CRGroup's Top Ten Dynamics GP Tips & Tricks of 2013

The CRGroup Blog covers topics including ERP, CPM, document management, and much more.

Here are ten of our top posts related to Microsoft Dynamics GP from 2013:

Do you Really Need to Embrace Analytics?

If you have not witnessed the deluge of big data and business analytics media coverage to date, then welcome back from the coma you were apparently in for the last couple of years. For the rest of you, perhaps you have the same nagging question that I have: Are big data and business analytics such a big deal that if our organization is late to the party in deploying them, we will never catch up to our competitors?

I go back and forth on wondering if applying analytics now is an urgent imperative for an organization to survive or if it is a “nice to have” relative to more critical “must have” capabilities that an organization should ideally possess.

Raising Funds for Charity is Easy as Pie at CRGroup

This season, CRGroup staff raised $450 for the MS Society of Canada, a national voluntary organization that provides services to people with multiple sclerosis and their families and funds research to find the cause and cure for this disease. Throughout the month of December, employees placed bids in a silent auction in order to raise funds for the charity. Team members donated their time or services as items to be auctioned. Prizes included dog-sitting services, a holiday baking platter, Starbucks coffee runs and a CRG Mystery Bag.

The highlight for many, however, was the second annual pie slam, with several managers and employees volunteering to receive a cream pie in the face

Holiday Greetings from CRGroup President & CEO, Dr. Vijay Jog

A message from CRGroup President & CEO, Dr. Vijay Jog:
 
I cannot believe that CRGroup will be celebrating its 25^th anniversary in 2014!  Yes, a lot of years have gone by – each year bringing new accomplishments and continuing excitement.

And what a terrific year 2013 has been; it ranks as a year of remarkable accomplishment for CRGroup. We forged strategic partnerships, released innovative software and upgraded our existing products, welcomed many great new clients, and participated in leading industry events. We revitalized our solutions platform to cater to our widely diversified client base and worked hard to get our team trained and certified in these new solutions. We now have even deeper capabilities and offer technology solutions that can be deployed both on premise and in the cloud.

In 2013, we entered into four significant strategic relationships:

• NetSuite – a fast growing company that provides a SaaS offering of cloud-based ERP and CRM
• Adaptive Planning – a SaaS offering of cloud-based planning and budgeting
• BOARD International – one of the most innovative companies that provides an on premise one-stop solution spanning strategy, metrics management, planning and budgeting and business intelligence
• KEMP Technologies – in order to provide much-needed load balancing solutions to our clients who are challenged with managing network traffic arising from an ever-growing use of bandwidth

4 Things Dynamics GP Users Might Want for Christmas

If Santa got out of the toy-making business for a few minutes and started paying some much needed attention to Dynamics GP users around the world – what requests might he get this festive season?

What would it be for you? If you could ask Santa for help with your Dynamics GP, what would you ask for? Based on our extensive experience implementing and maintaining GP, we have put together the ultimate wish list.

Four things Dynamics GP users might want this Christmas:

1.      Help restructuring their GP Chart of Accounts: Imagine sitting by a warm fire, sipping hot cocoa and enjoying the improved reporting, consistency, and simplicity that comes with 

Some Accountants are the Blind Leading the Blind

I recently met a managerial consultant whose intentions were sincere, however his advice was surprising, but not totally surprising, to me.

He mentioned to me that a company had inquired to him whether they should consider using activity-based costing (ABC). His next step was initially encouraging. He contacted the accounting departments of the inquiring company’s major competitors. He asked them if they are using ABC. The answer from them was that none of them are.

A missed opportunity for good advice

I was hoping the next thing he would tell me is this. I was hoping he would inform the inquiring company that they had an opportunity to gain a competitive edge.

I presumed he would say to them, “I have good news for you. Your instincts are correct. You have realized that the amount of your indirect and shared expenses have grown large relative to your direct expenses. You may understand that this expansion is a result that your products and services have expanded with much diversity and variations. And the result is that complexity has caused this increase to manage the complexity. By your using a highly aggregated indirect cost pool with a single allocation factor that has no cause-and-effect relationship with those indirect expenses, the consequence is that you are simultaneously over- and-under-costing your products. Their costs exactly reconcile in total but not in with parts. This is because cost allocations are a zero sum error condition. Your competitors do not realize this, but you do. Go for it. Implement ABC. Your company will much better understand their profit margin layers and where it makes and loses money – and why.”

Sadly, he advised the inquiring company that since its competitors do not use ABC then that is evidence that ABC is of little benefit.

How long can this ignorance continue?

Exceptional EPM / CPM Systems are an Exception

Many organizations over-rate the quality of their enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM / CPM) methods and supporting software systems as well as exaggerate how comprehensive and integrated they are. For example, when you ask executives how well they measure and report their costs and non-financial performance measures, most proudly boast that they are very good. However, this is inconsistent and conflicts with surveys where anonymous replies from mid-level managers candidly score their scaled answers as “needs much improvement.”

Every organization cannot be above average!

What makes exceptionally good EPM / CPM systems exceptional?

Rather than try to be a sociologist and psychiatrist to explain the contradictions of executives boasting superiority while anonymously answered surveys reveal inferiority, let’s simply describe the full vision of an effective EPM / CPM system that organizations should aspire to.