Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains serves mid-size and large clients in horizontal and vertical markets. Historically Great Plains Software was encouraging ISV partner to write third party modules and later on – Great Plains Software had a chance to select the product for incorporation into their core set of modules: Manufacturing, Project Accounting, Purchase Order Processing, Collection Management, etc. Today we’ll consider Microsoft Great Plains implementation specifics for large pharmaceutical corporation.

• Product Research cost. New product research and testing could be grouped into cost center and Microsoft Great Plains offers several Project solutions. The most reliable way is to deploy Great Plains Project Accounting. This module could work in the multicurrency environment, when you incur R&D cost in multiple countries. Then in the first year of product release you can track P&L by your product. There are certain restrictions, however – you typically have one customer, who pays your Project bills. Obviously it is not the case for new product. However you can consider your organization as an association of internal customers

• Multinational Payroll. In each country you have to implement Payroll solution. In the case of Microsoft Great Plains you can have separate company for each local subsidiary and implement US, Canadian, Brazilian, Middle Eastern Payroll modules as well as Payroll custom solutions for most of Latin American countries, South Africa and Australia

• Intercompanies Transactions. In Great Plains these transactions are automated and the transaction results in parallel transaction, involving due to and due from accounts. You can also do it manually

• GL consolidation. This was popular approach in Europe with sophisticated multicurrency and strict tax regulation issues back in earlier 1990th. Nowadays you can use reporting tools to achieve the same goal. FRx could do the job, consolidation Great Plains companies.

• EDI. Typical case when Purchasing is automated via EDI. In Great Plains you have multiple options to implement it. The simplest would be SQL queries with strict EDI formatting

• Internal Audit. Internal Audit requires you to have random samples. Good example is AP checks and payments. The solution lays in using external reporting tool, based on MS SQL Server stored procedures, such as Crystal Reports. The random selection itself is Transact SQL routine. We are raising this question, because we saw the company struggling to implement this reporting with no luck

We encourage you to analyze your alternatives. You can always appeal to our help, give us a call: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), serving Microsoft Great Plains, CRM, Navision to mid-size and large clients in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Minnesota, Ohio, Michigan

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