What are some of the best changes to Navision you have seen

themave

I was just watching an online demo for a credit card processing add-on, and the demo database they were using had a lot of modifications to the customer card, I had never thought of before, basically a lot of buttons to bring up related customer information, that you otherwise would have to go to many different places in Navision to find.

We use a pretty much standard Navision, changed a few forms to simplify data entry, ect.

Probably our most useful change is not even a real modification of Navision, but instead just a consolidated of a lot of inventory information onto a single screen.

What are some changes you have seen to Navision that adds value to your organization. Tring to get some ideas for my company, so anything you want to share, feel free.

ara3n

What I would suggest is to go an watch what people do daily in navision, and how many click it takes them to accomplish their job, and then make the changes.

Savatage

That's what I usually do - See the steps that it takes to perform a task and see if I can simplify.

A couple of helpful changes we made here is the color changes on the Customer & Vendor ledger entries. The colors depend on the type Invoice, Credit or payment - just makes life easier
http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6784

We have also made many changes - new buttons, Added tabs to better oganize the fields.

Adding sounds to the e-ship scanning have been praised at the top mod we made this year
http://www.mibuso.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13007

ara3n

This is interesting about the sound solution. One of our client used another scanning form I had build for them. The problem was that the user would work to fast and citrix could not keep up. So they had to constanly check and see if they had scanned it and citrix was updated. I added a bit sound once navision finished with the scan. That way the user just had to listen for the beep. as they scanned the boxes and didn't have to look at the monitor all the time.

Marije_Brummel

Well, this is a very interesting topic because it seems that, nomatter how good you solution is technicaly when it comes to datamodel and transactions, it is the little things that seem to make the difference in usability.

Over the past years I have made tons of solutions and always used the official guidelines for form design. I am very interested in hearing others thougts about this.

Miklos_Hollender

Mark,

Well, when I was back in Hungary, I was quite unhappy about the official GUI guidelines - I always had users who refused to spend more than 10 minutes on a training and wanted to accomplish things in seconds, and even getting one error message made them yelling in rage. Therefore I always dumbed down the GUI really much - instead of menu items, makign huge buttons etc.

Now in the UK I always see users who don't have to work very hard neither very fast, and therefore they are content with a system that looks a bit more complicated than a typical pocket calculator. Very simply, they don't have bad feelings against using an ERP system, they are actually glad that they have something more advanced and therefore are willing to pay some attention to it.

But there are some guidelines that are better be broken. Using colors to indicate something is wrong is really a good idea - f.e. in Customer List coloring the name red if they have an overdue balance. Because these are stuff users better be really aware of.

Also, f.e. checking the Visible checkmark OFF to unused menu items is also good, even though it's against the guidelines - no reason to confuse users with functionality they don't need. Removing really unnecessary fields.

Miklos_Hollender

Basically, what I mean, the guidelines and standard Navision have quite a liberal system in mind - a system that's flexible and let's you do whatever you want.

The problem is, this way the system doesn't tell you what you SHOULD do. You have no idea when you are ready with a task. Think about entering an Item. What makes you not forget to set Default Dimensions? And the other guy who will use that Item in a transaction will suffer, not you.

Therefore I think it is necessary to break the guidelines a bit to make the system not only LET, but also REMIND or often even FORCE users to do stuff.

I think this is basically a cultural question. 80% of Navision licences sold is said to be still in Denmark (it's Nov 2004 data, I have no updates on that) and Danes are really laidback, really take things easily and liberally. They don't get upset if the software does not remind them to do something, they'll just take a note to don't forget that next time and that is. In Eastern Europe, everything is a lot more passionate: users don't want to use the system at all while managers want to micromanage them to the most possible extent, forbid everything they shouldn't do and force them to do everything that's needed. Now in the UK, this is somewhere in the middle. Users, clients are a lot calmer and take things a lot easier than I'm used to, but they always pinpoint what the typical user errors are and want us to make the system warn them on that and sometimes even to force them to not do that. They are a bit more committed to efficiency and 100% accuracy than our laidback, take-it-easy Northern friends.

