Gregory’s Blog

For a first time in more than three years we are implementing NAV as a backoffice system. This means that we cover financial, sales and purchases processes, but only on G/L account level. The front-office systems is responsible for the rest. It’s so easy to work with NAV this way - no items, no locations, no manufacturing and no strange costs. It’s like a rebirth. This make the system similar to a common accounting system. However the thinking in the planning phase remains. You should imagine all the needed reports and what is needed for them before start building the system.

I’m working with NAV for 3 years already and still there are unexplored areas for me. I am using the matrix box for a first time now. It seems as an extremely useful control. However there is not enough information in the help or in the developer’s guide how to work with it. The help that is given is totally confusing and the reason for this is that the matrix can combine two tables and provide a result, but in the help both tables are the same. This can not demonstrate the full functionality of the matrix at first place and confuses with how things happen because both tables are the same on second place. Here is my help on matrix:

1.Matrix has three parts - right part(table part), header part and result part

2.Right part uses as source table the source table of the form. You can think of the right part as an ordinary data grid - item list for example.

3.Header part uses as source table the source table of the matrix box. If the source table of the matrix is Location, you should use CurrForm.Matrix.MatrixRec.Code in order to display Location codes as header values. Keep in mind that you should change the name of the matrix control(here it is Matrix) in order to use it.

4.The result part is the grid between the right part and the header part. It is a result of some calculations that generates values in the fields of the grid. For example you can show the inventory of each item in each location simultaneouly in the upper example. You should use the Matrix.OnAfterGetRecord trigger for this calculation. Keep in mind that this calculation is done for every cell in the grid and sometimes the form can be reaaly sloooow.

That’s what I found useful. Perhaps there is other functionality that I do not know still.

Today was the last day of Covergence. I’ve visited two sesions and the keynote of Steve Balmer. My firts session was about hardware sizing and high availability of Dynamics NAV. This gay, Michael Devoe, obviously know what he is talking about. I’ve learned a few tricks and I’ll try them some day. My second session was a Q&A session with all Microsoft NAV experts. The only thing that I’ve learned was that they have a long list of software requirements and they should choose what to implement in future relalses.

I have a full satisfaction from this Convergence. This is the shortest way of expressing what I fell about this conference.

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.

Today was a short Convergence day for me. I’ ve particpated in an User Experience workshop and listened to a session about advanced distribution in NAV.

The User Experience was extremely interesting for me. However I signed a non-disclosure agreement, so I can not share what was it about. However I think that I can say my impressions. I think that it was a great exercise which provides with a lot of information the people who led it. It would be great if everybody who develops a new software just invite a bunch of people, give them a number of exercises and listen to their feedback in the end.

There is a camera on Convergence. You can record your thoughts or questions to Microsoft. I’ve recorded myself. My message was about the lack of record level security in NAV. Todays businesses need higher state of security in their processes and in their business systems, so I think it is normally to expect a record level security from an ERP system

The session about advanced distribution was a good one. The guy was a support engineer in Microsoft. He explained a lot of things about reordering policies. I do not have experience in that area, but I’ve tried some things in the demo database without any success. Now I know why. One of the important messages was that NAV is not designed for simultaneous work of several planners so this case should be prevented in most of the cases. Also A location should always exist even if it is only one. This helps during the planning.

Kitting was introduced as a new feature of 5.0. Kits are supported by the means of BOMs. A lot of people in the room congratulated this decision. However I am not very confident about the use of kits without problems at least for one version.

 

Today is the first day of Convergence for the customers. The agenda is not that tough and I managed to go to the world famous San Diego zoo. It is an incredible place. I recommend it to Convergence participants and all visitors of San Diego.

I’ve participated in two sessions today. The first one was about item tracing and inventory costing in NAV 5.0. The second was introduction to SharePoint.

I’ll add some comments on yesterday that I’ve forgot to put in previous posts. Yesteday they said that NAV is used by 57000 customers with more than 1000000 user licenses. Honestly I do not think that this numbers are very impressive. I am little bit disappointed actually of the average licenses per company. They appear to be less than 20. Most of our implementations in Bulgaria exceed this number several times. I’ve seen SAP implementations with 800 users. From other point of view it is quite normal. NAV is quite good software, but some of its features and functions(SIFT, costing, etc.) can not be used in larger organisation without significant effort from the IT team. However I do not think that NAV should be developed for larger organisations. Rather it would be better if it is enhanced for better use.

Maybe this is the reason that on the first session today they talked about enhancements, no about new features or functionalities. One of the enhacements is related to EU regulations for item tracing especially in the food industry. NAV 5.0 has the ability to trace back and forth the items. However I did not feel this enhancement as an user-friendly one.

Inventory costing is long time pain for Navision users. There are significant changes in every release since version 3.1. Mircosoft concentrated on the “singl truth” which I find is a good solution. Data should be trustworthy and the reports should return same values. Zero quantity with non-zero value should be prevented. They introduced a new inventory-G/L reconciliation form and the most important of all - transparent mechanism of calculation of cost. Till now I felt myself really stupid when I explained to our customers that cost calculation in Navision is black box. I hope that this will change.

SharePoint is one of the trends here. Everybpody is talking about SharePoint and anybody does not know what exactly is this. Me also. For this reason I attended the SharePoint 101 session. Still it’s not quite clear to me how SharePoint works, but it seems to me that it can be useful in larger oranisation for knowledge and content management.

That’s from today. If somebody followed the feed from the convergence site, I should excuse myself, because this blog is both personal and professional. The professional part is written in English. However the personal part is held in Bulgarian.

