Getting Insights from your Dynamics GP solution
You have been using the Dynamics GP solution for some time and have captured valuable data about your customers, vendors and financial operations. Now you want to draw some useful insights from this information. You want the answers to questions such as the following:
- Who are our most profitable customers?
- What products are these customers buying?
- Are they buying more (or less) from us this year versus last year?
- What is our margin by customer and by product?
- Who are our top salespersons?
With the GP Analysis Cubes, the answers to these questions are just a few clicks away.
Here’s the Pivot Table created from the Sales cube that contains the top 10 customers by Sales. The report also includes Cost of Sales and Gross Profit. You could also sort the Pivot Table by Gross Profit.
Once you have this basic report, you are ready for further analysis by slicing and dicing the data. For example, you want to know what products these top 10 customers purchased. Simply drag the product dimension next to the Customer dimension. Here’s the resulting report.
Now you want to compare this year’s sales for your top customers against the last year’s sales. Simply, drag the year dimension to the columns area and select the years you want to compare.
As you can see from the report, Office Design Systems Ltd and Vision Inc. are the brand new customers this year who made the top 10 customers list. You also notice that some of the last year’s top customers have dropped off the top 10 list this year.
If you would like to see the underlying details for a given cell in the report, you can drill down by double clicking on the cell. A new worksheet will display the detailed transactions that make up the result in the cell as shown in the following screen shot.
Conclusion: Your Dynamics GP system captures a lot of valuable data about your business and you can use it to your competitive advantage with the tools you already know and use.
New Distribution and Manufacturing Features in GP 2010!
What’s new for Distribution and Manufacturing in GP 2010? Following are a few of the highlights!
Inventory
Exclude discontinued items from Items lookup — You can now exclude all discontinued items or exclude discontinued items with no quantity available from the Items lookup window. You also can set a default view.
You can define and save a default lookup view for your master records by selecting the Set as Default View option from the View menu or using the right-click menu in the lookup window. The default view you select will be the view displayed when you open the lookup window the next time. You can set a default view for the following lookup windows.
• Items lookup window
• Accounts lookup window
• Employees lookup window
• Customers and Prospects lookup window
• Salespeople lookup window
• Vendors lookup window
The default view is saved on a per user, per company basis.
Sales Order Processing
Print back ordered items on picking tickets — You can use the Print Sales Documents window, the Sales Document Print Options window, and the Bulk Picking Print window to print back-ordered items on picking tickets. A “B” appears next to back-ordered quantities.
Purchase Order Processing
Roll down promised date and promised ship date changes — You can change the promised date and promised ship date for a standard or dropship purchase order and roll down the date changes to the line items on the purchase order. The current promised date, original promised date, and the promised ship date on a line item are updated depending on the status of the line item.
Define lot number masks — You can define a lot number mask and automatically generate a specific number of lot numbers when receiving an item, saving data entry time and reducing the chance of errors. This is similar to serial number masks.
Receive in-transit transfer items – You can automatically receive in-transit transfer items using the Select In-Transit Items window and the Receivings Transaction Entry window.
Manufacturing
Right-click menu enabled — You can right-click in a text or numeric field to see a shortcut menu. The shortcut menu contains options from the Edit menu.
Enhancements made to the Sales Forecasting window:
• Items in the scrolling window can be sorted in ascending or descending order by item number or the item’s unit cost by clicking the column headings.
• Two shortcut keys have been added so you can move between the forecast periods in the scrolling window. Press ALT + < to move to the next period on the left or press ALT + > to move to the next period on the right.
• The Sales Item Number Find window can be opened from the Item Number Find window.
Changing standard costs — You can use the Standard Cost Changes window to roll the cost changes only to the item at a single level or roll cost changes to all levels in which the item exists.
For the complete list of enhancements and new features in GP 2010, visit Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 What’s New!
What’s new for HR/Payroll in GP 2010!
The following are a couple of cool new features in the HR/Payroll module in GP 2010!
Reprint Payroll checks and earnings statements
• You can now use the Payroll Check Inquiry window to reprint paystub and direct deposit earnings statement information
• The Payroll Check Inquiry scrolling window also includes a new check box that lets you select any combination of individual paycheck transactions to view and print.
– If you select multiple paychecks, a separate report is printed for each paycheck.
