Microsoft Dynamics GP vs. Winshuttle

Microsoft Dynamics GP is well-suited for our environment, as we pay a diverse group of employees, including on-the-road drivers, shop employees (some in other locations), and office employees. It easily tracks time off, taxes, pay, etc. The reporting allows us to verify with our drivers how they are paid each week, whether it be through mileage or stop-offs.

Incentivized

Winshuttle is well suited to help any company who has data that needs to move from SAP to 'somewhere'. The output file can be Excel, Text, or Access. Query has been greatly expanded in its ability to use SQL statements directly in the product at the 'pre-download' point. For example, you want to have one column do calculations on the data that is being pulled out of SAP via the Query and placed in a specific cell - this can be done - right in the Query script and the result will be produced in your receiving Excel file. I have another small scenario I call 'On the fly" uses. When our asset team had to change their depreciation on a very large number of assets mid-year, Winshuttle Transaction was very helpful. The update would have taken DAYS and lots of shredded nerves to update.

• Great Plains started as back office/accounting, and that is still it's strong suit.
• SQL and the GP programming language, Dexterity, provide a robust, scalable, and stable platform with well documented maintenance and repair procedures. Relatively easy to manage, tune, and support.
• Microsoft support for GP verges on "particularly well". Doesn't quite get there but good enough once you know what you're doing
• Strong partner network, including the GP User Group (GPUG)

Incentivized

• "Training" I feel Winshuttle was extremely easy to learn' my team and I went to a week long training class on the uses of the software upon finishing the course we all became internal (company) support as well as expert functional users.
• "Ease of use" once a user learns the basics processes of the software it is functionally very easy to use and if there are problems with in the processing that cannot be supported internally Winshuttle community and support quickly helped clear up those issues, "if they occurred"
• "Processes data FAST" once the transaction is mapped and recorded the user can move through (process) large amounts of data very quickly, saving lots of time by eliminating manual steps.
• "Data Error Correction" through the transactional processing of large amounts of data, nothing is ever perfect, usually during data migration process if a single line fails the process stops, the correction is made to the data and the process starts all over again. Winshuttle data migration process doesn't stop it will provide a list of exceptions upon completion of the data load. It does this by only processing the "good" data and when bad data is encountered it is skipped and an error message is created and added to the data sheet. With this process the user now only has to worry about exceptions that didn't load and also knows why the line failed so making correction are easier and faster.

Incentivized

• With respect to the allocations, once the expense is entered into the allocation account, you lose the ability to run any detail on just the total of the expense. It would be nice if you could run a trial balance on the allocation accounts the same way you can with regular accounts.
• I've always thought security set up could be a bit simpler. It actually has gotten better through the years. Specifically, with eight separate entities, it would be nice to have a "master" setup where you could call up one group entity, assign the users rights, and then be finished. Currently, whenever I have a new user, I have to call up each individual entity and select all of the features I want the user to have. That means I have to do eight steps for each user.

Incentivized

• The use of Winshuttle is particularly helpful with systems where data volumes are always very high. If data volumes are not an issue, the use of Winshuttle for cut-over activities might not result in a significant perceivable difference in time savings.
• For businesses and sectors that rely on business processes that are complex and tedious with a lot of manual interventions, Winshuttle comes in real handy. However, in situations of fairly straightforward business cases, it would be hard to see perceivable gains from the use of Winshuttle.
• At times, the use of complex business process with multiple fields from one transaction needs to be fed into the next for further processing, if the screen sequence changes based on each set of information, the processing could fail. However, these could be overcome by grouping similar screened transactions into one chunk and others into another.

Incentivized

Due the economic challenges that Puerto Rico is having, the company has had to merge some companies in order to be more efficient. It has been easy in GP to process those merges, even thought we had to spend days to accomplish that the process was smooth and accurate. In addition we were able to streamline the purchasing and sales process and the organization is confident to keep renewing GP for the future versions.

Incentivized

Fantastic tool and honestly the best out there for the particular need. I cannot think of any reason we wouldn't renew as it truly offers the perfect solution to what is often a supremely difficult process. Also, I believe that from a cost perspective it is quite agreeable given the amount of benefit/ROI received

Incentivized

Though it is a basic accounting package, I believe some users do not find the old style menus and navigation options intuitive. There is also a great lack of training resources in the market, so users have to learn the product without guidance a lot, resulting in inefficient workflows and misuse or misunderstanding of many features.

Incentivized

- I have used Winshuttle Transaction and Direct and the interface is simple, intuitive and easy to understand. - Not much technical knowledge of SAP is required before loading the data. - Data can be loaded for any sheet of an Excel spreadsheet - Output messages from Winshuttle are very clear and can be used to as an input to other data loads that use these output data

Incentivized

The rating is directed to the thrid party serive provider that we use. I do not now how good the Microsoft direct support is.

Incentivized

The winshuttle staff are some of the best in the business. I have been working with them for several years and always have had a positive interaction. There support staff are very knowledgeable. There product managers are very supportive as well and always open to hear feedback on how you like the product and any gaps that you would like to find a solution to better improve the products.

Incentivized

Basically the challenge with this implementation was the Business Portal, too many errors and even the aplication is up and running the users are still having issues. We will start planning the migraton to GP 2015 soon.

Incentivized

No, I do not have it.

I come from a strong background of using SAP. SAP doesn't have the flexibility of GP, an example would be SAP doesn't allow core mods, if they catch you, you lose support. Microsoft doesn't really care about mods, but they will be quick to have the vendor you used support your issue if it is caused by those mods. With SAP your company adapts to the software, where with GP you adapt the software to you.

Incentivized

Winshuttle works better with SAP than UiPath does in terms of performance and stability. The time to deploy a Process in Winshuttle is faster and less complex. It doesn't require coding skills as much as for UiPath. Winshuttle excels in batch input operations and also has a useful query reporting tool.

Incentivized

The functionality that GP and related ISV solutions offer and the ease of integration of GP to other systems makes it an extremely scalable solution

Incentivized

• Microsoft Dynamics GP allows my clients to move from a paper or spreadsheet based company to an integrated, electronic, streamlined business. I love being able to help clients gain efficiencies through the use of Microsoft Dynamics GP.
• Microsoft Dynamics GP allows for better customer service because everything is at our fingertips. If someone calls questioning an invoice, we can easily look it up. If someone calls stating they paid an invoice with a certain check number, we can quickly run a query to find that particular check number to see where it was applied.
• Having everything on a single platform provides ease of use for upgrades, backups and end user training. There is only one software to learn!

Incentivized

• We've been able to automate several time consuming, high volume tasks so that our analysts could focus on actual data quality and not data entry.
• We've been able to create reports and forego custom IT configuration by using Query and Transaction to come up with our own solutions.
• We've been able to pivot our strategy more quickly by easily adjusting and updating master data when processes change.