ERP Enterprise Resource Planning

Literally all organisations will have constraints upon their resources whether Private Sector, Not for Profit or Government.

Executive Officers of such organisations have a fiduciary duty to manage the resources they control. They have the onerous task of balancing the needs of numerous stakeholders, such as shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, etc and pay all duties and taxes. They must ensure that their organisation complies with numerous regulatory requirements, such as Sarbanes Oxley and they must always by competent, professional and ethical.

Unless the organisation is very small (less than 5 employees), some type of ERP system is essential in order to effectively manage resources.

There are many types of resource constraints, internal capacity such as number of employee hours, machine time, warehouse capacity, etc, as well as constraints on cash or borrowing for purchasing external inputs.

Microsoft Dynamics provides huge capability towards assisting with the management of resources. Mundane business processes are automated so that data is never re-keyed, paper is eliminated, approvals are routed automatically according to business rules and all transactions are tracked. Users and managers have time freed to enable them to use the powerful Business Intelligence tools within Dynamics to be more strategic and to confidently make better decisions as to how to allocate their limited resources available.

Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting

Planning, budgeting and forecasting on the one hand and BI tools on the other form two sides of the same coin called business performance. Planning models create fresh information (plans, budgets, forecasts), whilst BI tools manipulate and report information that is created elsewhere.

Many would be tempted to use the terms planning, budgeting and forecasting inter-changeably, however there is a subtle distinction in their approach to predicting future business performance.

Planning typically starts as a top-down exercise often engaging a small number of senior managers or business analysts acting on senior managers’ behalf. Conversely, budgeting has a strong bottom-up element and is usually a process of agreeing targets between multiple or indeed numerous contributors for key categories of revenue and expenditure that support corporate objectives. Because budgets normally serve as yardsticks against which performance is measured and rewarded, getting budget predictions as accurate as possible often involves an extended, iterative process of revision and re-submission.

Monitoring whether a company stays on course with their budgets requires the collation – again by numerous contributors - of revised forecasts of business drivers and outcomes.

Good planning, budgeting and forecasting software and their link to ERP systems is therefore crucial to effective management of resources, to comparing actuals against forecast and to devising what-if scenarios to better protect and equip the business against the vagaries of the modern world of business. If management has better control over the variables being predicted and can take quicker corrective action should something go astray, then the company has the ability to devise and implement cohesive and strategically more robust plans.

We at M4 Systems specialise in providing a number of powerful software systems which we can integrate with ERP systems, in particular Microsoft Dynamics GP to endow our customers with more powerful performance management capabilities. Software specialisations include:

• Corporate Planner
• Microsoft Forecaster
• Microsoft Office Project Server 2007

Project Management

Microsoft’s particular flavour of Project Management software is designed to assist project managers in developing plans, assigning resources to tasks, tracking progress, managing budgets and analysing workloads.

Microsoft Project's capabilities were extended with the introduction of Microsoft Office Project Server and Microsoft Project Web Access. Project Server stores Project data in a central SQL based database, allowing users to display and update this data over the Internet. Web Access allows authorised users to access a Project Server database across the Internet, and includes timesheets, graphical analysis of resource workloads, and administrative tools.

Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 is tightly integrated with Windows SharePoint Services, for each project is created in Project Workspace where the team members can share information related to Project.

As the software now operates as part of the Microsoft Office suite, cross-functionality with products like PowerPoint and Visio is enabled.

Microsoft’s ERP solution - Dynamics GP - includes comprehensive Project Accounting capability with timesheet and expense management integrated with the Business Portal. For more powerful resource management capability we have integrated Dynamics GP Project Accounting with Microsoft Project Server 2007 with the option to enter time and expense via Project Server 2007 Web Access instead of via the Business Portal.

Visit our Dynamics GP Project Management section for more information and/or request a demo.