposely limited the task to material planning with subsequent assembly. Both products put on a good showing here: they both reliably indicated when parts required to complete the assembly order were missing. The resulting screen could also be used to place orders. But of course it's always the little things that cause problems: after the orders are placed, Business One does not automatically make sure that the minimum stocks indicated are actually on hand. The user has to use a query to do this. Navision, on the other hand, already has this convenient feature: if 20 units of an article are required, the minimum stock is 30 and there are no parts in stock, the ERP system automatically orders a total of 50 parts.

Generating Reports

The differences between the two products became most obvious in generating reports. The teams were instructed to use the onboard tools of the ERP systems to prepare a report on the commission payments to be made to the sales representatives. The Microsoft ERP is equipped with a wizard to generate reports: it is integrated into the "Object Designer" included with the system. The tool makes it possible to conveniently select fields from tables, to determine the sorting and to define totals fields. The user then uses a layout template to design the report, which can then be either printed out or exported to the spreadsheet program. In contrast, the "Query Assistant" (Abfrageassistent) in Business One offers far fewer functions. The reports appear in a screen template that is not very convenient and have to be exported to Excel to put them in their proper form or to be able to print them. And that is quite surprising insofar as the SAP software does have a tool to layout forms, making it possible to prepare invoices on the screen and print them out. On the other hand, Business One was able to collect brownie points with its interface. The report view also makes it possible to show the SQL syntax of the query it is based on. The advantage: experts can easily change the query and start again.

Creating a new field in the table

Things really came to the crunch when the two teams of specialists were instructed to enter a new data field in the table structures. Both products support the user in doing so, whereby the Navision team came up with a more elegant solution to the problem by using the Object Designer. And the Microsoft product also has more to offer in terms of multiple languages. It was, however, necessary to change the source code before the new field would appear in these views as well. Navision is based on a proprietary programming environment, which is moreover integral part of the delivery when someone is buying this ERP system. In Business One this adjustment took place on the database level, which could prove to be positive for new release updates.

SAP B1 has some very interesting in-built workflow capabilities which can be deployed "out of the box" and the only disadvantage of this is that your organizational processes and procedures need to be adjusted to fit within the parameters of the solutions. As for Dynamics NAV, such capabilities are not available "out of the box" and some customization (using BizTalk) would be required to deploy such control capabilities. However, in terms of analysis of management information, the "Dimensions" concept of MS Dynamics NAV is way better than many other software solutions that I have used. So, whether it is SaaS or any other approach, it basically depends on how much management flexibility is required and also the depth of reporting requirements that you require.

Top Microsoft Dynamics NAV Partners & Implementation Providers

Inecta

Alletec

NAVAX Consulting AG

Arvato systems

ZSL Inc

ACP Business Solutions

Tradesoft

Alna Business Solutions

Boss Info Corporation

m-hance

Axxon Consulting

Absys Cyborg

All-e Technologies

TVision