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Ignify has a phrase we live by in our consulting practice: "Effectiveness with Efficiency for our most valued asset, our clients."  Effectiveness means being experts in our field and doing things right. Efficiency means being frugal with our clients' consulting dollars on the hours it takes to implement. This is why Ignify developed RAPID: Ready-to-use And Proven Implementation Deliverables.

RAPID leverages the already proven Microsoft Sure Step Implementation Methodology by adding additional value. The basic premise behind RAPID is that every implementation has some Deliverables, both in configuration and documentation, that are similar. RAPID has taken these Deliverables and pre-built these to save as much as 30-40% in consulting fees on every implementation Ignify does.

For example, every Retail Industry implementation needs to have zip codes imported. Ignify has taken this process and automated it so they can deliver it ready to use in a matter of minutes. The point being, "Why should our clients pay for repetitive deliverables as if we are recreating the wheel with each implementation?" Believe it or not, that is the approach most other consulting practices take: billing every client the same amount for these Deliverables simply because they have not automated the processes. They literally are "recreating the wheel" with each implementation.

How do I know this? Because I have done Project Management or Management Consulting for most of the Microsoft Dynamics AX Partners when I was a freelance agent. I was also intimately involved in the development, training, and delivery of Microsoft Sure Step when version 2.0 came out. I trained the MCTs (Microsoft Certified Trainers) on how to teach the Sure Step class, and I co-authored the first day's training material. So I had the opportunity to see nearly all the Microsoft Dynamics AX Partners out there, up close and personal.

That is why Ignify caught my eye. They were different. During the recession they were growing and profitable! This intrigued me; I wanted to find out how they were doing it. The answer is simple-Ignify is doing what other Partners only talk about, which is seeing an implementation from the client's viewpoint and asking key questions: "How can we bring more value? How can we save our client's money on implementations?"

Thus, RAPID was developed, demonstrating genius in its cost savings for Ignify's clients. I was so impressed, I joined Ignify after years of owning my own businesses (17 years of building Microsoft practices and selling them or doing freelance consulting). Ignify had what I was looking for: great core values and a focus on delivering to their clients. Now, with RAPID, I am sold. Ignify is going places, and I am going with them. It's good to be part of something special. Something you believe in.

In future blog posts I'll be sharing more about RAPID. Stay tuned!

Scott Mertes is a Senior Project Manager in the Microsoft Dynamics ERP practice at Ignify. Ignify is a Global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner headquartered in California specializing in Dynamics AX for Retail, Distribution, Manufacturing, Sea Port and Chemicals verticals. For help on Microsoft Dynamics ERP email us at dynamics@ignify.com

According to many or most sociologists, people do not adapt well to change. We are “creatures of habit” and we naturally react to our environment instead of changing it. According to this Benchmark Preview for 2010, our avoidance to change proves to be true within the software world as well. “Over 53% of implementing organizations self-assess their ability to deal with change as fairly poor or very poor” in addition, “Nearly 50% of companies in the process of implementing ERP software have not yet started their organizational change, training, or communication plans. 42% have not developed a business case and ROI analysis, which suggests companies are not ready to measure and manage the business benefits they expect to achieve.”

Although change is not something we accept by nature, we need to acknowledge the necessity of it within the software and technology world in order to improve our chances of success. I’ve pointed out to you that change isn’t easy for us to handle, so why not make your software upgrade easier on you and your colleagues? Sandeep Walia, President and CEO of Ignify points out how usability can be the cornerstone of success and failure for a CRM implementation. Microsoft Dynamics acknowledges the difficulty of taking that rather intimidating leap and creates ERP software solutions similar to the programs you use on a daily basis such as Microsoft Office and Microsoft Outlook, but still have the power to manage the overall spectrum of your business.

For example the screen below shows the Dynamics ERP home page for a financial controller. An intuitive home page like this not only makes the software less intimidating it also provides a daily starting point for users of the system and allows them to manage their work better.

Microsoft Dynamics ERP provides approximately 35 such role centers and dashboards out of the box to make your implementation successful and improve adaptability. Another example shown below is the home page of an Accounts Payable Manager

To make your ERP implementation pack a punch and deliver ROI you need several factors that you need to put into motion, such as organizational change, training, and communication plans . This is where Ignify comes in, to make this transition complete so you can see the results you paid for and deserve.

Bhavesh Ashani is the Vice President of Ignify. Ignify is a technology provider of ERP, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify is a global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner and ranked in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics partners. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine.

So in conclusion, even though it’s our “natural” response to avoid change, don’t be scared! If you’re experiencing difficulty with your current systems, you need to make an essential change and NOW before it’s too late.

Given the turbulent economy in 2009, companies were forced to do more with less, be more deliberate with IT budgets, and demand a higher ROI from their enterprise software initiatives. To my surprise, while many large companies have been cutting IT budgets in 2009, companies in the small and mid-sized sector have been investing large amounts of their budgets in ERP solutions and I believe this strategy will pay off. Here’s why…

ERP software drives productivity by leveraging an integrated framework making it possible to “do more with less, be more deliberate with IT budgets, and demand a higher ROI”. Investment in software isn’t always an easy undertaking during a turbulent economy, but if you step back and look at the big picture, it’s an essential move if you want to come out of the downturn ahead of the competition. A study by the McGraw-Hill Laboratory shows that “companies who continued strategic spending during a recession outperformed non-spenders and experienced revenue growth of 275 percent during the first full year of recovery.” For example, in the Order Central implementation of the Dynamics ERP for the Microsoft Business Solutions division of Microsoft – the ERP implementation was able to help drive cost savings of U.S. $2 million a year in reduced IT support requirements and U.S.$1.5 million in reduced staffing requirements. That is approximately $3.5 million of savings a year! No small change even for a giant like Microsoft.

So how did these savings come into play? There is no single magic bullet. It is a combination of reduction of many manual processes that lead to higher productivity. For example at Microsoft Business Solutions a report that used to take 2 person days of effort is now produced automatically by the system in minutes. Deb Remboldt, Accounting Services Manager at MBS validates this. According to her, "All our worldwide partners now have online access to their statements and invoices. Through this online functionality, they can advise our credit and collections team on what invoices they are paying and which credit notes to allocate online. This functionality has already streamlined this process significantly and simplifies this interaction.”

According to Mary Foley in a recent ERP for Small Business article on Technology.Inc.com, “The time is ripe for small and mid-size businesses to adopt enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications." There are more options than ever targeting the small and mid-size business sector. ERP used to be a multi-million dollar project. It no longer is. By leveraging pre-built configurations that partners like Ignify bring to the table and leveraging the ERP creatively to use more out of the box functionality a sub million dollar ERP implementation can be a reality for a full organizational cross-functional implementation that can span financials, supply chain and inventory optimization.

It may just be the best time to advance your company into an ERP solution that’s right for you. What are you waiting for?

Bhavesh Ashani is the Vice President of Ignify. Ignify is a technology provider of ERP, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify is a global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner and ranked in the top 1% of Microsoft Dynamics partners. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine.

