Why Great Plains 8.0 Is Worth the Move
By Leslie Knudson, Microsoft Business Solutions

Let’s take a look at the question on everyone’s mind: To upgrade or not to upgrade? You’re probably weighing the potential Release 8.0 benefits against the inevitable costs and uncertainty that accompany an upgrade.

To help you make an informed decision, it may help to know that the primary source of the new features in Release 8.0 came from you, and other customers just like you, who told us how to make Great Plains even better.

“Partner and customer feedback is absolutely critical to helping us prioritize which new functions we should be working on,” says Jay Richardson, product manager for Great Plains. “For Great Plains 8.0, we had numerous online and live meetings with our Customer Advisory Boards and Partner Advisory Boards, asking them what functionality they needed and to prioritize the most important features. Virtually every single feature in 8.0 can be tied back to feedback that we received from a partner or customer.”

With that in mind, Great Plains 8.0 brings improvements to financials, distribution, manufacturing, payroll, project accounting, and field services. Organizations can more effectively manage product lifecycles, fulfillment, and delivery; capitalize on stronger Microsoft Office integration; strengthen customer and vendor relations; and get to work easier and faster with an improved user interface.

A Fresh Face

One of the first improvements you’ll notice is the new user interface that makes it easy to get straight to the tasks you need to complete without wading through screens that aren’t relevant to your day-to-day workload.

Customize the menu to see only the Great Plains screens to which you have access and create a favorites menu of the screens you use on a daily basis for a quick, easy reference to get right to the tools you frequently use.

“It (works) like a Microsoft application they use on a daily basis and will help users to quickly get around the system,” says Chad Sogge, product planner for Great Plains. “They won’t see a lot of unnecessary icons.”

Power of Microsoft Office

The release also prides itself on tighter integration with Microsoft Office to help strengthen reporting capabilities, build template-based communications, and foster teamwork and collaboration.

For instance, maybe a field service technician is unsure of which route to take to a site. Now you can easily attach maps and directions with integration with Microsoft MapPoint. Or let’s say you want to send mass quantities of a letter with a sophisticated appearance but you don’t have the time to sit down and hand-create a specialized version. Now you can just build customized communications in Microsoft Word.

“The Letter-Writing Assistant was such a hit with Small Business Manager that we decided to include it in Great Plains,” Richardson says. “It makes it simple to drop a specific letter to customers. It not only lends a professional appearance to communications but cuts down on the amount of time to create them.”

Handling Your Books

We know that some pieces of your daily interaction with the Great Plains software can seem tedious, even mystifyingly complex. The complaint we often hear is ‘Why can’t the software figure this out on its own!” With Release 8.0, you’ll see that many of the biggest new features are designed to eliminate those wasted seconds and hours of time and effort. You’ll have the flexibility to correct errors and make last-minute changes without tearing your hair out.

For instance, general ledger transactions can be deleted prior to posting, and posted transactions can be reversed out and corrected, all in a simple and easy-to-manage process. How much time will that save you?

Not only will you find more flexibility for handling transactions, but you’ll also notice pinpoint visibility for drilling into transaction details. For example, you can view “point-in-time” checkbook balances to identify discrepancies between your checkbook balance and the general ledger.

Finessing the Supply Chain

Successful supply chain performance rides on efficient ordering processes and smooth relationships with customers, suppliers, and vendors.

Now it’s even easier to optimize vendor relationships. With 8.0, you can create blanket purchase orders to establish extended-term purchasing agreements based on a total currency amount or total quantity. That means you can negotiate better prices, and avoid month-by-month repetitive ordering processes.

Last-minute manufacturing order changes are also less painful now. The ability to mass update bill of materials enables you to add, remove, or edit a component on multiple BOM’s in a single action. That translates to crucial time-savings when you don’t have to go through bill of materials one by one when making changes on common items.

Tracking and Maintaining Inventory

Poor visibility into inventory is a “hidden” cost which can have a significant impact on your business success. Release 8.0 helps you get a better view of your inventory so you can plan appropriately for demand, and avoid costly out-of-stock or over-stock situations.

A cradle-to-grave view of serial and lot numbers lets you identify the exact location of inventory. Enhanced tracing capabilities allow you to enter an item’s serial or lot number and initiate a trace to see the item’s occurrences by date for a complete lifecycle view.

“The traceability of serial and lot numbers is something that many manufacturers we serve are excited about," says Melissa Paulik, senior product manager for Great Plains Manufacturing. "Some industries such as pharmaceuticals or medical devices need to maintain the traceability as part of their overall compliance with FDA and other guidelines, and other industries can use this traceability to improve customer service levels.”

Nothing is worse than making a promise you can’t keep. With a cumulative availability-to-promise feature, you can make commitments with confidence based on forward-looking inventory projections—taking into account outstanding sales and purchase orders, not-yet-posted inventory, bills of materials, and manufacturing transactions.

Shaping and Sharing Information

Let’s face it: everyone has loads of information but not everyone knows how to use it (or sometimes even find it). Release 8.0 delivers useful queries and enhanced reporting capabilities to quickly identify, retrieve, and share critical information—including 20 new SmartList “favorites,” such as customers over credit limit, transactions by vendor, and today’s purchases.

The new release of FRx also includes significant enhancements, including the new Report Manager for scheduling the printing and distribution of financial reports, and Report Books, which enable you to combine all the relevant documents – Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and FRx reports – into one file for speedy delivery and access.

“Customers I talked to about FRx 6.7 at Convergence immediately saw the value of the new Report Books,” says Richardson. “The ability to package and schedule all these different forms of financial information and have them delivered in a consistent fashion is really a fantastic new benefit.”

Sharing information with customers just got easier, too. With Microsoft Business Portal 2.5, a new Electronic Document Delivery module helps you automate the scheduling and distribution of invoices, orders, credit memos and other sales documents to your customers.

For example, maybe you want all your invoices to go out every Wednesday morning. With electronic delivery, you can schedule customer statements, invoices, returns, and other similar sales documents to be e-mailed at a specific time—even during off-hours.

New modules for Microsoft Business Portal 2.5 also include Requisition Management for online entry and approval of purchase requisitions, and Project Time and Expense, which gives employees the freedom to enter their own time and expense information, and managers the flexibility to review and approve records with secure Web-based access.

“Microsoft Business Portal is really making major strides with every release,” says Richardson. “Business Portal 2.5 adds Requisition Management, which almost all of our larger customers need, plus Project Time and Expense for our Project Accounting customers, and Electronic Document Delivery is an excellent way to use technology to knock the ‘wait cycles’ out of a common business process like sending documents to customers.”