EFaru Dynamics AX Second Opinion or how to Recover Failed Implementation

June 3, 2011 - PRLog -- Corporate ERP implementation failure rate is pretty high.  But the good news is the fact that it is up to you to decide to reduce the risk substantially if not completely.  Former Axapta is recommended to upper mid-market in such industries as Process and Discrete Manufacturing, Service Sector, Supply Chain Management, Not-for-Profit (starting with newly introduced version 2012).  AX is also perfect fit for multinational corporation with locations in China, Russia, Europe, India, Korea, Brazil, Japan.  In fact, Microsoft Business Solutions is pushing Axapta to be compatible with regional and local legislations Worldwide (and AX supports Unicode based languages, the hint is Chinese, Japanese, Korean hieroglyphs). It is also available in Arabic (which is actually ASCII one byte compliant language)  First of all let us guess, why your implementation failed or went into limbo.  This small paper is not intended for coders, it is rather for company management and decision makers in IT department:

1.   Non Proportional Level of Custom Programming.  Well, Axapta has its own IDE (Integrated Development Environment) MorphX with its unique programming language X++.  If you are implementing Axapta in the United States, please take into consideration the fact that it was initially designed by Daamgard Software, software development company in Denmark, Europe.  Microsoft Business Solutions inherited this upper mid-market Corporate ERP application with the acquisition of Navision Software.  Here in USA we are in the sort of startup mode with AX horizontals and verticals.  It is obvious fact that it is very robust with process manufacturing (food and meet processing, mining, ore mills, coal, gold, silver, platinum mining, including such exotic places as Russian Siberia, Tuva, Buratia).  If you are coming from Dynamics GP world, the number of ISV add-ons for AX is lower or better to say modest

2.   Unreasonable Data Conversions and Migrations.  Here each Corporate ERP application has the right to have its own business logic.  It is unreasonable to expect that your legacy accounting application posted and historical data to be imported into your newly implemented Corporate ERP.  It is recommended to keep your old accounting application on single user workstation on old server for just transactions lookup or query

3.   X++.  This is where your custom coding projects might be failed.  The reason is simple, not every AX VAR is required to be certified in SDK X++ programming

4.   Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, Tuva, Uzbekistan.  Our difference is the fact that we are ready to travel to your place in Siberia or Central Asia, where Moscow based ERP implementation firms is ignoring you.  It is pretty feasible to do onsite X++ programming plus end user training in Axapta user interface

5.   FRx versus Microsoft Management Reporter.  In the year 2010 MBS introduced new tool MMR, which should be considered as timely replacement to old good days FRx consolidated financial reporting. There is conversion tool, but as e3xperience indicates, there might be a good idea to hold on for the couple of years, while MMR could get into its stability.  Of course we would recommend MMR for new implementations, however FRx has so many years of its dominance, that we expect at least five years of FRx legacy version supports demand

6.   Axapta in Uzbekistan in Tashkent, Kokand, Samarkand, Bukhara, Urghench/Khiva.  This county is open to Russian language, plus English user interface (Arabic Alphabet was successfully forgotten since 1921 when Bukharian Emir Alim Khan escaped to Horasan and later on had to evacuate to Afghanistan)

7.   AX in Kazakhstan.  We are writing these lines in June of 2011.  Alma-Ata and Astana are pretty conservative.  By all means we are ready to travel to Karaganda, Semipalatinsk, Tselinograd, Barnaul

8.   Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center).  help@efaru.com  We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese.  Our core expertise is in International Business

Andrew Karasev is Great Plains Certified Master, MVP, help@efaru.com 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904. He is also the initiator of eFaru project http://www.efaru.com and founder of Alba Spectrum information space