ERP

Mystery laptop: an update

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Never trust the customer 🙂 We were sure that the server had last service packs applied, that’s the first that we asked of the customer IT, and got a definite answer that “But, of course!”. So we didn’t really think this might be an issue. Then we noticed that SQL Server build number was 1399, while my laptop was running 3042. This reads: customer’s top-notch server is still on SQL Server 2005 RTM, my laptop is on SP2. There may hide the culprit.

So – a lesson learned: check the versions yourself, check them first, no matter what they say to you.

BUT STILL – did SP2 really bring such a huge performance improvement? Any experiences anyone? I’ve found out that there are some improvements with performance, but on such a huge scale? I mean, it is still three times faster on four times weaker hardware. This should call for a 12-fold improvement in certain operations, quite a feat 🙂

I look forward to this evening, when we have SP2 upgrade scheduled – I really can’t wait to see if this helps. I hope so, otherwise, we don’t need technical consultants on this project – we need exorcists!

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Mystery laptop

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I had no clue how good my laptop was. Seriously. Today it kicked ass of an 8-processor server.

Tomorrow we have a go-live of a Microsoft Dynamics NAV deployment, with manufacturing customized to support configure-to-order functionality. Refreshing manufacturing orders now calculates dynamic BOMs and routings, and it takes time.

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Architectures: Good, Bad and Ugly

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Four months ago I attended a conference, where I had a chance to listen to Miha Kralj, an architect at Microsoft, talk about architectures. It was one of the best presentations I ever attended, and ever since I had this topic in queue, but never really had chance to write about it. Most of the stuff he talked about reminded me of some bad experiences about architectures on projects I’ve worked on. Most of stuff here is also not my original contribution to the universal pool of knowledge, and I reuse it with the permission of the author, so Miha, thanks! What I did, however, is that I applied general principles to specific Microsoft Dynamics NAV situations.

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Standard enemy

  • Reading time:4 mins read

The biggest jeopardies often lurk where we least expect them. When implementing an ERP system such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV, what should be one of our best allies, turns out to be our mortal enemy. It has a simple name: The Standard. Standard processes, standard functionality, standard documents, standard system. All these gizmos can turn into gremlins in a blink of an unattentive eye.

Standards are tricky. If during due dilligence, or diagnostic or analysis phase, we hear the prospect or customer utter the word “standard”, what do we instinctively do? Well, in a standard system, it’s pretty obvious what the standard is, and when the customer says that they “just have standard processes” it means that these processes are just covered with such a standard system, right? So we instinctively tend to skip the more detailed analysis of these, because after all, they are standard.

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Business case – do I eat it or?

  • Reading time:7 mins read

It’s a well known fact that IT projects fail every so often. Standish Group has been researching the success and failure factors of IT projects for a decade and a half, and they publish their results in their CHAOS report every two years or so. According to their 2006 report, only about 35% of projects can be categorized as successful, while 65% are declared unsuccessful. In this report, word unsuccessful can mean anything from exceeding time and/or budget (46% of projects) or failing altogether (19% of them). With such a huge proportion of projects going astray, maybe there was something wrong with these projects from the very beginning. Were the time and budget unrealistic? Were the project requirements, or even objectives, unrealistic? Maybe. Or maybe not. How can you tell?

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Peugeot – Engineered to be enjoyed (or A simple way a car dealership can profit from an ERP system?)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

About six months ago, when I was buying a car, a friend of mine, in a typical The Good, the Bad and the Ugly fashion, told me that there were two kinds of cars: good cars, and French cars. I bought a French car. I bought a Peugeot 407 SW (Peugeot says their cars are engineered to be enjoyed) and although I could do so, I am not going to make this a post about what went wrong with this car already so far. This is going to be a post about how the simplest of the features of an ERP system can influence customer (dis)satisfaction, and create long term decisions for, or against a car vendor. Also, not typical for me, I am speaking from the shoes of a customer, rather than consultant, this time. Quite a change for me.

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Not-so-elementary costing: The Change

  • Reading time:5 mins read

They say the only constant is change. I’d say that the only other constant is error. We humans tend to err. Give a repeatable task to a human, and they’ll mess it up every once in a while. Some call it the human factor.

One of the many repeatable tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is setting up items. If you remember my rant about mandatory fields, and how I said they were baaad, there might be an even more baaad kind of fields: the default value fields. Because the system simply inserts a value into these fields without asking for your say, and if anything is easy, it’s only so easy to overlook these. Yep, you have a chance to voice your oppinion on these, but having got to hurry for a cup of coffe with Mary from accounting, admit it, you’re gonna leave that default FIFO costing method for an item every once in a while, even though it should really have been Average. Then you’ll start posting. Then your phone rings and starts screaming at you about a moron who screwed up items again.

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Purchasing Services: Inventory Value Zero

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I’ve stumbled recently upon a support request, where a partner asked if there was a possibility to register purchases of services in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. When it comes to selling services, such as consulting, or repairs, NAV is your true friend, because you can use Resources to register sales against them. However, purchase documents don’t offer a possibility of purchasing resources, so you are left to some workarounds.

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Output journal confusion

  • Reading time:6 mins read

A few days ago, I’ve got a question from a customer, about an alleged bug in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. According to online help, when you are posting output in manufacturing module, the last line of the type Output in the journal will actually adjust the inventory level. However, what is not explained is how the figure in this field is calculated, and why exactly that way.

When you decide to post an output of a production order, you specify the released production order for which you want to post the output, then call the function Explode Routing. After this function completes its chore, users unfamiliar with how manufacturing works can get quite confused, because two of the fields the procedure fills in contain unexpected values. These two fields are Output Quantity, and Scrap Quantity.

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Scrap doesn’t just happen

  • Reading time:6 mins read

In reality, if you need 1,000 of whatever product, the manufacturing process is rarely going to yield exactly 1,000 of it, even if you feed into the first operation the exact quantities of raw materials system calculated as gross requirements. The process may produce 980 or 1,020, but is hardly ever going to be exactly 1,000. If you didn’t take scrap into account, or you took incorrect scrap into account, your actual output from the process might be much more unpredictable, with huge variances. Variances are always a problem, only they don’t have to be that big a problem in all scenarios.

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