Customer Focus vs. Microsoft Dynamics SL

Today, with a globalized competition and without truce, a company must evaluate and take into account its size, and use this to analyze which of the tools available in the market is more suited to their needs. If it is a small company, you can improve your customer service by incorporating a chat. But a company of national level must evaluate other aspects like: marketing, tastes, preferences, tendencies, etc. To achieve the effective management of relationships with our customers, this technology provides us with effective tools and easy access.

Incentivized

For a small to mid-size business, MS Dynamics SL is effective. We are capable of managing our finances with a very low risk of error. We have worked with MS Dynamics for almost 15 years and have more than doubled the size of our business in that time with very few issues from the program. We have exponentially increased our revenue and reporting demands and have found SL to be very dependable and stable. The program does have the occasional glitch and those are sometimes outside of the realm of expertise of our IT department. SL support is excellent, but their timeliness is not as urgent as ours.

Incentivized

• Facilitates the interaction between the company and customers, through various communication channels, thanks to the storage of information of interest, such as the needs and preferences for products or services.
• Access data of interest (about the clients, their histories, products, prices, etc.,) from any place with access to the internet
• An extensive knowledge about the clients allows the company to present commercial offers adapted to their needs, so the income is also higher, through a lower sales cycle. The CRM allows to enhance sales and marketing functions.

Incentivized

• Provides flexibility for complex project based cost accounting
• Strong and flexible allocation processer for cost allocations, markups, and pricing
• A "Flexible Billing" module under the project controller series that allows for multiple billing formats ranging from fixed price schedule of values, T&M or Cost Plus, and scheduled billing.
• Flexible reporting with options using Crystal Reports, SSRS, a Quick Query tool, and ability to tie into MS Office tools such as MS Access and MS Excel
• Tight integration with Financials, but also the ability to integrate with modules such as Sales Order, Inventory, and Field Service
• Customization abilities ranging from a VBA (visual basic for application) foundation to allow customizing existing forms to the ability to use the SDK (Software Development Kit) to build more complex customizations that integrate with Dynamics SL.

Incentivized

• Cost is always an element to consider when purchasing a computer solution, both for the purchase of the software and for its maintenance, many forget about the ongoing support costs that come with software.
• Many systems are backed up automatically through the cloud or through some other solution, but not all. So there is a good chance that the data will be lost. it is therefore necessary to take the safe backup forecasts in the event of any unforeseen occurrence and cause us an unpleasant surprise.
• There is a difference between being served by a real person when making a phone call, to an automated attention system. Sometimes it is good to make the tasks more automatic, but it is also good to have a little personalized help to avoid losing the human value of relationships.

Incentivized

• Reporting in the Project module is lacking functionality. I understand that most companies have specific needs when it comes to tracking project information but the standard reports are not good.
• I would recommend a product like Management Reporter that is for Projects only. Project Reporter should allow users to pull in all Project related data into reports.
• Fixing suspended batches. Obviously all of us users have experienced this mess. SL knows what needs to be corrected and there could be some step by step fixes in a separate repair module to do the steps we do in Query Analyzer.

Incentivized

Unfortunately, Dynamics' lack of ability to smoothly integrate with our CRM system is causing us to look at other solutions. The efficiencies that we gain by using Dynamics for our day to day accounting are lost in the constant headaches of getting sales quotes to import properly into the system for invoicing. Another major issue for us has been budgeting and reporting. We currently do all of our budgeting and board reporting in Excel, which is too time consuming and inefficient, especially when a system as robust as Dynamics should easily be able to handle this relatively simple task.

Incentivized

I rate it a 10 because we have removed the fields we don't need so users can really crank the data into the system. The software was designed for the professional services firm in mind but does a tremendous job for construction firms and "blended" companies that are both distribution firms but project centric as well. Perhaps they drop ship inventory to a project where their employees or subs need to work on a project for example.

Incentivized

We have had only one unplanned outage for 2 hours in the last 30 months. We shut down for 30 min to 1 hour once a month, but that is for Microsoft OS updates to the servers. Being a 24/7 world wide operation, the reliability is really important. We do get an 8 hour window on the weekend that we can be down for a short period to install Microsoft Dynamics SL updates, but we do not have many of those. On our last version upgrade, we shut the users out at 9:30 am and were fully operational in less than 6 hours. The upgrade was New SQL server, New SL server and 2 new Citrix servers.

Incentivized

Support is only used when needed, so unfortunately ,they get all the odd issues. It's a difficult business, but Microsoft and our firm do a great job of meeting customer needs. We get routine feedback that our support services are very good.

Incentivized

Just to let it take its course. The implementation for me once I became a part of my former organization was pretty seamless. Just get to know the basics and call the support team to ask questions if you need help on an issue, should they arise. They are ready, willing, and able to help!

Incentivized

Sales management is based on the management of customer relationships and must be centralized so that its analysis is effective. The data that is collected must be available for the generation of statistics for decision making by the directory. This tool allows us to generate the necessary data to generate results, save time and production cost. The other products did not fit our objectives.

Incentivized

Of the comparable mid-range ERP systems, Dynamics SL competes at the lower end based on price, but also above the high-end based on flexibility, data, and reporting. Being able to stay with the same core accounting from a $100 million dollar company to a $3 billion dollar company shows the range of capabilities.

Incentivized

Since the backbone of the database is MS SQLServer, the database can be easily scaled.

Incentivized

• With the information available, about the clients, the company can know and segment the markets and develop effective and successful marketing campaigns.
• With the information the employee can develop more personalized relationships with the client.
• This customer service tool facilitated the administrative processes of sales to achieve higher performance and better results in the company.

Incentivized

• More time is spent on manipulating reports which can and should be automated.
• Lack of electronic invoicing process and other green technology features creates more cost on printing and storage costs.
• The lack of a user friendly interface requires more training and a bigger learning curve for staff.

Incentivized