Excel-based reports for Certification, License and Training Manager
• Give managers and other company officials who are not GP users, to have access to this data for decision making purposes.
• Use Microsoft Office Excel reporting for viewing and sorting certification, license and training data and for customizing the presentation of data to satisfy their requirements.
Exclude inactive employees in Employees lookup
• You can now exclude all inactive employees from the Employees lookup window.
• You also can set a default view.
Assign employee secondary status codes
• You can create secondary status codes to provide more detail about an employee’s status
• You can set up separate status codes for active and inactive employees, and print a report listing all available status codes.
– why an employee is inactive or isn’t being paid.
– set up codes for inactive employees
– You can assign the new codes using the Employee Maintenance window, and view assigned codes using the Employee Inquiry window.
eConnect HR Adaptors
• HR eConnect Adaptors are now available
– This means you can create Scribe integrations to write directly to HR tables
– No custom code is required
Pay policy management “Use Add-On” functionality
• Allow the mass updating of employees using a Pay Policy Manager add-on
I Have A Dream: Microsoft Inspires a Global Community in D.C.
In a few short days, Microsoft’s senior leaders and thousands of Microsoft partners like us from over 100 countries will come together in our nation’s capital for the 2010 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference. For partners, WPC is a fantastic annual opportunity to start the new (fiscal) year informed, connected and in sync with one another. But I think it’s much more than that.
To me, the theme this year, Infinite Possibilities, conveys the mindset that Microsoft would like to inspire its partners to take on. Microsoft thinks big and has an incredible vision of what’s possible in the world. But having a great idea or creating a phenomenal plan for the future will only go so far. You need to engage those that surround you and have them touched, moved and inspired by that possibility in order to create an environment that’s conducive for the fulfillment of that dream.
So Microsoft brings together partners from across the planet, conveys its vision and strategy, celebrates the latest product innovations and accomplishments, and provides hands-on-labs, training and discussions to give people essential capabilities and knowledge. Microsoft not only gets people out of town and out of the office, it gets people out of their short-term, constrained and limited ways of thinking. Microsoft not only sees what’s possible for software and technology, Microsoft sees what’s possible for people, businesses, non-profits, and governments around the world. But rather than keep that beautiful vision locked up, they want to bring us all together in the capital of the United States of America, share it, and empower us to achieve what we can now imagine.
Personally, I’m a fan of people from around the world returning to their state, city or village filled with a sense of infinite possibility, hope and power. Let freedom ring.
CRM 4.0 Installation Considerations with SQL Server 2008 and Windows 2008
CRM 4.0 Installation Considerations with SQL Server 2008 and Windows 2008
1) Installation will fail get to the final step and will fail checking requirements with the following error:
Error| Check FullTextRunningValidator : Failure: Service msftesql was not found on computer ‘Computer_Name’.
This occurs because the fulltext search service that existed and was required for CRM on SQL 2005 has been incorporated into each database on SQL server 2008. This error should be resolved by choosing “Update installation files” at the beginning of the install process. If you selected this option and are still getting an error, then the installation update is being blocked by a firewall!!! (this was the case for me) To get around this you will have to install CRM via command line and and install config xml file. To do this start by manually downloading the updated install files from MS and borrowing the XML config details from the CRM installation documentation.
2) After installation you may get an error when you go to the CRM website that says:
HTTP Error 401.2 … You are not authorized to view this page due to invalid authentication headers
This occurs because IIS 7.5 no longer has Windows Authentication as part one of the default authentication methods when a site is created. To resolve this, go to the Control Panel and nder Programs click “Turn Windows Features On or Off”. On the console that opens, expand “Roles”. Right Click “Web Server IIS” and choose “Add Role Services”. On the new window that opens, scroll down to “Security” and check the option that says “Windows Authentication”
After this is installed, the CRM site should function as expected.
Manufacturing Cost Rollup Discrepancies
During a recent implementation of the Dynamics GP Manufacturing module for one of our clients, we noticed significant differences between the existing current standard cost and the proposed or pending standard cost for several finished goods items after performing our first cost rollup. There are several possible reasons for this, some of which include:
- The existing standard cost on the finished goods and/or materials item cards are over or under valued
- Labor and/or machine rates are over or under stated
- Routing times are invalid
- Components are missing from the Bills of Materials (BOMs)
Upon closer look, it appeared that the pending material costs were less than what they should be according to how the BOMs were set up and what the client knew their material costs to be.
