Article by Andrew Karasev

Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains MRP and ERP application is very popular in Chicagoland and in this small publication we would like to give you GP implementation, customization, reporting, data conversion and migration, version upgrade, data integration case studies and highlights. We will base our paragraphs on real customer stories here in Illinois

1. Migration from Quick Books to Great Plains Dynamics. You can export your chart of accounts, rework it by adding segmentation and then import to Dynamics GP via Integration Manager, table import tool or even in SQL Query Analyzer with insert statement. In the case if you do insert into GL00100 table, which is account master, please run check links in Financials. Transactions on the level of General Ledger are pretty simple to import, including historical years from Quick Books to Great Plains, assuming that you established one-to-one accounts mapping QB to GP. If your company outgrew Quick Books or another Small Business Accounting package, please contact us

2. Light Manufacturing and Assembly. In Chicago, Northern Illinois and North West Indiana we see large number of small manufacturing and distribution businesses, shipping their final assemblies across the USA and Canada. Discrete Manufacturing, especially for small production lots could be implemented in Great Plains Inventory Control and Bill of Material modules. For larger manufacturing mills, you should consider Great Plains Manufacturing suit of modules

3. Innovative Web Sessions support. Even for local businesses in Chicago area, in order to respond immediately and fix ongoing issues, we recommend you remote support via gotomeeting web sessions. Typical remote support cases: unlock batch, change posting date, restore Great Plains workstation after virus attack and following antivirus cleaning, modify aging trial balance report to name a few

4. Dynamics GP Dexterity Software Development Factory. We are very enthusiastic about Great Plains add-ons design and programming. If you need unique or generic modification needs, where existing Great Plains third party products do not fit, please feel free to contact us with Dynamics GP customization needs

5. Great Plains Support Call Center. After analyzing business opportunities, we decided to support exotic Great Plains products: Great Plains Accounting for DOS and Windows, Great Plains Dynamics of earlier versions on Ctree and Pervasive SQL and Btrieve: 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0, 7.5, Intellisol Advanced Purchase Order Processing and Project Accounting

About the Author

Andrew Karasev, Alba Spectrum, LLC, http://www.albaspectum.com, help@albaspectrum.com, 1-866-528-0577, serving Great Plains Dynamics GP community since 1994. Please visit our information portal Pegas Planet: http://www.pegasplanet.com. GP, SAP B1 local service in Chicago, Naperville, Evanston, Plainfield, Downers Grove, Joliet, Aurora, Lisle, Lemont, Lombard, Glen Ellyn, Wheaton, Bolingbrook, Hinsdale, Villa Park

SAP B1 ERP has light manufacturing or discrete production module and light MRP wizard.  In this publication we will be staying with SB1 standard functionality and not covering third party add-ons, related to full featured manufacturing.  As this publication is written for SAP Business One popularization, we will be commenting and giving you our opinion, comparing other accounting applications, available on the market.  If you are at the decision point on purchasing and implementing SAP Business One, this material should help you to pick your SAP Business One Reseller, Consultant and Implementation partner

1.       Discrete Manufacturing.  This type of production assumes exact knowledge of incoming components to get final assembled product.  And this is where SB1 production could be deployed, in discrete manufacturing model.  If you are in food industry, where you have variable units on the input with such necessities as catch weight, then out of the box SB1 production module is probably not covering

2.       Disassembly Production Order.  This feature allows you easy to disassembly returned units, returns and canceled orders from your customers and place back inventory items and parts back on the shelves

3.       Combining Production and following up Warranty Service contracts.  In SAP B1 you can easily associate serialized end product with Service Warranty contract for your customers.  In this case you can service the contract with scheduled maintenance, warranty parts replacements on the serviced unit, associate warranty related technician hours, as well as billable hours, if warranty doesn’t cover

4.       MRP Wizard.  This feature is helping you to replenish your inventory in order to meet deadlines with your production orders.  It bases the replenishment timeline on vendor typical lead time and other feature

SAP B1 gets its ERP and small business MRP market share in US, especially with the release of SB1 version 2007A.  In this small publication we would like to give you practical highlights on deploying SAP Business One in Rentals business, where you rent your serialized item and then service it while contract is active, incurring cost, such as spare parts and replacement, labor hours and expenses either covered by warranty or billable to the customer.  This publication should help you locate your SAP Business One consultant, VAR, technology partner or reseller for implementation, software license sale, customization, data conversion, user training, reporting and integration.  SB1 is targeted for small and medium size businesses, and we expect it to get good ground in Chicagoland distribution hub related small assembly and shipping businesses

1.       How service contact is realized in SAP Business One.  You associate your inventory serialized item with service contract.  Here serial or manufacturing number is auxiliary feature, not required, but we recommend to serialize rented items.  Please, note that you can add more item to the rental contract, see next paragraph

2.       How to allocate additional items to the service contract.  What you do is create service call document, and there switch to Expense tab, Expenses Detail, create new document and select the type on the document options – transferred to technician.  In the Transferred to Technician document select warehouse from where to transfer and destination warehouse – to where to transfer

3.       How to return items upon the contract expiration.  The same way as in paragraph 3, create return from technician document

4.       Customer Vendor Consolidation, this feature is new and introduced in SAP B1 2007.  Look at Business Partners – reconciliation and check multiple BPs.  Here you can select your Business partner, who is customer (with its customer ID) and vendor (with its vendor ID) and reconcile all customer and vendor outstanding documents with single either payment from customer or credit memo or payment to vendor.  Customer Vendor Consolidation functionality is typically separate module for such competitors, as Microsoft Dynamics GP Great Plains, for example, so take your advantage

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