Hello,
This is really a two part question and of course i'll start with my first.
#1
We’re currently looking to purchase Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft
Dynamics GP to accommodate the growing needs of our business. One of the
largest reasons we’re looking to move to this new infrastructure is due to
the lack of support our current systems have for “sales leads” and “product
maintenance” plans. A critical part of these new processes is to have our
new CRM & GP package support some sort of tight integration between the line
item in a sale within GP and the registered “account product” within the CRM.
(This is where “Account Product” represents an account’s unique product
serial number to a particular line item in GP)
Currently our process is that a sales order is made in our Great Plains
v.5.5 software, where our shipping manager then looks in Great Plains and
determines which products need to be produced and shipped. Those item orders
are then hand entered into a piece of homegrown software which then generates
a unique serial number for each product. Those items are marked with the new
serial numbers and shipped out to our distributors, where they then are sold
to the end users. The end user then goes online and registers these serial
numbers, which then are semi-automatically entered into our Saleslogix CRM
database. At this point, these products then exist in Great Plains, our
homegrown software package and in our CRM database, with no relationship to
each other. In other words, our software doesn’t automatically know that end
user “x” is registering a product that was line item #2 in an invoice we sent
out to one of our major distributors. I hope this paints a more real life
picture of what I’m asking.
What I’m wondering is how the relationship is handled in the new versions of
CRM/GP? We speculated that it may work as follows:
A) Dynamics GP “out of the box” accept and allow association of a product
serial number with each item sold, where it’s part of some sort of shipping
“close-out” process at the end of the day?
B) If possible, an even better and more automated method would be for GP, as
part of the order entry process has the option of simply reaching out
(perhaps using a DLL) to a serial number generation function and get and
embed the serial number somewhere into GP.
C) Then what would be great is to have the subsequent product registration
process have a method of linking the newly registered serial number with the
serial number that should have already been saved into GP as part of step A).
Although these are guesses, what we’re trying to find out is how this
built-in process truly works between Microsoft CRM & Microsoft GP.
#2
The second inquiry we have is about how product returns (RMA’s) are handled.
We’d like to know if the same type of association between line-items and
serial numbers exists between line-items & product returns?
To our understanding, with RMAs, this would involve the return of a line
item in GP. In an ideal world, when the product is returned, we would also
mark the associated record in the account product’s registration database.
(This would presumably eliminate unjustified technical support.)
Currently the way RMA’s happen is that when a customer returns the product,
the return is entered in by one of our sales or customer service reps. At
that point, after the return arrives and is entered, our production manager
is supposed to also mark the registered product as returned.
My ultimate goal here is to try and learn in advance how ready for us the
out-of-the-box software solution is. That lets me better understand how much
software customization we are likely to have to do.
