ERP SOFTWARE FOR SME :- "MICROSOFT DYNAMICS NAVISION"

MICROSOFT DYNAMICS NAVISION

 The product is part of the Microsoft Dynamics family, and intended to assist with finance, manufacturing, customer relationship management, supply chains, analytics and electronic commerce for small and medium-sized enterprises. Value-added resellers (VAR)s can have full access to the business logic source code, and it has a reputation as being easy to customize.  NAV is licensed using the "Business Ready License" (BRL) model. The customer purchases user sessions, which have access to certain parts of the system included. There are two types of user - Business Essentials (BE) and Advanced Management (AM); AM provides access to more functionality than BE. Under the previous licensing model, "Module Based License" (MBL), users came with no functionality - this all had to be bought separately. Microsoft offers a path for customers to transition from MBL to BRL licensing.

          Dynamics NAV's sector is distribution and manufacturing companies that want more than "out of the box" functionality. The solution has a standard feature set, but it can also be thought of as an "ERP System construction set". The Pascal-like development language is easily accessible to appropriate developers and is designed for rapidly customizing the software. There is no need for complex server side Transact-SQL stored procedures as the one language manages the application and database.

                          According to Microsoft, Dynamics NAV is being used by approximately 65,000 companies, with over 1.3 million end user licenses, throughout the world. Approximately 13,000 of those companies are in the US. It was the first and only mid-market ERP application to break one-million end user licenses.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV delivers integrated functionality to provide support for:-
• Financial management
• Supply chain management
• Manufacturing
• Distribution
• Customer relationship management
• Sales and marketing
• Service management
• Human resource management

Microsoft Dynamics NAV Add-ons are software products supplementing NAV functionality. Add-on solutions are developed and distributed by Microsoft Partners worldwide network as granules or modules to improve functionality of NAV system or make it applicable in some business spheres. Microsoft Dynamics Solution Finder is an online tool to search for solutions within vertical markets, with an up-to-date overview and identifying solutions that are Certified for Microsoft dynamics.

There are vertical and horizontal add-on solutions. Horizontal add-on solutions supplement one of the NAV functions or add new function (e.g. financial management, human resources management etc.). Vertical (or industry-specific oriented) add-ons expand NAV functionality to support some industry (e.g. health care, brewery, financial services etc.)  The majority of add-on solutions are multilingual with most supporting English. Microsoft Dynamics NAV utilities are small software modules for Microsoft Dynamics NAV improving programmers and database administrators work convenience and effectiveness. Also it makes program development and implementation processes faster and their cost lower. Eventually utilities will be developed by the NAV developers/implementers for their own needs and will then be distributed as a commercial software product.

                     It fulfils the basic requirement of SMEs. Cost and time is the first concern point for SME. They are more focused on quality software at lower cost and implementation in lesser time and Microsoft Dynamics Navision provides this facility to the SMEs.

STRENGTHS OF MICROSOFT DYNAMICS NAVISION:-
• Large user base worldwide
• Good user interface
• Large partner base
• Good brand value

WEAKNESSES OF MICROSOFT DYNAMICS NAVISION:-
• Heavy license cost
• It does not support Linux
• Implementation by partner- Microsoft does not take responsibility of implementation
• Customization is costly and is difficult