February 2009

There is a fantastic website that I haven’t been aware of yet: Enterprise Resource Planning: Accelerate Your Business Toward Profit , on Microsoft’s Events and Webcasts portal. Thanks to Fred Mackie for bringing it to my attention.

A short story about maritime trading, steamboats and Microsoft’s Azure Services Platform in short to mid-term ERP and Microsoft Dynamics NAV perspective This is a story of a business which failed, and it didn’t have to. It had all the capital and resources it needed to grow, it held a solid share in an expanding market.

Implementation is like marriage. For better or worse, you choose a piece of software, take it under your roof and commit to it for a long term, so help you God. And as in marriage, if you want to live happily ever after with your new software, the my way or the highway attitude doesn’t help much—you must be open to compromise.

There are three kinds of people: those who watch things happen, those who make things happen, and those who wonder what happened. The world is in crisis. Some countries are hit harder than the others, some markets have sunk deeper than the others, but the effects of global economic recession are obvious, and if the crisis didn’t hit you yet, fasten your seatbelt—it surely will.

Somehow I’ve missed it earlier, but a wealth of information for developers, architects and technical consultants specializing in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is now available on MSDN in the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Developer Center .

Someone has tweeted about my blog yesterday. Was that you? Seeing twitter.com in a list of websites sending traffic my way pumped a dose of adrenaline up my arteries: if you find this blog worth tweeting about, then it must be… well, worth tweeting about. Thanks! The ultimate effect is this: I opened a Twitter account.

To customize or not to customize, that is the question. When you see a complex business process far from the standard ERP system, a knee-jerk reaction is to reach for customization tools and do the development. Many ERP theorists say that ERP is only as good as it is an exact match for your processes.

Last week I participated in a discussion about budgets and whether you should ask your potential customers their budget. It made me think: how often do customers reveal their project budgets before the consultants bid? From my personal experience—not too often. What a waste! Of time, money, and opportunity.

When I started blogging just short of two years ago, there weren’t too many NAV blogs. I don’t bother to go do the count, but I figure there was no more than ten of them. Then it exploded: today, there are about forty.