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In this article written by Alex Chow, author of the book Implementing Microsoft Dynamics NAV – Third Edition, we understand more on how Microsoft Dynamics NAV being an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is specifically made for growing small to mid-sized companies.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

This is, at least, what Microsoft’s marketing department says. In reality, Dynamics NAV is being used by large and publically-traded companies as well around the world.

An ERP is a software that integrates the internal and external management information across an entire organization. The purpose of an ERP is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of organizations. An ERP system is meant to handle all the functional areas within an organization on a single software system. This way, the output of an area can be used as the input of another area, without the need to duplicate data.

This article will give you an idea of what Dynamics NAV is and what you can expect from it. The topics covered in this article are the following:

  • What is Microsoft Dynamics NAV
  • The functional areas found in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016
  • A history of Dynamics NAV

Understanding Microsoft Dynamics NAV

Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 is a Role Tailored ERP. Traditionally, ERP software is built to providing a lot of functionalities where users will need to hunt down the information. This is more of a passive approach to information in which the user will need to go somewhere within the system to retrieve information.

Dynamics NAV works differently. The role-tailored experience is based on individuals within an organization, their roles, and the tasks they perform. When users first enter Dynamics NAV, they see the data needed for the daily tasks they do according to their role. Users belonging to different roles will have a different view of the system; each of them will see the functions they need to properly perform their daily tasks. Instead of the users chasing down information, the information comes to them.

Here’s an example of the main screen for an order processor. All the relevant information for a user who is processing sales orders are displayed in a business intelligent (BI) format:

The functional areas within Dynamics NAV

Dynamics NAV covers the following functional areas inside an organization:

  • Financial management: Most of the functionalities from “off-the-shelf” accounting software can be found in this module. The functionalities include, but are not limited to, G/L budgeting, financial reporting, cash management, receivables and payables, fixed assets, VAT and tax reporting, intercompany transactions, cost accounting, consolidation, multicurrency, intrastate, and so on.
  • Sales and marketing: This is for the companies that want to track customer orders and determine when the items can be promised to be delivered to the customer. This area covers customers, order processing, expected delivery, order promises, sales returns, pricing, contacts, marketing campaigns, and so on.
  • Purchase: This module is required when you buy goods and services and you want to keep track of what you have ordered from your vendors and when the goods should be delivered to your door, so you can make the stuff or ship the stuff to your customers. This area includes vendors, order processing, approvals, planning, costing, and so on.
  • Warehouse: Where are your items in your warehouse? This functional area answers this question for you. Under the warehouse area, you will find inventory, shipping and receiving, locations, warehouse bin contents, picking, put-aways, assembly, and so on.
  • Manufacturing: The manufacturing area includes product design, bills of materials, routing, capacities, forecast, production planning, production order, costing, subcontracting, and so on.
  • Job: This module is typically used for companies that deal with long and drawn out projects. Within this job area, you can create projects, phases and tasks, planning, time sheets, work in process, and likewise.
  • Resource planning: If your company has internal resources that for which you keep track of cost and/or revenue, this module is for you. This area includes resources, capacity, and other tools to keep track of cost and revenue for resources.
  • Service: This functional area is design for a company that sells items to their customers that needs to be serviced periodically, with or without warranty. Within this service area, you can manage service items, contract management, order processing, planning and dispatching, service tasks, and so on
  • Human resources: This involves basic employee tracking. It allows you to manage employees, absences, and so on.

One of the best-selling points about Dynamics NAV is that it can be customized. A brand new functional area can be created from scratch or new features can be added to an existing functional area. All the development is done with the programming language called C/AL.

When someone creates a new functional area, a vertical (a wide range of functions for a specific industry) or horizontal (a wide range of functions that can be applied across an industry), they usually create it as an add-on. An add-on can be registered with Microsoft, with the appropriate fees of course. If some features are added to an existing area, usually it is a customization that will only be used on the database of the customer who asked for the feature.

Making add-ons available greatly enhances the base Dynamics NAV functionalities to fit the needs of every industry in every business.

One thing unique about Dynamics NAV is that the entire code is located on a single layer. Therefore, if you customize an area, you have to do it by modifying the standard code and adding code in the middle of the standard object definition. This made it a little tough to upgrade in the prior versions of Dynamics NAV. However, with the release of Dynamics NAV 2016, code upgrades can be done automatically using Power Shell! We will dive into Power Shell later.

Dynamics NAV uses a three-tier architecture:

  • SQL Server is the data tier and is used to store the data in a database.
  • Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server is the middle or server tier, managing the entire business logic and communication. It also provides an additional layer of security between clients and the database and an additional layer for user authentication.
  • On the client tier, we will find Windows clients and the web client. Dynamics NAV 2016 also supports other kinds of clients including Web Services (both SOAP and OData), mobile tablets, a SharePoint client through Microsoft Dynamics NAV Portal Framework, and NAS service.

