Microsoft Great Plains Furniture & Fixtures - Implementation & Customization Highlights

Microsoft Great Plains, former Great Plains Software Dynamics / eEnterprise was introduced in 1993 as first Microsoft Windows and Macintosh based graphical accounting/ERP application for Mid-Size businesses. Considering the history of furniture retailer and custom assembly lines - they showed up on the market about five decades ago and they have automated their business operations with Unix-based businesses in the late 1960th and earlier 1970th. You can find such furniture resale systems as Storis, which is Unidata based application, automating furniture retail outlets. Let's consider the options.

? General Ledger. There is no need to immediate replacement of legacy retail stores automation software. It is reliable and proved to work over years. They usually sit in very reliable Unix hardware such as IBM AS/400 or RS6000. You would need just import General Ledger transaction to the system, where you would have flexible and quick financial reporting. In this case you need Unidata export and feed it into Great Plains General Ledger. Use Great Plains Integration Manager or heterogeneous SQL queries.

? Payroll. Great Plains would be reasonably priced payroll solution if you process payroll inhouse. If you have less then 500 employees - then Great Plains Standard douse excellent job and software price would be around k$10. You will have to pay annual maintenance program and receive Payroll taxes and federal magnetic media updates to keep you safe from the payroll taxation errors and miscalculation. If you cross over 500 employees line - Great Plains software price will be around k$30 and you could find cheaper solutions with unlimited number of employees - look at Accpac.

? eCommerce. If you are replacing your legacy system, then you could build eCommerce upon Microsoft Great Plains Inventory Control (IV) and Sales Order Processing modules. Looking into the future you should expect increasing portion of you business to come from eCommerce ordering. Here you deploy eConnect and have your or contracting developers do the job. If eConnect is too expensive - you could appeal to experienced developers, who has set of custom stored procedures to work with SOP10100, SOP10200 and IV00100 tables

? Commission Reporting. In Furniture outlet shift manager commission is based on her/his employees-salespersons performance. And it is usually tiered. We saw very complex and proprietary formulas. Our suggestion is to realize it in SQL Stored Procedure and then you could create Crystal Report with parameters to calculate and report commission amounts

We encourage you to analyze your alternatives. You can always appeal to our help, give us a call: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies (http://www.albaspectrum.com), serving Microsoft Great Plains, CRM, Navision to mid-size and large clients in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan