One of the most difficult decisions that has to be made during a new system implementation is how much and what kind of data to migrate from your old system to the new. How many years do we bring over? Do we bring over detailed or summarized data? Is it reconciled? Will we have access to old system for historical reporting purposes? These are all questions that are posed and answers that are debated during the process of making the decision.
With most CRM systems or for that matter any enterprise systems we often hear this saying “Garbage in Garbage out” about the data that resides in these systems. The reality is that most systems do have garbage data and each organization uses different methods to maintain/scrub/cleanse their data. Some organizations use a data warehouse where data is synced from different sources and normalized, the data warehouse is used as the master data source for all reporting and transactional data still remains in the same state. In another situation an ERP would be the source for the master data and all other systems like CRM would sync and integrate with the ERP data. But each system has its users and they too would like to maintain good data. In a modern system like Dynamics CRM, it provides a lot of methods to maintain your data. The following methods can be deployed to keep you data clean:-
In April, Microsoft announced that it had acquired the Datazen mobile BI platform and were adding it to their enterprise BI product suite. This is exciting news that rounds out the Microsoft BI stack and, better yet, it’s free for SQL Server Enterprise customers who have Software Assurance agreements.
What is Datazen and what are its capabilities?
Blogs are a way for KTL Solutions to provide information and highlight particular items and solutions to our customers and users. In this month’s blog, I wanted to highlight KTL Solutions’ 10th Annual User Conference and, in particular, I wanted to provide a recap of the “Ask the Expert” session hosted by Dave Vora and myself.
For the last few months we at KTL Solutions (me in particular) have been promoting our upcoming “Empower the User Conference” a free one-day educational event for Microsoft Dynamics GP, SL, and CRM users. And while it is a great educational event that you have learned about through a number of emails, landing pages, and tweets from KTL there are other benefits to attending this event:
I love listening to the Kane Show on Hot 99.5 during my morning commutes into the office. So I couldn’t resist using Arnetta’s saying in the title of this month’s blog. When someone calls in to the Kane Show saying that today is there last day at their company they like playing a clip from Arnetta. In my case it’s not my last day at KTL Solutions but a job change within the company.
On Friday, December 12th, KTL Solutions continued on with their yearly office holiday party tradition. Renting out a cozy room in an Italian Restaurant not far from their office, the vast majority of KTL employees began filling the space with their significant others trailing behind. It wasn’t long before the open bar was packed to the nines with good cheers and chatter from all that were welcome.
Pleased with the outcome of the attendees (employees, family, friends, and many local clients), Kim and Tim ushered everyone along to tend to their seated 3 course dinners. The room was filled with holiday cheer as the candlelight set a warm and family atmosphere, the food left a delicious aroma lingering in the air, and the laughter reminded us that KTL is a family unit powered by it’s devoted employees.
In previous blogs, I have touched on the sheer number of Dynamics ERP ISVs (third party products). They are great tools to add on to an accounting system, however choosing out of the thousands can be a daunting task. Implementing them can also be quite an undertaking. It involves multiple systems, and should involve several parties, not just the ISV but also your Dynamics Partner and IT personnel/company. All too often us partners get calls from clients saying they have purchased a product that was supposed to solve all their problems and now they have no clue how to use it and their ERP is crashing.
Over the last several years we have heard a lot about the cloud: How easy it is to move business applications to the cloud; how IT departments are making this part of their strategic business plans; and the different initiatives coming about on how to save companies money and gain efficiencies. IT is now able to off load hardware and software administrative and resource overhead to hosting providers. This is empowering them to not only concentration on, but to be a PART of, strategic technology planning efforts for their organizations. This is an overall benefit to the organization, and I believe an unexpected but welcomed result of the cloud movement.
KTL Solutions has been creating customizations for Microsoft Dynamics GP since before there was a Microsoft Dynamics GP. Dynamics GP was originally Dynamics by Great Plains Software and some of our products go back that far. These add-on modules for GP have been designed to fill a need that the core functionality of GP does not provide. We will be looking at 3 core products that KTL offers as add-ons to GP. These are AP Fast Entry, Payroll Security, and Advanced Distributions.
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