You can install Dynamics NAV in more complex scenarios, as you can have multiple instances of any of the core components.

History of Dynamics NAV

We are not historians, but we thought that it would be important to know where we come from and where we are going. Some of the current restrictions or features can be better understood if we know a bit of the history of Dynamics NAV. This is why we have added this section.

Dynamics NAV was first developed by a Danish firm and the program was called Navision A/S. In 2002, Microsoft bought Navision A/S and included it in the Microsoft Business Solution division. The product has gone through several name changes. The names: Navision Financials, Navision Attain, and Microsoft Business solutions Navision Edition, have been used to refer to the product that is currently called Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Note that all the previous names included the word Navision. This is why many people keep calling it Navision instead of NAV.

Prior to Dynamics NAV 2009, the development environment was actually the primary end user interface before Microsoft revamped the user interface that we call the Role Tailored Client (RTC).

One of the greatest technological breakthroughs with the original Navision (the name before it was called Dynamics NAV) was that the application programming objects, the user interface, and the database resided together, in one file! Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, no other software came close to having an efficient design like this. This was the main menu for Navision Financials version 2.0:

We’re now more than a decade away from 2000 and technology has changed quite a bit. Dynamics NAV has been very up to date with the latest technology that has the best impact for businesses. However, most of these improvements and updates are mostly in the backend. This is an important reason why Dynamics NAV has never faded into history. There were a couple of user interface improvements; however, largely, it mainly looks and feels very much the same as before. This is the main menu for Dynamics NAV 5.0:

Then something happened. With the rise of a company called Apple, people started paying more attention to the aesthetics and the overall interface of the technology they’re using. People demanded not just powerful software with a strong backend, but they also wanted an elegant design with a simple and intuitive user interface.

Because of this shift in user perception, what was once the greatest innovation in accounting software since sliced bread, had become not obsolete, but outdated.

When you put the old interface (called Classic Client) against some of the newer applications, even though the backend was light years ahead, the Classic Client was the ugly one. And we all know somebody who made a terrible decision based only on looks, but not really what’s inside.

So when NAV 2009 was introduced, the Role Tailored Client was released, which is the interface you see when you install Dynamics NAV for end users. NAV 2009 was unique in that it allowed both Classic Client and Role Tailored Client to coexist. This is mostly to appease the existing NAV gurus and users who did not want to learn the new interface.

In addition, NAV 2009 replaced the classic reporting with the report definition language client-side (RDLC) reporting. RDLC reports brought in a big change because the layout of the report had to be designed in Visual Studio, outside Dynamics NAV, to bring in the advantages of SQL Server Reporting Services technology; while pages changed the way of developing the user interface.

This is what NAV 2009 in the RTC looked like:

At the first glance, NAV 2009 and NAV 2015 do not look too different. You will have to understand that there were significant user interface and usability changes. We can list out these changes, but if you’re not already familiar with Dynamics NAV (or Navision), you’ll will find this disinteresting.

That grace period expired when NAV 2013 was released and the Classic Client user interface was completely removed. Microsoft basically renamed the Classic Client as Development Environment. For the foreseeable future, it looks like the Development Environment and the Windows Client environment will remain separated.

Now we’re at Dynamics NAV 2016, with tons of performance and usability enhancements, which is what this book is about.

Functional areas

The core functionalities of Dynamics NAV have not dramatically changed over the years. New functional areas have appeared and the existing ones still work as they did in the previous versions. In NAV 2009, Microsoft was focused on changing the entire architecture (for good), and NAV 2013 is the consolidation of the new architecture. NAV 2016 enhances what was released with NAV 2013. All these architectural changes were made to bring Dynamics NAV closer to the existing Microsoft technologies, namely, Microsoft Office 365, .NET, SQL Server, Azure, and so on; in the meantime, the core functionality has not undergone a drastic face-lift compared to the architecture.

Microsoft has been adding small functional features and improving the existing functionalities with every new release. The base Dynamics NAV 2016 covers the following functional areas:

  • Financial management
  • Sales and marketing
  • Purchase
  • Warehouse
  • Manufacturing
  • Job
  • Resource planning
  • Service
  • Human resources

In Dynamics NAV, the financial management area is the epicenter of the entire application. The other areas are optional and their usage depends on the organization’s needs. The sales and purchase areas are also commonly used within a Dynamics NAV implementation.

Now let’s have a closer view of each area.

Summary

In this article, we have seen that Dynamics NAV is an ERP system targeted at small and medium-sized companies.

Dynamics NAV can be used on different environments such as the Windows client, the Web client, tablet client, the SharePoint client, or an external application that connects to Dynamics NAV via Web Services. The development environment is used to develop new features on top of Dynamics NAV.

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

Packt

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