In today's highly competitive environment, innovation plays a key role in staying ahead of the game. Fortunately, you can rely on help of business tools such as Dynamics ERP and SharePoint to help your teams collaborate, create, and deliver quickly and creatively.

The key to competitive advantage in today's connected world is innovation. Companies that can continually offer new product features and services will win and hold the attention of customers. To support innovation, how do you keep your employees thinking outside the box and building for the future?

Share the knowledge

Connect your employees to each other no matter where they are. When employees can collaborate in real time instead of emailing documents — not knowing who has the latest version and who contributed what — they keep innovation flowing. Dynamics ERP and SharePoint will give your teams the power to share their ideas in a central location without any slowdowns.

Lack of information, dated information, or disjointed information all keep people from making the best decisions. When you get the right information to the right person at the right time, you allow them to focus on productivity instead of data crunching. With business intelligence built on an integrated ERP system, you deliver information that fuels innovation.

Connect departments

When one department doesn't know what the other is doing, duplicate efforts, wasted time, and poor decisions follow. Dynamics ERP and SharePoint together allow you to share information from all departments across your organization. Help your team move forward together, basing decisions on the whole picture.

You can stay ahead of the competition by supporting innovation and creativity with a connected ERP system. Microsoft Dynamics ERP will help your teams collaborate and connect. Let's talk about how we can help you find creative solutions to get ahead of ever changing markets.

Now that you have signed up to test drive Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, what's next? Here are a few ideas to help you get the most from your free trial.

1. Take the time to watch the instructional videos. There are some valuable tips in the videos and they are short. A few minutes of your time up front will help you get more value from your test drive. 2. Upload some of your own data. Data familiar to you will make the processes more "real" for you and your team. 3. Work through the processes that you think will help your organization the most. Whether it's sales management, customer service management, or marketing, focus on the processes that will make the most difference to productivity. Practice, so that you feel comfortable showing the process. 4. Show your team or manager. By taking the initiative to demonstrate the improvements that could come from implementing CRM, you will help them open their minds to improving the business. 5. Be sure to show them the dashboards. Set up a few of the dashboard charts the way you would use them – it's quick and easy, and they pack a punch when demonstrating the valuable at-a-glance information Dynamics CRM can provide.

By test driving Dynamics CRM online, you are obviously interested in helping to improve the processes that are holding your company back. Once you have started the conversation with the decision makers in your company, an experienced Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partner can assist you in taking it to the next level. Let us help you make the most of CRM for your organization. Talk to us today.

Are you able to track the true profitability of the projects that your business delivers? If your business provides services that are delivered by multiple people or departments in your organization, you may not be charging enough. Estimating costs to cover salaries, sales time, travel time, and other hidden expenses may be eating up your profits without you realizing it.

Take the guesswork out of project costing with a systematic review of the projects that you have delivered. Evaluate how you should capture and assign actual costs to specific projects, including:

• Project definition. Projects take different forms for different organizations, and it's helpful to have a good understanding of what yours entail. A manufacturer could define a project as a custom-made machine. A marketing campaign is a project for an advertising company. Each wedding would be set up as a project for a caterer.
• Assign the costs that should be allocated. Direct costs, such as materials, are easy to allocate to projects, but other costs might be less obvious. Think through all the steps of your project activities, from conception to delivery, to capture the full cost of delivering that project.
• Determine how to track time, costs, and expenses. Rule of thumb: keep it simple. Consider how much detail you really need to capture to accurately track costs. And be sure to make it easy for your employees to enter and assign time and expenses to each project, no matter where they are – you'll get more accurate results.
• Monitor. Check the results of your project costing regularly to make sure that your employees are using the system consistently. Use reports to monitor the profitability of each project, and then adjust your prices accordingly.

Project costing is a critical business management technique that most companies today need for at least a part of their business. A business management solution such as Dynamics ERP can help you manage projects and the expenses that go with them automatically. Give us a call and let us help you get a handle on project profitability.

Distributors around the globe face similar challenges with inventory. These common problems put distributors at a competitive disadvantage as customer expectations rise.

Common challenges include:

• Too much of some products – excess inventory and dead stock lead to decreased turnover and profitability.
• Stock-outs of other products – resulting in backorders, lost sales, and dissatisfied customers.
• Knowing what is in stock – the on-hand quantity in the computer system does not agree with what is actually on the shelf in the warehouse.
• Material misplaced in the warehouse – material is "out there somewhere" but can't be found when it's needed.

Effective inventory management A systematic plan to achieve effective inventory management will allow you to meet and exceed customers' expectations of product availability. In addition, effective inventory management will maximize net profit by minimizing total inventory investment. Effective inventory management results from the balance of inventory control and inventory management.