I was recently interviewed by a reporter from Search Manufacturing ERP on how manufacturers can get quick ROI in today's market. I've worked with quite a few manufacturing companies both in my past life at Deloitte and at Ignify. ERP, in general, is not a fast ROI project I believe there are certainly some things that a manufacturer can do to get Quick ROI. First of all, the manufacturing paradigm in North America has changed. With a few exceptions, Manufacturers in North America are no longer doing heavy manufacturing. Most of the manufacturing work is now done with subcontract vendors in China, SE Asia etc. So the manufacturing challenge is less about managing the shop floor but more about managing the supply chain and optimizing inventory either in the warehouse, with the vendor, on the water. This is, in fact, really important because the new paradigm means that lead times have shifted and become longer with a 60- 90 day lead time to get product not uncommon. That requires better forecasting, demand planning, purchase planning and better tracking of critical inventory items. Not surprisingly, manufacturers have not yet made that paradigm shift completely. When I do a site visit at a manufacturing site I find the focus still very much production planning and shop floor control even though now the manufacturer is just doing warehousing and light manufacturing at best. There is very little focus on the planning, forecasting, warehouse management and supply chain management aspects which burden the cost significantly. As an example of a cost burden, I surveyed a manufacturer that builds heavy engineering product often finding themselves with gating parts – i.e. parts that are not available and hold up the completion of the item. The net effect was about 6 weeks added to the production cycle. Doesn't seem expensive? Check out the math below. Average sales price of item: $2 million (this is a complex end product) Cost of capital to manufacturer: 10% Cost of 6 weeks of capital: $23,000 (2 million * 6 weeks/ 52 weeks * 10%) Cost of delay on 100 shipments: $2,300,000 $2.3 million dollars in cost of gating parts! Now this is a $200 million manufacturer that has a net profit of $2.5 million (which by the way is a pretty good number for most manufacturers). The net impact of eliminating the gating with better inventory optimization would be to double the manufacturer's net profit. Before you say – this is not me because you don't do $2 million type products – change the numbers a bit. It could be 10,000 shipments of $20,000 type product going out or 100,000 shipments of $2,000 type product etc and you'd still have the same cost of capital of $2+ million dollars. Even if you can only shave off a couple weeks and not 6 weeks and if your volume is lower remember that you are still talking at least hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions in savings by optimizing your inventory and supply chain with better planning. No small change by any standards. The reality for manufacturers is that the management now has to be on the supply chain and inventory optimization and not just production planning and shop floor control. So how can you do this? Fortunately most of the newer generation ERPs provide functionality to do this out of the box. I'm going to take the example of Microsoft Dynamics AX – a next generation ERP from Microsoft – as a solution to this and show some quick and easy things to enable functionality that can help you get there. One of the more important things to do in getting to a stable replenishment mode is to use automated replenishment to the extent possible: Dynamics AX has the ability to automatically spit out planned purchase orders by looking at a variety of things

• Safety Stock levels
• Forecast
• Sales Orders
• Purchase Order
• Inventory that is Available to Promise
• Vendor Lead times

For a human being, to take into account all of these parameters and provide a planned purchase forecast manually is just impossible – even if you just have under 200 Finished good SKUs. If anyone tells you otherwise they are kidding you or pulling wool over your eyes. No individual buyer or group of buyers is going to be able to do a multi-parametric calculation that involves six parameters and create a planned timeline for all your SKUs for each vendor without doing some rough (and dirty) ballparks. You need a fairly sophisticated automated process to do this right. And why shouldn't you – you will cut labor costs, you will reduce your inventory stocks outs as well as lower your cost of carrying inventory. And you should leverage the ERP to do that. How do you do a forecast – for that you can use a demand forecasting system if you have a complex web of customers with changing patterns or you can get quite basic and track it in excel as a starting point and improve from there on. Dynamics AX provides you the ability to load forecasts by customers, customer group or at a total level. The above figure for example shows the forecast in Dynamics AX by different customer groups. For example, the first line shows the forecast of 5000 units for all major customers and 6,000 units for a particular item for Retail customers. Dynamics AX splits them out based on an Item allocation key based on month (or any other time period relevant to you). By defining such item allocation keys you can take into account seasonality or business cycles. Loading a forecast is however, optional. You can run planning just based on current open transactions including sales orders, purchase orders and inventory. The figure below shows planned purchase orders and planned production orders created using the MRP functionality for multiple release dates for multiple items with the quantity to be ordered and the desired delivery date. The delivery date ties to your need of the product and the order date factors in the vendor lead time. The end result is a stable automated planned cycle that happens every day, week or month depending on the frequency of inventory churn and volume of orders in your business. Now should you do this for every single SKU in your item master or just for some SKUs. My answer is your top % of SKUs by some measure. This measure could be sales quantity, Sales $, and most typically for manufacturers inventory carrying cost (which is determined by inventory value). Typically you would classify your items as ABCs and plan for the As and Bs and just ensure the Cs are always there and typically overstocked since they have a low inventory carrying cost. The ideal way to do it is again to have the ERP actually calculate the ABC classification for you. For example, in the example shown below I asked Dynamics AX to rank the top 25% of items by revenue as an A, Next 30% as a B and the rest as Cs. I may choose to do now do weekly planning on my As, monthly on my Bs and do no planning and use an auto-fill mechanism on my Cs. This is simplifying it a bit but the point is that I don't need to go through a lot of grunt work to get this done. The system will do 90% of my work of loading forecasts, generating purchased orders and even deciding which items get planned for with the appropriate configuration. The end-result you've saved yourself a boat load of work and enough dollars to make this a high and fast ROI project. Want more – email us at dynamics@ignify.com to get on our email list for valuable tips or to ask us any questions in general. Sandeep Walia is the President & CEO of Ignify. Ignify is a technology provider of ERP, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions to businesses and public sector organizations. Ignify is a Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner and ranked in the top 18 Microsoft Dynamics partners. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for 3 years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine.

