Dynamics GP Technology Partner: Great Plains Customizations and Integrations Support

Modern ERP, MRP, Sales, Purchasing and Accounting systems, being implemented, have to coexist with company computer network and legacy applications infrastructure: EDI, eCommerce, Groupware, various industry applications, reporting.  We assume that the decision to implement Microsoft Dynamics GP was made in several comparison cycles, where you have seen competitors: SAP Business One, Accpac, MAS 90, and you are now ready to begin Dynamics GP custom add-ons implementation, and if these are too expensive or do not exist for your Corporate ERP business requirements, this small publication should give your GP custom development perspectives:

1. Dynamics GP customization specification writing, programming, testing and version upgrade.  Specification is first step and it often is decisive in the success of failure.  We encourage you to involve your Dynamics GP ISV partner in this process.  If you are in partner selection process, please, check with your prospects if they have your industry GP implementation and modification expertise and if they carry in staff Dexterity, eConnect programmers with multiple years of coding experience.  For programming and testing phase, based on our experience, we recommend you either to dedicate separate Testing Server or do QA and Testing on the copy of you GP production company.  Custom logic is often your settings and data driven and it is too generic to test in GP Lesson Company.  GP Custom Add-on has its own life cycle, most important is to plan its code review for each Dynamics GP version update.  This paragraph was for IT directors, we tried to be not too technical

2. Great Plains Customization tools.  Being mid-market ERP, GP has various tools and modification options.  We will list them here and you will need to come through others FAQ style articles to get more info on each one to make your homework done.  eConnect is perfect new set of libraries and SDK sample code snippets - if you are experienced or even probing your after college steps Microsoft Visual Studio C#, VB or other .Net language programmer, you may quickly familiarize yourself to eConnect and make introduction programming exercises.  eConnect allows you to manipulate master objects (Customer, Vendor, Employee, GL Account, Address, etc.) and Work Transactions (SOP Invoice, Order, POP Purchase Receipt, etc.).  Microsoft Dexterity, formerly known as Great Plains Dexterity, it is the shell of Dynamics GP user workstation and it is part of current architecture on the data structure level.  Dexterity is more proprietary, comparing to eConnect, for example, and we do not recommend you to consider programming Dex in-house.  Dexterity programmer has complete control over GP objects and such GP Add-ons as Alba Spectrum Posting Server is coded in Dexterity Sanscript, where our Software Development Factory Programmers had access to Dex native procedures and functions and that would not be possible in C#, SQL or other non Dexterity programming

3. Integration Tools.  Here you should consider eConnect and Dexterity, especially eConnect as integration typically feeds something like Sales Orders and Customers from your ecommerce website, or EDI compliant Purchase Orders.  However, if your objective is not customization, but rather pure integration, please review Dynamics GP Integration Manager module.  It was recently redesigned with eConnect connectors, meaning that you can deploy eConnect logic and performance even if you are not a software developer, but rather business logic savvy end user.  Plus in IM you can tweak integration logic in event driven scripts: before integration (where you set up global parameters, such as date, exchange rate), before document commit (where you check and modify document parameters before saving them in GP).  With IM you typically expect integration on demand, meaning that GP user should launch integration manager manually.  It is definitely the most popular way, however you can also schedule IM with Windows macro based third party small programs, and we even saw the scenario, when ecommerce computer parts and service reseller implemented real time IM integration by calling it every 2 minutes

4. Dexterity Custom Add-On upgrade.  If your custom module coded in Dexterity triggers exclusively - you might be lucky in just reapplying Dex chunk file to new version Great Plains workstation.  For the rest of us, especially when you had to alter existing GP windows, consider some budget for Dex customization upgrade

5. Barcode integration in retail, wholesale, shipping and receiving, logistics.  Please, refer to our recent articles on these subjects.  You should decide on Barcode scanning integration point, plus if you are OK with Batch mode or need real time Barcoding data upload

6. EDI Integrations.  Here you likely have to read these lines if existing Dynamics GP ISV EDI add-on is too expensive or you believe that you can program EDI integration in SQL Stored Procedure or simple eConnect programming

7. Great Plains Customization in International Environment.  Please, note that Dexterity is not compatible at least in its current version 10.0 with Unicode.  If you plan to roll out Dynamics GP in the subsidiary in China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, please give us a call on your possible options.  If you plan to implement simple GP interface in European language: Bulgarian, Russian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbian (when tax compliance localization requirement is not a concern), you may consider to translate Dexterity strings from English into your local country language

8. Consolidated GP Reporting.  Here we recommend you to deploy FRx financial reporting with Reporting Trees, Multicurrency

9. If you need additional help, please call us: 1-866-528-0577, internationally 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com or skype: albaspectrum.  We would be happy to give you your industry case from Great Plains customization and integration perspective, as well as to give you second opinion, if you are not happy with your current Dynamics GP Partner support level