The reset economy

davmac1

There has been talk about the reset economy - including from Steve Ballmer.
How is this affecting you - are you seeing it in your businesses and parts of the world.

I think it is effecting NAV sales. With current Microsoft pricing, it has taken away a lot of the smaller companies, who are now electing to stay put (current software is "good enough") or go with a cheaper solution.

What is the current starting point for new installs? Is it 20 users? 30 users?

How much per user are businesses willing to pay?
Employee Portal is an attempt to maintain high prices for the heavy duty users while providing a low cost for the light weight users, but it does not seem to have taken off.

ssingla

I am more or less satisfied with the Microsoft pricing. The only gaps seems to be RTC & Denial of some granules in Business Essential edition.
Looking at the Indian market there is lot of potential of selling NAV (AX as well or for that matter any good ERP solution). A normal deal ranges between 5-25 users. The benefit with MS Licensing is that you can sell even 1 License for small business. I have seen a couple of deal where 2 licenses were sold.
Employee portal is not good and I will never implement it. I would rather go for .NET option with Web Services. Employee portal is not expensive but the implementation is cumbersome, Less than expected performance and so on.
Webservices on the other hand has opened a lot of oppurtunities and now it depends on us to exploit the benefits.......

Jeffrey_Fletcher

Yes price is always important to customers and some cheaper products exist with reasonable features. NAV strength however has always been its flexibility and speed to develop so you have to play to your products strengths and target clients that need this.

PS I also believe you need to template NAV to your target customers as out of the box it does not really fit any business 100%. Technical progress excluded I can't say I have found a really useful new product feature in the last five years.

matttrax

Jeffrey Fletcher wrote:

Technical progress excluded I can't say I have found a really useful new product feature in the last five years.

There's only so much you can add that is applicable to the majority of businesses. What would you add to the product that more than 50% of companies would need? I'm sure there are some things, but they are probably few and far between. The things customers end up needing are created by their partner or purchased as an addon solution.

Jeffrey_Fletcher

Re "What would you add to the product that more than 50% of companies would need? I'm sure there are some things, but they are probably few and far between" - You may be right but in my experiecnecne I have never implemented a NAV site without reasonable levels of development needed due to the things that are missing. Yes customers can buy add ons and/or get a partner to create but this pushes the price up and hence you make less sales.

NAV covers a broad range of functions well but seems to stop just short of what is needed in a number of places. Two examples follow:

1) Bulk emailing of PDF attachments for core business documents such as customer statements at month end. I can purchase a $500 product that does that out of the box to say to potential customers NAv does not have unless you buy an add on is a plain embarrassment.
2) Account Schedules cannot print a management pack for various dimension filters in one go so a user has to set filters and click print ten times for a company with ten departments. I thought ERP systems are supposed to automate processes.

They sad part is all the issues above can be easily fixed with the excellent NAV development environment and structure. Somes times we all feel users are a necessary evil but they also often have the best ideas on business process maybe it is time we started listening to them a bit more for future releases of NAV otherwise the competition will pass us by.

PS Yes I do come from an end user and business process background.

generic

Jeffrey Fletcher wrote:

1) Bulk emailing of PDF attachments for core business documents such as customer statements at month end. I can purchase a $500 product that does that out of the box to say to potential customers NAv does not have unless you buy an add on is a plain embarrassment.
2) Account Schedules cannot print a management pack for various dimension filters in one go so a user has to set filters and click print ten times for a company with ten departments. I thought ERP systems are supposed to automate processes.

I do like those two ideas, actually what is totally missing from NAV is batch process functionality.
Batch invoice shipped orders and email/fax/print.

Batch creation of warehouse document shipment documents, and Picks at the same time based on some priority.

The filtering of dimension on account schedule, I've implemented that twice for a customer, but I'm sure others would like that as well.

I think customers now look when they ask why they need to upgrade, and functionally.

Nav just needs to be polished a little to make it great.

I think MS NAV needs to look at 100's of their client db and see all common modification that have occurred and implement them in base db.

Jeffrey_Fletcher

generic wrote:

Nav just needs to be polished a little to make it great.

I think MS NAV needs to look at 100's of their client db and see all common modification that have occurred and implement them in base db.

Could not agree more. In the early 90's before windows, systems used to have user groups and sharing of common enhancements based on user pressure got placed in new releases. The big boys all seem to have forgotten this and think they know better than users now. I recently replaced a 25 year old product with NAV and it had better intercompany transaction functionality than NAV - how do you explain that to a client :oops:

generic

The inter company is a good example where MS built a bare bone solution.

matttrax

generic wrote:

I think MS NAV needs to look at 100's of their client db and see all common modification that have occurred and implement them in base db.

That would imply that their are actual, documented, modifications

Microsoft has a site where you can submit suggestions for new versions of the product. I don't use it that much so I don't recall the address, but you should be able to find it.

Alex_Chow

https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions

davmac1

One competitor has its dealers add features to their wish list and then vote on which features to add a their annual dealer conference.
I get the impression that Microsoft is focusing all their energies into converting Dynamics products into the best .Net products (and not the products with the best features).

generic

I get the impression that Microsoft is focusing all their energies into converting Dynamics products into the best .Net products (and not the products with the best features).

please explain.

matttrax

generic wrote:

Quote:
I get the impression that Microsoft is focusing all their energies into converting Dynamics products into the best .Net products (and not the products with the best features).


please explain.

I won't try to speak for anyone else, but to me it seems like Microsoft would rather have good products that can all talk to each other (i.e. ERP, CRM, Office, SharePoint, etc) that one really great product. Integration is a huge factor and when you can offer products that can communicate with each other in a common language, to me, it gives you an advantage over the competition. My current company used to be a Microsoft ERP user with IBM / Custom everything else. Now that we're moving towards complete Microsoft the ability to integrate and get information out to the business is greatly improved.

davmac1

That is pretty much what I am saying. Focus is on interopability and not features.
Microsoft has the money to do both if it wants to.
Maybe they have given up their goal to be the dominant ERP platform with 50% of the mid market.

generic

NAV isn't a priority for MS in Redmond.

MS in Redmond and in Fargo are mainly working on AX and GP.

Nav is centered in Copenhagen.


There was a story where bill gates threatened the Danish Gov to relocate NAV to US if he didn't get his way but I don't remember the story.

matttrax

generic wrote:

MS in Redmond and in Fargo are mainly working on AX and GP.

Also remember that while NAV and the other Dynamics products are all geared towards SMBs, their strengths are different. NAV is easy to customize and has a reputation as such. You can obviously customize the others, but not as easily. Microsoft depends on the ISV network to develop for all of them, but especially NAV. More outside development by partners = less in house development by Microsoft.

generic

matttrax wrote:

Microsoft depends on the ISV network to develop for all of them, but especially NAV. More outside development by partners = less in house development by Microsoft.

Having one ERP system with all the traits = less in house development by MS.
Currently they are moving to one UI client.
Second Phase is same .NET language. 3rd phase is same code base.

matttrax

generic wrote:

Having one ERP system with all the traits = less in house development by MS.
Currently they are moving to one UI client.
Second Phase is same .NET language. 3rd phase is same code base.

Absolutely. Anyone who thinks that getting rid of the native database and forcing you to SQL, migrating to the same UI, and moving to .NET isn't a transition to one ERP system is crazy. It will take a long time to get there, but it is coming. I'm just glad we can see it this far off.