Independent Microsoft Dynamics NAV Software Review

The Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP Suite

Customer Relationship Management Software

Dynamics CRM extends NAV's customer relationship management module. Dynamics NAV comes with basic contact management, contact classification, campaign management, and opportunity and task management. Dynamics CRM ups the ante and delivers more sophisticated opportunity, sales, accounts, pipeline, and lead management functionality as well as advanced Sales Force Automation (SFA) features such as the incorporation of sales methodologies like Miller Heiman, SPI, and TAS. The Dynamics CRM software has full interoperability with MS Office, and in fact can use Outlook as the CRM client, thereby delivering a common user experience and easy integration with email, Word and Excel.

Within the Dynamics NAV context your customers may be suppliers, trade partners and consumers of which the ERP software accommodates well. It is the additional functionality such as rental and heavy equipment manufacturing and tracking of these customers that differentiate the CRM capabilities within NAV. The CRM functions required by these feature sets should be separately reviewed and included as part of the overall workflow traditional CRM software items such as contact and activity management.

Front office workflows can be loosely created to automate sales and marketing processes for better productivity. Dynamics CRM also has mobile functionality for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows mobile, however, the mobile CRM software is not purpose built for mobile operating systems such as iOS or Droid and therefore fails to take advantage of many device-specific mobile features and form factors. Those users who are advocates of their iPhones, iPads or Droid devices will probably not enjoy the Dynamics CRM mobile experience.

Dynamics CRM features an analytics component for reporting, trending, and forecasting, with key performance indicators (KPIs) and real-time dashboards. Overall, Dynamics CRM handles the SFA processes such as account/contact/opportunity management quite well and in a logical flow and offers reasonable customer service capabilities—but the CRM software falls short in campaign management, marketing automation, lead management and trade promotion.

Enterprise 2.0 & Social Enterprise Capabilities

The employee enterprise portal (EEP) includes software features that supply chain and distribution centric companies will find useful such as Windows SharePoint Services, out-of-the -box .NET Web Parts, multiple languages, secure web access and user group based access controls.

The system encrypts online communication to secure your data through the employee enterprise portal which is important for companies that trade with external business partners and share information throughout their supply chains. This is an example of external collaboration.

Windows Live delivers a mixed internal and external social collaboration tool for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Windows Live features Messenger as a chat tool and SkyDrive, which allows simple storage and sharing of documents. Both Messenger and SkyDrive are mobile ready. Messenger allows for video, messaging, and access to social networks like Facebook, as well sharing capabilities on WordPress, Flickr, and YouTube. Aggregation of social network updates from Facebook and LinkedIn are also available in Messenger. Key features of SkyDrive include collaboration of documents like Excel spreadsheets, mobile capabilities for uploading files, and file/document storage in the cloud.

Skype, another social collaboration technology, was recently acquired by Microsoft and might give Dynamics NAV further enterprise 2.0 capabilities for collaboration, video, and VoIP calling. The newfound functionality might find its way into Windows Live as well as the social networking and Enterprise 2.0 components now in NAV 2009 R2.

Dynamics CRM has recently delivered new social CRM capabilities, including an internal micro-blogging tool and simple integration with social network streams. The company trails other CRM software competitors in the realm of social CRM, but suggests this is an area of increasing importance in order to help facilitate and better engage the dramatically increasing numbers of social customers.

Reporting and Analytics Capabilities

There are approximately 800 standard reports and documents included with Dynamics NAV. Reports permit export to desktop programs such as Excel and some level of parameter driven definition such as dates, transaction numbers and the like. Dynamics NAV has a flexible framework that allows customers to attribute, sort, edit, access, and archive data into cubes for easy reference, and which also allows customization by the user and has an Outlook interface feel. The Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) cubes can be accessed from a PC desktop, with Excel or a more traditional third party OLAP client.

Definition of organizational attributes simplifies reporting because the attributes can be reported upon based on the given metric or KPI created, and they can be monitored to update managers to potential problems with notification alerts or assigned approvals.

Numerous partner add-on solutions that extend reporting functions within project management and project accounting, timesheet and resource management, vertical-specific compliance reporting, field service management, and other functionalities are available from the Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace.

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