I recently talked to Microsoft partner ChargeLogic about their own in-house implementation using Microsoft Dynamics RapidStart Services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV. I found the story inspiring and wanted to share it with you here.
ChargeLogic recently spun off from their parent company and needed their own ERP system. As solution experts, the decision to use Microsoft Dynamics NAV was obvious because they knew the product inside and out. Yet, according to Jon Cooper, President at ChargeLogic, they still faced one big challenge: lack of time.
“With our already busy schedules, combined with all the work involved in starting a new company, finding time to actually sit down and work on our own internal systems was a challenge,” Cooper says. “We wanted implementation to be quick and painless.”
How to make implementation quick and painless
This is where RapidStart Services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV came into the picture. It is an integrated tool and a native part of Microsoft Dynamics NAV that helps speed up the implementation process and facilitates better control of the whole process.
It includes Project Overview, Questionnaires, Master Data Import and Configuration Packages. Using the basic configuration package for the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 made implementation straightforward for Cooper and ChargeLogic right from the start.
“When I installed NAV 2013 on our new server and logged in, it brought up the RapidStart Role Center, which was enormously helpful. Not having used RapidStart before, I started filling out the G/L Questionnaires. I quickly finished and moved through the Sales, Purchasing, and Inventory Questionnaires. I was able to leave most of the settings at their default values and only changed a few values along the way.”
Not a single bit of data had to be re-entered
Another aspect of RapidStart Services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV that made things easier was the data import aspect.
“Once I had finished answering all the questions, I moved on to the Configuration Worksheets. All of our data from the old company was in a NAV 3.60 database, so I simply filtered on the data that was applicable to our new company and copied and pasted it from NAV 3.60 into Excel. I created worksheets for my Item and my Customer masters. I also pulled Customer and Item ledger entries into a worksheet.”
Cooper exported the Customer and Item masters and journals as templates, made some slight adjustments to the fields in NAV 2013, and created an updated template. He then simply copied and pasted the data from their old system into the templates and imported it into Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013. RapidStart identified some validation errors, which were quickly corrected and reprocessed.
“My Customers, Items, and their respective histories were in my new NAV 2013 system, and I didn’t have to data-enter a thing,” Cooper says.
Much less demanding than expected
Cooper admits that he had anticipated that the implementation would take ten to fifteen days and he would need to make use of three people in that time.
“With RapidStart, I performed the entire implementation myself in less than two days. I’m a developer, and I know NAV very well, but this was my first implementation. I was very impressed with how easily RapidStart Services got me going and walked me through the implementation process,” Cooper says.
ChargeLogic is an Independent Software Vendor providing the PCI-Compliant solutions integrated with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. ChargeLogic’s suite of products include ChargeLogic Payments, the PCI-compliant payment processing solution for NAV, ChargeLogic Connect, the cloud-based service for easy e-commerce integration with NAV and secure payment management, and ChargeLogic Shipping, the most intelligent, integrated shipping solution with NAV. ChargeLogic is Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD) and is a Validated Payment Application as certified by the PCI Security Standards Council. ChargeLogic sells, distributes, and supports their software through a partner channel comprised of Microsoft Enterprise Resource Planning partners with a high degree of technology competence and expertise. As a Microsoft partner, ChargeLogic uses this knowledge to build the highest quality solutions for Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Jannik Bausager
Director – Microsoft Dynamics NAV product marketing