Gregory’s Blog

Today was a busy day for me. I’ve started the day with a session about NAV 5.1. It is a hot topic apparently, because the room was completely full. The important message of the session was that there will not be additional functionality in 5.1 compared to that in 5.0. The change is in technology and user experience. The classic architecture remains and it will be the only one available for native database. The new 3-tier database requires SQL Server. The user interface is completely different. It is a role-based interface. There are new things as ribbons, additional toolbars, fast tabs (which are fast, because they are faster than the normal tabs:)). I think that I’ve covered most of this things in a previous post. One of the good new things is the option to freeze panes like in excel. This is great when you have lists with a lot of columns. Another thing also imressed me a lot. When user selects a menu, the starting form is the list form. I’ve never tought about it, but people normally run the card and immediately call the list. So Microsoft decided to call the list directly. It is so simple and it is realized years after the first release of the system. Perhaps this is the reason for all of the user experience surveys that Microsoft makes. Sometimes people do not see the obvious things.

After the lunch I’ve visited a session about advanced manufacturing. It was the same guy that led the advanced distribution yesterday. However he was not that good today. Still he managed to make some good points about planning in NAV. I think that companies should be super diciplined and organized in order to start implementing production planning. Sometimes it is better to convince the client to skip this part and to reduce your benefit of licenses and imlementation fees than to mislead him and to put both of you in trouble.

My next session was about AX. There was nothing interesting about NAV and the AX session sounded interesting. It was about costing and inventory closing. The lady spoke fluently and knowledgable about these things. However some of the demos did not succede from the first time. There are 6 costing methods in AX - FIFO,LIFO,Average,Standard and LIFO date and Average date. The other interesting hink was that during the accounting period values are calculated based on a average cost. Then it is adjusted. In NAV the operational method is FIFO. I’ve attended this session in order to acquire a different view about these processes but I’ve found that they are pretty much the same in both systems.

I’ve attended a Chalk&Talk about optimizing NAV performance on SQL Server 2005. The main idea was something about disablinf SIFT index and replacing it with a SQL Server non-clustered index with included fields. However I’m not sure how this works so I’ll try it in next days. The effect of this is a relatively slow read and tens of times faster write.

The last session was about BI capabilities of NAV. I was quite tired and the speakers were more sales oriented, so I felt this session as an extremely irritating one. They didn’t stop explaining that NAV and all ot its BI features are out-of-the-box without any developer work. Yes, but no. Theoretically they are right. Practically this is impossible. From my experience end users hardly understand what is a table, relation or a key. Besides, although all new bells and whistles, if you do not have the data, you could not run a BI i.e. you can not make analysis by dimensions if you do not have dimensions set up. Efficient reporting is a critical requirement to every ERP system so company reporting requirements should be examined in the implementation planning phase in order to have the basis for report preparation. This is much much more important than the visual layout of the report.