Yesterday I had a very insightful meeting with one of our longer term prospects. Their business has grown significantly over the past 15 years with an increase of 3 to 30 people, most of whom now need to access data from their various systems on a day to day basis.
At the moment they are struggling to keep up with demand and are, at the same time, actively trying to move into new markets. We both realise that they need agile systems to help them stay on top of all their success and new initiatives.
Their systems manager has been searching for a standard solution for their industry for over two years and had not yet found a system to meet his needs for a variety of reasons. It started to became apparent that his search keeps coming back to Microsoft Dynamics NAV. While we have experience in his industry sector, each organization has a slightly different way of working.
Over the last two years he has engaged with us periodically and we have advised him how best to meet his needs. During our latest meeting we proposed to deliver the core stock, order processing and finance system within Dynamic NAV and we would interface with their company’s other periphery systems. Later on these systems could be built into Dynamics NAV or they can continue to develop on their own.
These periphery systems are still going to be tightly coupled together as – rather than interfacing with files being passed between systems – we will work on a shared SQL Server based data model. This is very similar to the way Dynamics NAV 2016 and Dynamics CRM work together; rather than duplicating data in both systems, users of Dynamics CRM will see Dynamics NAV data directly in their application and vice versa.
This was our prospective customer’s creative idea and we thought it was a very good way of having exactly what he needs combined with the advantages of a tried and tested ERP system. If they do decide to work with us, it will be hugely beneficial to them as a business, and – I suspect – a huge amount of fun for us to come up with creative and robust solutions for their unique needs.
Image credit: Kevin Dooley on Flickr