Therefore, these stuff basically depend on where you are and what culture are your users from.

Alex_Chow

We don't get a lot of complaints on the usabilities in Navision here is LA as well. There are a few obvious changes like showing and hiding columns on the sales order screen, but other than that, once the users are familiar with the interface, they will swear by it.

Back to the topic, one of the screens that I've seen implemented on a site is like a "control panel" where everything related to the customer specific to the company on one screen.

The same goes for an item screen.

Generally, the functionalities and the features are there, most changes are really cosmetic.

Captain_DX4

Some of my enhancements that I've found most useful are:

-Adding shortcut keys to often-used functions. -Adding email interface to the Customer Card to track correspondence and automate emails to customers. -Creating a province/state table and updating the Postal/ZIP Code table to maintain the lists of codes with the provinces attached.

Savatage

Having a very simple, easily viewable, item form for the warehouse users was really helpful too. I eliminated any field that should not be changed by an untrained worker & locked everything else down.
http://www.geocities.com/navision_attain/warehouse.jpg

Miklos_Hollender

Yes, Savatage, this is very good. Although... maybe it breaks the GUI standards a bit way too much. I'd vote for somewhere in the middle. f.e. either using big fonts OR colours but not both.

On the topic:

Basically, there are tons of developments in the world, usually addressing vertical needs or a given client's needs, but they are usually in the usual master data / journal / entry / document / posted document range, which isn't very impressive. Important, but not especially interesting or impressive.

What I do find impressive is when it goes somewhere out of the usual stuff.

On MiBuSo: I'm quite impressed of the Nibbles game, BlackTiger's communication using WithEvents, and are a bit proud of my Navision Integration Framework as well ;-)

In the world: Landsteinar Retail. I'm not very content with the quality, but implementing a touchscreen-based POS with onscreen keyboard and stuff like that... impressive.

Also a German multinational firm has an internal product configuration development. I've seen many configurators, but this one includes rules as well: if you chose option 3 in step 2 then option 5 in step 4 is not even shown to you... all of it fully configurable. Quite impressive.

Also a Swiss firm developed an internal product that not only manages the business, but also the technology as well - giving error messages like "no, you cannot fit part X to part Y if the size of part Y is 25mm" - quite amazing.

Also, a guy at one of my past employers developed an invoicing solution for heat provision company that parsed any mathematical formula with Polish notation - you could enter a (X + Y) * (N - M/Z) *4 as a contractual agreement and only give the values for the variables each month...

Also I'm impressed with a Dutch add-on I forgot the name of which enabled you to create Word documents fully configurably, without development... (C/OFFICE, maybe? Something like that.)

Also I'm impressed with the Enwis waste managment add-on - just the sheer size, it has more tables than Navision...

But what I'm most impressed with are those changes that solve huge problems with very small changes. I saw a German consultant develop a function for Payment/Cash Receipt Journals when you choose Applies-To Document Type and No and almost everything else is automatically filled... so DAMN easy to do, 30 minutes and still speeds up the process five times... and at such cases I always kick myself: why did the idea never occur to me?...

Basically, you can do everything given there is enough money. To convince users to spend that money instead of just demanding stuff to happen, that's the most impressive hack of them all

Captain_DX4

Savatage wrote:

Having a very simple, easily viewable, item form for the warehouse users was really helpful too. I eliminated any field that should not be changed by an untrained worker & locked everything else down.
http://www.geocities.com/navision_attain/warehouse.jpg

I'm so very hesitant to modify forms like this because upgrades are a huge p.i.t.a. afterwards, but that's just me. I think a lot of companies in my area tend to work towards better training instead of dummying-down the forms, though, so it works best for me and for the customers.

Savatage

I did not change a pre-existing form - this is a form created from scratch (in 50000 range) - the older versions allowed you, using the security feature, to assign a form to open on logon depending on the user.

so our warehouse guys get form & this form on on logon.