nav 5 & the move to SQL reporting services - report view

DenSter

@ nav nav: Could you please not repeat yourself over and over :evil: and if you do would please not quote entire postings? I had to read through a whole page of you repeating yourself....

gedas wrote:

I agree and dissagree :?

That's fine, you can have your opinion (I'm feeling generous ). Just don't say that with a report writer license you can't do damage, because you can program everything you want in a report, and customers who can usually do. Once they hire someone with rudimentary VBA skills (and this happens more often than you think mave...) they often underestimate the impact of what is perceived as 'small changes'. I am talking about writing reports to create sales orders without validating fields, so you're missing posting groups, dimensions, other important values. We end up spending twice the amount of time on fixing the problem than we would have reviewing a requirement/design document with the customer.

Believe it or not, I have the customer's best interest at heart. I have absolutely no problem with customers being able to do development, as long as they realize what it takes.

And as far as the remark about the "report scam"..... I have to explain this one to almost every customer... it simply takes a few hours to do the average report change, and then you send it to the customer, and they send it back with additional requirements, and before you know it you spend a whole day on one report (this happens really easily). At a rate of $100 an hour (try to find a good resource for that cheap by the way) you are looking at $800. Take normal rates into consideration and you're talking about $1000 easily, and that is just what a whole day of development costs.

If I do a report change and it takes me 15 minutes, I charge my customer for 15 minutes. But if I spend 3 days on a 'simple report change' where I have to do 6 iterations with a customer who doesn't know exactly what they want, I have no problem sending them a bill for $3000 for the one report. Explain to me how that is a scam...

themave

DenSter, I would love to have you work at my solution center, and the one I have now is good at what they do, When I talk about a scam on reports, I am not talking about doing the level of detail of changes you are talking about.

When we started, one of our first request was to expand the item no field in a few reports, and to hide the UOM field, so there was enough room to expand the item no, and move the description over, we printed the existing report, used a highlighter on what we wanted, and were quoted $750 to do the job, which as they listed out included everything mentioned earlier

needs analysis
initial design
customer approval
actual work
developer testing
Customer testing
final revisions
ect.

So, instead we bought the report designer, did the report in 5 minutes and were done with it. So, I understand they were trying to cover their butt, just in case we were the customer who would have kept going back to them over and over again because they weren't happy with the report. So, maybe scam is not appropriate, maybe it was just a little excessive.

Who knows, maybe they were just trying to get us to buy the report designer, so we wouldn't bug them for reports in the future.

I also completely agree with you that when using the report designer you can do just about anything in Navision, although using code units would be better a report can do almost as much, if the forms designer and table designer allowed access to cal/code that would be nearly the same as the full developer. I have no doubt you and many solution centers have come across many customers that have caused many problems with their database. We are not one of them, as we understand that our company relies on Navision to run smoothly and things don't go into the live database without through testing, which by the way is how I have uncovered poor programming on our solution centers part many times. I have received bug fixed that caused other problems, that I identified during my first pass, so they clearly had not even been tested by the solution center. just passed on to us to install. And not passed on for free mind you.

Some of the best programmers of Navision I have come across, didn’t come from the traditional programming background but from the business side. Understanding Navision, and programming it, I thinks requires more of an understanding of business processes. And that is the current danger I see with Dynamic Nav going forward, is it appears to be moving to open up Nav development to any programmer out there, you can get the developer license for testing from MSDN. And it appears that the basic programming the end users can do, is decreasing, so as to require a programmer do all the changes, I think this is the beginning of the end of Navision. As it will become just another ERP with nothing that distinguishes it from any other program.

Microsoft is even changing the customer assurance program to make it so you can switch freely between the different Dynamics versions, or to the future unified product. So, they are kind of saying we are moving to one generic program, it doesn't matter which one you choose because they all are going to lead to the same thing.

Savatage

DenSter wrote:

If I do a report change and it takes me 15 minutes, I charge my customer for 15 minutes.

If only everyone did that.

Before we started doing our own stuff I know adding 1 field to a table was costing us $225 easily. Later when we learned how to do it ourselves and realized it took 30 seconds. Well, I got a little angry. But their deal was the price always would round up to the hour regardless of how much time was spent.

nav_nav

DenSter wrote:

@ nav nav: Could you please not repeat yourself over and over :evil: and if you do would please not quote entire postings? I had to read through a whole page of you repeating yourself....

Sure, bye bye forum .

Savatage

nav nav wrote:

Sure, bye bye forum .

All opinions are welcome - don't take it so hard.

Denster doesn't always play well with others

DenSter

You know when I have a good relationship with a customer and all they need is to add 1 field to 1 table (which is very rare), I would just do it for them without charging them, it's a courtesy that pays back when you take a little longer on a bigger issue. It hardly ever happens though, I'm usually on something at least for 1-2 hours.

We usually try to put little things like that together in a build. So instead of 1 field for 1 table, we add all those little requests together for one bigger task order.

You also have to know though that sometimes I get a request to look at something small, but in order for me to get set up (call the consultant, get database access, download a backup, restore into a new database, see where I'm going?) If it's a one off type thing then sometimes I charge that time to the customer, or a portion of it. Most of the time those are bilable time and materials tech support type issues, or customers that don't want to give us remote access and they accept additional charges like that.

ara3n

I'm curious how big companies like IBM and Accentur, charge their cutomer.

Savatage

DenSter,

I think you are correct. Giving & Taking a bit is part of creating a good relationship with a customer. As an End-User we want to know that the NSC is trying to "Help us" not "Drain us" for every penny.

I'll give you a call when we're ready for Nav 6.1

Building a strong and lasting relationship is the key!
And That's the point!

(Ooops wrong topic) :whistle:

themave

Savatage wrote:

.....And That's the point!

(Ooops wrong topic) :whistle:

That is pretty funny, made me laugh

DenSter

lol are you related to Mickey Rooney?

DenSter

<edit>on second thought, never mind </edit>

Kevin-NPS

Probably way off topic from the original postings but to follow everyones free not free same old ERP system conversation and where code should be...

Personally to throw an opinion out there on the regards to end-users and solution centers - there is definitely a danger in having the end user write and edit code; but without argument I think some companies it may be not necisarily require to do it but it may be in their best interest... and possible to do with the correct training and NOT purchasing full blown Developers license.

The main thing is training, our company, which is another arguement, loves changing around reports or building new ones. To help the customer, the solution center started training me on navision and everything about it over a LONG period of time until I really understood everything that was going on, and even did the programmers test. We then purchased I believe Application Builder granule 7200 for I believe maybe between 7-9k? NOT The full developers license. It allows me to edit Codeunits (Includes codeunit 1 and many others, just not sales post etc any major posting routines, not sales invoice header etc) We own Report & Dataport Designer, Form Designer, and Table Designer and Consult with our solution center on any major changes.

Just because of the dangers I agree it shouldn't be just thrown out there for free, there needs to be training checks and balances, but with this we can do everything we really need to. If not we call the solution center anyway - saves them from the frusteration of changing a report 50 times because we (the customer) change our minds constantly and puts that on me. If theres a problem, I call and consult - as long as I know what I did and make backups - its my responsibility. Anyway, code in codeunits, application builder should allow you to edit most. Sry for the long post.