How It All Began

On a cold rainy day in December (or so it seemed)...

The Dynamics journey began for me in 2006. My company, anticipating quite a bit of growth in the near years to come, decided to take the leap, leaving our ever beloved Quickbooks platform behind, into the ERP pond , err OCEAN. Boy were we in for quite a surprise! Not only did we not have a clue about ERPs, we chose a partner who, at that time we obviously did not know this, had absolutely no clue about about them either (I will talk more about our implementation woes later). This left us with a $40,000 Microsoft Dynamics GP product that we really had no clue how to use. I know this is a rather small number for a Great Plains implementation, but after divorcing canceling our contract with our partner, we ended up doing the conversion and implementation in-house (i.e. I did it).

After 2 years of struggling to figure out that we had not made a HUGE mistake on purchasing Great Plains over MAS 90 (and my recent trip to Convergence 2008), we are finally to the point that we are happy with the choice we made. We are so happy that we are currently in the process of implementing Dynamics CRM. More on CRM later (I can't blog it all in one post now can I?).

Many of you may think that after only 2 years of Great Plains, I am too young in the Dynamics platform / ERP arena to be blogging about it. Normally, I would have to agree, but given my implementation experience, I feel that I am much wiser than most 2 year veterans. I also have gained quite a bit of insight into the problems with Great Plains, and ERPs in general. This has lead me to do quite a bit of research on my own figuring out how to make this application work for my company.

I hate to stop my thoughts in the middle of this post, but it is time to head out and get something to eat...I will finish my thought on implementation in my next blog.

Ron