Inventory control is managing the inventory that is already in your warehouse, stockroom, or store, including:

• Knowing what products are "out there" and how much you have of each item.
• Knowing exactly where each piece of each product is located in your warehouse.
• Ensuring that all inventory remains in salable or usable condition.
• Storing products to minimize the cost of filling customer orders.

Inventory management is determining when to order products, how much to order, and the most effective source of supply for each item in each warehouse – that is, ensuring that you have the right quantity of the right item in the right location at the right time. Inventory management includes all of the activities involved in forecasting and replenishment.

Customers expect you to know what is in stock and when you can ship. Let us help you find the right balance of effective inventory management with a financial management system that helps you deliver on time and on budget.

As an owner or manager of a small or mid-size business struggling to keep up with technology and changing business environments, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Should you keep limping along with multiple, unconnected systems, or bite the bullet and implement an ERP system? The ERP evaluation process isn’t easy, but with a few guiding principles you can prepare your company for the future.

Practical advice for ERP selection

1. Define critical requirements first – Don’t get sidetracked with the bells and whistles of the applications you review. Before you start, define the functionality that is critical to your organization and stay focused. Communicate your requirements to your vendors and require that they focus on those requirements in their presentations.
2. Double check references – Go the extra mile when you check references provided by a vendor. The more clients you speak to, the better picture you will get of not only the vendor’s products, but also their level of customer service for all their clients – and not just their best clients.
3. Don’t overthink it – It’s easy to get into “analysis paralysis” with such an important decision. Once you have decided to take the plunge into ERP, keep moving forward and find the best fit for your requirements. Create a realistic project timeline to maintain momentum and keep the project on track.
4. Choose the evaluation team carefully – Choosing a new ERP system is a business decision, not an IT decision. While IT should be involved, the evaluation team must make certain that the product fulfills the critical business elements that are needed for the organization’s success.
5. Partner for project success – Once you have found the right solution for your organization, make sure that you have the right partner as well. The implementation partner you choose will make the difference between success and failure. Choose an organization that understands your business.

Prepare for the future
Selecting an ERP system is a big step for a modest business organization. Choosing the right ERP system will build the foundation for growth for many years to come. Find out how you can transition from spreadsheets and disconnected software to a fully integrated ERP system. Call us today.

ERP Drives Manufacturing Innovation It's the start of a new year and 2012 forecasts for manufacturers are starting to look more promising. To stay ahead of the competition, you need to respond to the market with innovate product additions. A fully integrated business management system should enhance innovation to improve your responsiveness to the market.

Improve innovation When you can identify opportunities for new products at an early stage, you can respond with new, innovative products or product variants. Your ERP system should provide you with information from across the organization, with deep insight into product preference trends. With industry-specific and customer-specific KPIs delivered to your key decision makers, you can get a jump on the competition to meet changes in customer preferences.

Innovation in most manufacturing environments requires collaboration between outside partners as well as multiple internal departments. Spending time fighting outdated systems makes it hard for teams to keep communication lines flowing. An ERP system that integrates with collaboration solutions like SharePoint and common applications like Office gives teams the tools they need for easy collaboration.

Reduce time to market Fast and accurate planning is a must for the innovative manufacturer – budgeting and planning cycles can't last weeks and months anymore. Real time inventory, production, and supply chain information presented in one easy-to-use dashboard gives managers the tools they need to plan and execute quickly.

Coordinating multiple facilities and departments to support new products from production to delivery requires an integrated ERP system. Automated workflow ensures that products move from development to production environments by eliminating delays and miscommunication. A fully integrated ERP system will support new products entering the production schedules and adjust inventory levels at key distribution points.

Get ready for leaps of innovation in 2012, and improve your responsiveness to the market with a fully integrated ERP system. Call us to talk about how we can help you build a better business.

Productivity is one of the fundamental building blocks of profitability. In New Year planning sessions around the globe, a common theme is how to enable current employees to achieve more in less time. For companies using Microsoft productivity tools such as Office and Exchange, the strategic advantage of an ERP system that fully integrates with those applications is clear.

Productivity tools are just the beginning Day in and day out, your employees work with productivity tools like Microsoft Word to create forms or Microsoft Excel to analyze data maintained in a SQL Server database. All of these applications share the Windows platform and present a familiar look and feel to users. An ERP solution that works like and with these productivity tools and server products can unlock a new level of value. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

The Line of Business (LOB) applications that your organization uses to manage core business processes are probably built on the Microsoft platform. Choosing an ERP solution that runs on the same platform could simplify integration and shorten your time to benefit. The broad acceptance of the Microsoft platform also encourages competitive pricing among alternative LOB applications and technical support services. With a single platform focus, IT resources can dedicate time to improving business processes instead of integrating and troubleshooting disparate applications.