My afternoon sessions included “Enhancements in NAV 5.0″ and the partners closing session.

In the NAV session there some demos of XSL and export to Word and Excel.  This feauture is quite good and a lot of customers has been expecting this from years. You can use several stylesheets on a form. Of course, only one can be used during export. The good thing is that you can add data from additional tables by modifying codeunit 403. My question was if there is a tool for stylesheet creation and modification because I find XSL for a non-user-friendly language. The best tool for this task remains Visual Studio. They said that in the whitepaper there is a description how to create XSL tempaltes for NAV export.

Document approval is another new feature that was mentioned. however I’m aving some questions about this and I’ll try to find the answer untill the end of the Convergence. I am wondering if document approval can be parametrized i.e to require approval only for orders above 1234$. The other thing is how the approving party is defined. Is it just a user or it is based on roles somehow. And if it is a user, what happens if he gets sick.

There was a demo about Outlook synchronization. It looked cool although the Outlook was actually cheated. I think that I’ll try this and consider it it can be used in real life.

A non-real-life demo was also the RFID demo. However the guy said that this is mostly a technology demo that should be used as a proof of concept. The main idea is to automatically record item transactions in NAV by tracking them by the means of RFID and the Biztalk RFID.

The Rapid Implementation Methodology is also promoted intensively. I saw that it is implemented in NAV. I like the explanation of usage of RIM. It should guarantee consistent approach when dealing with customers even if the partners are more than one.

The closing session was more about values and strategy. Michael Park talked about “building muscle” - his idea of beating competitors via constant practice, commitment, better communication, knowledge, etc. They were nice words but I did not belive him fully because he himself did not feel confident on the stage.

Then Doug Burgum came and the whole hall aplauded him. I did not know who is he. He made a brief presentation about the three pillars in the business according to him. They were thrust, customer service and leadership. Low thrust leads to slower transactions. High switching cost in the ERP business keeps the customer stuck to us. That’s why high switching cost leads to arrogance in partner behaviour. And it should not. Leadership is on object of choice. People choose to be leaders. The price again is commitment, discipline, self-building. The sentence that impressed me most was that it’s better to spend few minutes trying to inspire, than 365*7*24 trying to control.

Doug is leaving. There were a lot of emotions. Perhaps it is an emotional moment to leave a successful company tht you’ve created and developed years in a row.

Then came the Q&A sessions. Obviously partners are not that happy of their partnership as Microsoft is. There were questions of the pricing, licencing, advertising, competiotion of other partners. Most of the questions remained without answers. “Great feedback, we will consider this” was the most common phrase. However people seemed not to like this type of answers.

Opening session was typically Microsoft. Everyone is excited, revenue grows, etc. Two things were of interest for me. They showed a prototype of visual planning tool, which was awesome. Imagine typical gamer technologies and visulisation tricks implemented in a business system. There was a 2D and 3D look, zoom and analysis information. As this is a popular word here, everybody were excited. But as far as I understand this is under development. The other thing was a independent research of Harvard professors which prove that Microsoft beats SAP in 6 key areas. I do not rememer the areas but most of them were related to usability, flexibility, etc. This is true, of course, but SAP still has a lot more of functionality. There was a funny quote of CEO of NVIDIA, who said that his employees prefer to eat worms instead of work with SAP:) Obviously SAP bothers Microsoft a lot because there are a lot of sessions in the agenda of how to sell Microsoft products, hot to compete SAP, etc.

My next session was about NAV 5.0. There are several good news and one bad news. The good news are about functionality of NAV 5.0. I’ve tried already some of its new functionalities like prepayments. Here they demonstrated links to SharePoint, to maps, integration with Word and Excel, item tracing and document approval. SharePoint Portal integration is one of the keypoints of what is said till now although I still do not understand what additional value this brings to the clients. There was also demonstration of NAV web services. It looks as that major triggers of the tables are exposed as a web service - insert, modify, delete. Tehre was demo of 5.1 user interface which is quite different. The space is widely modifiable. There is a new action pane. Tabs are ordered in another way and some fields have prpoperties that tells the system how to display them.

The bad news is that the rumours about 5.0 release in group 2 & 3 countries is true. They will not release this version in this countries. They will release directly 5.1 somewhen in then next year. 

Yesterday I saw a strange decision. A company implemented Navision using the corporate chart of accounts. Bulgarian chart of accounts was described as a dimension. This is a working decision, yet it is a strange one. Bulgarian accountants use almost standardized chart of accounts from decades. Perhaps this company suffered a lot of problems during the implementation, because people did not feel comfortable with the new chart of accounts. The other problem is that the accountants work with the bulgarian chart of accounts when reconciling, reporting, preparing reports to the authorities, etc. Normally corporate chart of account is used for reporting to the headquarters. In this case it is with lower priority according to the everyday financial work of the company. So it is better to use it as a dimension and the bulgarian chart of accounts as a primary one. A technical issue also arises. Using another chart of accounts as a dimension means that every single record in general ledger will have at least one accompanying record in the ledger entry dimension table. This makes posting slower and the database bigger. Besides it is not effective because mapping of both charts of accounts is constant and you do not need this information for each entry.

Today I passed the Navision Financials exam. I have a three years of experience with Navision, I read the whole training material and still I did not feel confident enough. The reason for this is that still there are areas of Navision that I haven’t worked with.  After so many exams taken for Microsoft certifications, I believe that the experience is much more helpful than the theoretical training.