Dynamics NAV Supply Chain Blog

It’s no secret that western Supply Chain companies have been Outsourcing and Offshoring (to make things simple, we will just call it “Outsourcing”) more and more production (among other things) in the past decade.  In the last few releases, Microsoft Dynamics NAV, formerly Navision, have created some very strong features and functions which can assist companies in tracking and costing goods correctly in a Outsourcing scenario. 

The first is the Item Availability screens, with either P/O’s with proper receipt dates (if purchasing from overseas), and Transfer Orders (if making yourself overseas).  From any screen where you need item information (exceptionally helpful from a Sales Quote or Order, where you want to see if you can fulfill that order) you can see the dates from now into the future, with quantities on Purchase Order, Transfer Orders, Production Orders, etc., either by your location, or overall in the company.  That way, if you don’t have the item on hand now, you can see when you will get it in. 

Click on the thumbnail below to see the Item Availability screen as navigated to directly from a Sales Order.

The other feature which has really made an impact for our customers are the Item Charges to calculate a correct Landed Cost.  This is handy when costs come in later, most commonly freight and import / export duties, which should be calculated as part of the Item’s cost.  As you can see in the below example, we can take a charge and allocate it to items in our inventory when the invoice comes in.  Dynamics NAV lets us do it equally or by Amount, but we have extended this to also allocate by Quantity or Weight. 

These features, combined with the multi-language and multi-currency functionality, help give us a great solution set for our customers who outsource from other countries.

In this present economy, one thing that companies can do to increase their customer loyalty and reduce costs is put in a Customer Portal, also called a B2B eCommerce Website.  A Customer Portal is a web site which a companies customers can log into and perform tasks like place orders, check orders status, change basic information, and look up their account information.

Since the companies we deal with are exclusively Navision / Dynamics NAV Manufacturers and Wholesale Distributors, the customer portals we help implement are B2B (business to business) websites with additional functions.  The difference in a B2B rather then a B2C (Business to Consumer, or Individual) is that the functionality must be different;  for example, in a B2B, companies normally order on account, and when they place orders, they often copy orders from past ones, or order from an order pad - with many line items.  B2C ordering is normally for one or a few items, with one time customers, and options like gift wrapping.  Some of our customers have B2C web sites, but let’s chat about them in a later post!

A lot of our customers are Consumer Packaged Goods companies (CPG), and while their larger customers order via EDI, the smaller retailers do their ordering at night, when most order entry staffs are closed.  So they prefer to order via the customer portal.  And the information goes directly into the Dynamics NAV system, no one needs to re-type a fax in, or enter it over the phone.  Even better, when a customers wants to check on a status of an order, they can login instead of calling Customer Service. 

 We have found that with the cost savings of Customer Service time, the added benefit of getting orders directly into the system (rather then fax or hand entered) and the customer preference of anytime ordering and information make customer portals a great investment.

Hello, as a short introduction, my name is Michael Anderson, and I have been helping Manufacturing and Distribution companies (for short we will call them “supply chain” companies) implement Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision) for over 13 years.

The situation I am in is that I talk to many different supply chain companies every month.  I get to know what challenges they are facing and trends in the industry.  So what I am planning on doing in this blog is giving everyone out there some visibility into these issues.  While it may have some Dynamics NAV information, it is going to focus on the mid-sized supply chain industry as a whole.

Warm Regards, and thanks for reading!
-Michael