The value of Microsoft Dynamics ERP The Microsoft Dynamics ERP product line provides the foundation to build on the Microsoft platform for flexibility and ease of use. Facilitating the flow of information between the many parts of your business, you’ll connect financial management and business intelligence to LOB and productivity tools. Productivity will improve through:

• Fast, easy integration with your existing technology systems,
• Quicker and better decision making with central business intelligence,
• Fast, universal adoption to drive down costs and boost efficiencies.

As your organization plans for 2012 and beyond, consider the productivity gains you can achieve with connected systems that are familiar to your employees. Making employees’ lives easier will pay off with improved operating margins and increased cash flow.

Call us today to find out how you can increase employee productivity.

When evaluating ERP systems, most companies analyze the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) as part of the decision process. TCO includes the full cost of implementation and maintenance over a period of time, often 3-5 years. Factors incorporated into the analysis generally include software license, implementation, and software maintenance costs.

Well managed implementation will deliver results quickly

In the Analyst Insight "ERP: Is High ROI with Low TCO Possible?" released by Aberdeen Group, researchers found that the actual TCO realized by companies is more dependent on the Best-In-Class use of the ERP systems than TCO alone. Return on Investment (ROI) derived from the ERP system will offset costs when companies implement ERP efficiently to quickly achieve cost savings through productivity gains.

For their research, Aberdeen Group measured those benefits on the following criteria:

• Number of days to close the month
• Days sales outstanding
• Percent of orders delivered complete and on-time
• Growth in operating margins year over year

These basic factors are indicators of the operational efficiency and productivity gains that a company is typically trying to achieve with the implementation of an ERP system.

Key recommendations from the Aberdeen Group report include:

• Establish specific ERP implementation benefit goals, and measure results.
• Initial implementation should focus on achieving results in critical areas.
• Continued measurement of ERP results leads to increased business value.

Find out more about the Aberdeen Group's research on the benefits of ERP implementation. Download the report here.

Contact us today to find out how your organization can realize productivity improvements of a Best-In-Class ERP implementation. Dynamics ERP delivers high ROI with a low TCO.

During your evaluation of ERP solutions, support should be a key element of all conversations. Ultimately, the value of the system will be reflected in the productivity gains of your employees. System users who have continual training and a community to share best practices will make the greatest strides.

An extraordinary resource CustomerSource, the Microsoft Dynamics customer portal is the gateway for Dynamics users to find all the resources for success in one place. An award-winning online portal, CustomerSource provides access to free training, support, links to user communities, and much more. CustomerSource includes:

• Self-support tools: Reduce costs with around-the-clock self-support tools that can help resolve many of your day-to-day technical support issues, so your people can stay productive.
• Critical information: Stay current with the latest developments for your solutions and future technology with access to product roadmaps, documentation, the Microsoft® Knowledge Base, and a wide variety of training resources.
• Online training: Reduce the learning curve by gaining access to customized training, tailored specifically to your individual organization's requirements, in multiple languages and addressing multiple product lines.
• Online communities: Read about news affecting your business and industry, share tips with other Microsoft Dynamics customers, get answers to your technical questions, and find additional solutions for your business.
• Information about updates and upgrades: Microsoft makes significant investments to add new functionality and features. CustomerSource helps you stay on top of new service packs containing the latest updates and upgrades—and easily view the status of your licenses and service plans.

When you invest in Microsoft Dynamics ERP, your employees will have access to an extraordinary resource. CustomerSource will help your employees keep your solution running smoothly—and protect your investment. Let us demonstrate CustomerSource to you today.

When is it time to replace your aging ERP system? According to a new Aberdeen Group Analyst Insight report, an older ERP system could be holding your organization back.

Use it or lose it One of the biggest drawbacks of an aging ERP system, according to the report, is the declining use of modules over time. When business processes and requirements change and the ERP system doesn't keep pace with the needs, employees find ways to get around the system. Spreadsheets start to replace centralized information which limits insight into information needed for effective decision making at the top.

Expensive support Older ERP systems generally require more IT support, from a limited pool of talent. As technologies emerge, IT support people must keep up with the new and can't focus on outdated systems. Outsourced support may be impossible to find, and dedicated internal resources are expensive.

New options for old systems While you may have been plugging along with an outdated ERP system, there is no better time to start evaluating options. ERP cloud solutions can help you avoid capital costs while at the same time eliminate IT support costs you've been spending on your old system. Investing in business process realignment and training will deliver the highest ROI on your ERP investment, according to multiple Aberdeen Group reports.

Find out how you can move to the next level without breaking the bank. Download the full Aberdeen Group report “Aging ERP: When Old ERP is Too Old” here with our compliments.