America’s Second Largest Sea Port Refines Operating, Invoicing and Revenue Tracking Systems for Moving Over $100 Billion in Goods Annually

I am excited to announce that Ignify has been chosen by the Port of Long Beach California to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX. The new ERP system will greatly heighten productivity by automating the Port’s critical billing, accounts receivable, revenue recognition and analytical reporting systems responsible for moving more than $100 billion worth of products, natural resources, and provisions traversing through the harbor each year.

Microsoft Dynamics AX will serve as the central core for the Port of Long Beach’s new Port Operating and Revenue Tracking System (PORTS) that will be developed and implemented by Ignify. The key role of the PORTS platform will be to help the Port of Long Beach increase the efficiency of the billing process and improve customer service by managing invoices, accounts receivables and cash application. Dynamics AX -based PORTS will provide EDI and real-time reporting of billing data which is not available in the current system, thereby enhancing financial reporting and automating data validation. In addition, a new web-based portal will offer tenants, terminal operators, and employees the ability to securely create, view and manage orders anywhere an Internet connection is available.

Other benefits include:

• Allows port staff and customers to enter billing data directly into a web browser, reducing data entry errors
• Validates customer self-reported data and calculates charges and credits in accordance with lease agreements and Port tariffs
• Interfaces with the Port's Electronic Document and Records management system, Vessel Tracking, Property Management and Green Flag systems
• Provides dashboard style user interfaces for Port staff, executives and external customers

Microsoft Dynamics AX will provide increased automation and efficiency; flexibility and scalability for future enhancements; and better quality control and turnaround time for more effective decision-making.

The Port of Long Beach is one of the world’s premier sea ports responsible for the transport of goods ranging from textiles, automobiles, petroleum, steel, furniture, and consumer electronics among many other products. The Port is also an economic powerhouse responsible for over 316,000 job in Southern California and 1.4 million jobs throughout the United States.

I am pleased that the Port of Long Beach has chosen us for this important project. The amount of cargo traveling in and out of Long Beach at any given moment along with the amount of data generated for fulfilling these shipments is astronomical. By automating order entry and revenue tracking through Microsoft Dynamics AX and designing a web-portal where customers can log-in and manage orders themselves, the Port of Long Beach will dramatically improve day-to-day operations while lowering total annual costs.

In addition to the Port of Long Beach, Ignify in 2009 was selected to implement Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system for the Harbor Center port in the Philippines. Ignify was recently ranked as the 26th fastest growing company by the Los Angeles Business Journal and 19th Fastest Growing IT Company nation-wide by Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 500.

Sandeep Walia is the President & CEO of Ignify

Ignify is a privately-held ISO 9001 certified company focused on the mid-market and enterprise business space for ERP, CRM and eCommerce implementations. The company provides design, consulting and implementation services for ERP, CRM initiatives for mid-market and enterprise businesses. Ignify is a Top-tier Microsoft Gold Certified partner ranked in both the Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle and the Microsoft Dynamics Presidents Club in 2009. Ignify offers a comprehensive set of Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) eCommerce solutions for increasing online sales while lowering overall operation costs. Ignify has offices in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, Chicago, Toronto, Manila, Pune and Bangalore. For more information, visit http://www.ignify.com or call 888-446-4395.