Microsoft great plains - Better Integration

Great Plains Integration Better integration between business applications is a hallmark of efficiency. No matter what industry you're in, the task of pulling data from one application and entering it into another opens up the door to inefficiencies that waste time and money and often cause problems that take on a life of their own. Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains has been upgraded to help your front office processes integrate with your back office operations. This release greatly improves your integration efficiency with Microsoft applications as you build out your IT infrastructure. Businesses often talk about integration between applications, and spend a great deal of time and resources figuring out how to achieve front-to-back office connectivity without additional software, often called middleware. Getting your applications to communicate directly with each other gives your data a straighter—and less costly—path from the front to the back office and can increase efficiencies in a multitude of areas within your business. Great Plains eliminates inefficiency Inefficiency is not always obvious. One such example involves training employees to use different interfaces with different software applications. Not only is the learning curve longer and more complicated, employees must then redefine their thinking about data and mentally recalibrate where they enter, store, and retrieve information. Another example is software upgrades. The more advanced a software application becomes, the more outdated other applications around it become. And storage becomes another major efficiency issue. The more places data is housed, the harder it gets to move it from one application to another. If the shipping department's data is not in sync with the accounting department's data, invoices may be sent long after the merchandise has shipped. With the release of Microsoft Great Plains 8.0, businesses gain new ways of integrating information with other Microsoft applications they may already be using.

Microsoft Great Plains Financial Integration

Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 pulls from and delivers data to general ledgers developed on Microsoft Business Solutions for Analytics–FRx because the two applications sit on top of each other as well as share the familiar Microsoft interface. "If your employees are using both programs, they do not have to work in two disparate environments," says Sandy Braun, senior product manager for Microsoft Great Plains. "In fact, in user testing, Microsoft found that similar interfaces let users do the same tasks in one-third the time." Additionally, employees working in Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 can use Microsoft FRx to include documents from Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Word to create financial report book summaries. Management has faster access to data and can make faster and more accurate business decisions without the typical delay of getting data from one business unit to another. Productivity Integration Another new feature is the letter-writing wizard. Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 creates letters and Word documents with embedded data. There's no need to go back and forth between the two applications. Using Microsoft Great Plains 8.0, for example, you can send letters to all your customers, employees, and vendors without having to reenter data into each letter from your Microsoft Great Plains application. Or, you can set an alert in the application to write letters to all customers who are overdue on their balance. Using the letter-writing feature, Microsoft Great Plains will populate the letters with names, addresses, and other relevant data without your employees having to first data mine the list from Microsoft Great Plains before creating a mail merge in Word. Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 can also increase business efficiency in some unexpected ways. By integrating with Microsoft MapPoint, you can enter a group of orders that require delivery. The orders populate MapPoint and with a single click of the routing button, you quickly see what could be the most efficient route of the delivery truck. Great Plains Integration Across Your Organization Finally, Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 offers Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal 2.5 that can be integrated with Microsoft Office Accelerator for Sarbanes-Oxley through the common Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology platform. Key performance indicators and queries from Microsoft Great Plains 8.0 can be attached as evidence in the Sarbanes-Oxley Accelerator. For public companies that have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the ability to integrate business data into the Sarbanes-Oxley Accelerator can help improve controls and eliminate inefficiencies and inaccuracies that can be caused by dealing with non-integrated systems. Microsoft Great Plains won't stop there. The development team is already talking about the next release and throwing ideas onto the table. One thing every member of the team recognizes is that efficiency centers on the ways employees use the software to get information, what they are able to do with it, and how quickly. Whether it's sending out thousands of "personalized" letters with just one click or giving a driver a better way to make deliveries, Microsoft Great Plains customers always want more information and want to be able to do more with it.

http://www.avidware.net