Upon an even closer look, with our Item Cost Revaluation report and calculator in hand, we were able to review several BOMs and identify specific components that were not being included in the cost rollup even though they were included in the BOMs. These same components were also excluded from backflusing during the posting of Manufacturing Order (MO) Receipts; i.e. the component quantities were not being relieved from inventory and component costs were not flowing to the GL.
It turns out that records for certain inventory items were missing from one of the costing tables in the company database. But how? What could have caused this? Microsoft had a couple of possible explanations for the missing records:
- If items are imported via SQL
- If items start out as a perpetual valuation method and are later changed to periodic
The latter seems to be the most likely cause in this case. We performed the following steps to resolve the issue (after first testing in a test environment). The referenced scripts should be obtained from Microsoft Dynamics Support… Read the rest of this entry »
Terminal Server 2008 Together With Dynamics GP
After deploying several Dynamics GP customers using the new Windows Server 2008 Remote Desktop Services (old Terminal Services), I must say that I have been quite impressed with the new functionality. It is now a viable option to use, and much more cost effective, then the traditional school of thought that Citrix is the way to go.
The previous limitations of past implementation seemed to have all been addressed, namely:
- Printing on client computers without having to install every print driver – Thanks to Easy Print
- Training user on how to manage two desktops – Use of Remote App
- Providing access to external users without the dependency on a VPN connection – Accomplished through the RDGateway
With limited exceptions, we now recommend the approach to all of our customers that are deciding the best method to deploy their new Dynamics GP solution. It is the best of both worlds in that IT no longer has the challenges in maintaining several desktop installations while the users get the rich application experience they prefer.
Anyone else had similar successes or challenges in using Remote Desktop Services?
Top 10 Products Dashboard for CRM Accounts
Dynamics CRM users like “At a glance” views of their customers including the products they have purchased in the past.
In this article I will walk you through the steps to create a Top 10 Products dashboard and integrate it with the Account form via IFrame, in order to create a view such as this:
Missing Parameters in SSRS
For you SSRS report developers out there, have you ever received the error “Must define scalar variable @<variable name>” and then drove yourself crazy trying to troubleshoot it? You probably even checked your Report Parameters a dozen more times to make sure you weren’t crazy or blind?
I have experienced this issue on several occasions while working in SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio. I have yet to zero in on exactly what causes this to happen, but it appears to happen during times when I am making several changes to a report in fairly quick succession, toggling between the Data, Layout, and Preview tabs.
In this example, I received the error “Must declare scalar variable @StartDate”
I looked at my input parameters (Report >> Report Parameters) and all parameters were defined. I looked at my SQL statement and all parameters were included in the query and had the correct names. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I then checked the Dataset settings and on the Parameters tab noticed that all of my parameters were missing. They just disappeared!
All you have to do is re-enter your parameters in this window, and your report should run just fine.
Scribe Insight 7.0 supports multiple targets
Scribe Software recently announced the availability of Scribe Insight 7.0. One of the most important features of this release is the ability to connect to more than one target in the same DTS.
The blog post on Scribe’s web site describes various scenarios where this feature can be valuable. These include:
- If the source record was triggered via a publisher, then the update source feature is not available since the source for that DTS is a message queue and not the original application which triggered the integration.
- The source system uses an adapter which does not support the update source feature.
- The source query is a complex join which update source cannot not support.
- You need to be able to update multiple fields on the source record.
The scenarios 1 and 2 above are applicable in most closed-loop integrations between Dynamics CRM and another ERP system.
For example, because the previous release of Scribe Insight did not support multiple target connections in the same DTS, Dynamics GP to Dynamics CRM template has to use two separate DTSs for CRM to GP Sales Order integration as follows:
- OrderToERP.dts: Sends submitted orders from Dynamics CRM to Dynamics GP
- OrderToERP_Result.dts: Updates the Sales Order in Dynamics CRM based on the result (success or failure) of the OrderToERP.dts
Now, with Scribe Insight 7.0, you can combine both of the above steps in one DTS using both Dynamics GP and Dynamics CRM as targets.
This new feature will be very valuable for addressing many Dynamics CRM and Dynamics GP integration needs as well as the other closed-loop integration scenarios such as the above.
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