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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

At the beginning of a new year resolutions are the hot topic. However, most of these are of a personal nature, but how about some resolutions for your business – starting with your current ERP system. Even if it seems that every person in the company, from management to the end user, is thrilled with the business system(s) being used there is always room for improvement.

With that in mind – here are 5 ERP New Year’s Resolutions to begin working on now:

1. Evaluate the fit of your current system to the business. Business operations change, management changes, processes change, etc. The ERP system implemented years ago may not be meeting the business requirements anymore. Create an RFP and apply it to your current system just as you would if you were evaluating a whole new system. If you don’t have in-house expertise to put together a proper RFP, which fully addresses the business requirements, there are software programs and consultants that can assist in this exercise for a reasonable cost.

2. Conduct a full audit of business processes and system application. Apply your RFP to the ERP system and truthfully evaluate the capabilities of your system against the business requirements. Does it have what it takes to address those requirements and is it scalable enough to fulfill the projected requirements in the coming years.

3. Conduct user training. This is an often overlooked factor in successful implementation/use of any computer software. And even if training was fully addressed in the initial implementation, again, business processes change, new employees are hired or users move to new positions, upgrades to the software offer new features, etc. User training should be an ongoing never ending practice in order to maintain optimum system application, and reduce help desk inquiries.

4. Upgrade to the newest version. If your RFP and full system evaluation reveal that the current system is still the right one for your business then the focus should be on making sure you are using the most recent version available from the software provider.   In some cases this can be painful (customizations must be ported, testing must be done, etc.) but the payoff is worth it. Upgrades typically include new/improved features that will benefit the business, not to mention the increased support that is available from your software vendor.

5. Implement a new system. Sometimes your evaluation will indicate that your current system is no longer meeting the needs of the business and then it is time to move on, the RFP created in step 1 will simplify the search for a new system. Be sure that you include in this search evaluation/selection of a full service consulting organization to manage your implementation project and provide expert resources that will assist in the installation, training, and customizations.

Taking a long hard look at the ERP system being used in your organization is worth the effort and should be done regularly.Once the facts of need and fit have been gathered generating an ROI for approval of training, and/or upgrades, and/or a new system will be easy and management approval a sure thing. Happy New Year.

This post is written by Carla Whitcomb. Carla is a Dynamics AX Team Lead in the Microsoft Dynamics AX Practice at Ignify . Ignify is a Global Microsoft Dynamics Inner Circle Partner specializing in Dynamics AX for Retail, Distribution, Manufacturing and Chemicals verticals. For help on Microsoft Dynamics ERP email us at dynamics@ignify.com

I'm still surprised at how many customers still insist that the new system work exactly the last one does or supports their business process like they had it before the project. A fundamental question then is - why are you doing this project? If you are just looking for a nicer looking interface with no meaningful results then don't even waste time on an ERP project. Modern ERP systems bring with them bundled best practices. And an ERP project is the perfect time to re-evaluate your business processes and bake those processes into your new implementation.

I lead the implementation for an global Activity Based costing (ABC) effort for a 1 billion dollar division of a Fortune 10 customer. Of the many things I was analyzing, one key element was how people spent their time.One report in particular took about 5 person days of time to get ready every month. An annual cost of over 15,000 ($40/hour X 12 month x 5 days x 8 hours a day).This particular unit had a net profit margin of just $1 million on revenues of $1 billion and such reports were a gold mine to bring that net margin up. However, the cost to auotomate this report was estimated to be in the $45,000 range as it was a fairly complex report. The management balked at this cost. So we started digging into ways of simplifying the report. The report was initiated by a person in San Jose, California. Other data was filled by a finance person in Singapore and then by a team members in UK, Phoenix, Malaysia, UK and Germany. Certainly a lot of coordination and time. When finalized, the report was distributed to about 50 executive team members. I took the approach of reaching out to each recipient to ask them what was truly critical in the report so we could eliminate some of the complexity of the report. The results were staggering – none of the recipients ever readthe report and felt it was something that others probably found useful. Instead a simpler report was designed that cost only $2,000 to write and built in a day and was actually useful to all the divisional heads in improving their bottom-line. The report was completely automated and required no manual intervention.However, the fact that we developed a report that saved $15,000 is not so significant as the fact that had we not dug deep enough to find out the true pain we would have spent $45,000 ensuring the system worked like the client worked prior to the implementation and achieved nothing in the process. Are you sure you are not doing this to some degree?

I even found traces of this at Ignify. When we cut over to Dynamics AX – we got the ability to attach each receipt or expense with an AP invoice. We no longer had to sort and catalog these on a portal as Dynamics AX automatically catalogued our attachments with the invoice that was posted. However, our booking team members for a full 6 months after going live on Dynamics AX kept uploading the booking receipts to the portal while our payables team kept cataloging this in Dynamics AX. Of course we stopped the earlier process of uploading to the portal as soon as we found out. We had found a better way to do this, adopted it but forgot to tell someone to stop doing what they were doing . How much work goes on that is useless and redundant. In my ABC analysis project that I had done – I found it was very significant. Employees were spending approximately 40% of their time doing non value-adding activities. When you cut over to a new system – leverage its intrinsic benefits of best practices. There is no better time to re-engineer your business process and ask 'How can I make this better simpler and more cost-effective' for every process. Weigh the cost with the benefit. The highest benefit with the lowest cost is when you can leverage what is out of the box and use that.

When Ignify adopted Dynamics AX globally, we cut out several redundant and manual processes – the workflow and ability to review postings, role-based security allowed us to cut out all the manual approvals that we had.We are still learning to improve but we implemented Dynamics AX globally for 300 employees across seven offices in 6 weeks by staying vanilla. We made zero customizations and drove our business to the best practices Dynamics AX provided to us. We spent a lot of time on business process design and how each process can be improved over what we had today. We spent time writing up process training documents for pretty much every finance, accounting, collections, and AP job – how to post a credit card transaction, how to post vendor invoices, how to post wire transactions, how to apply a customer payment. It was great- suddenly we moved from an undocumented, disorganized set of processes to a methodical way of doing business that supported our core consulting and software implementations.And these processes were written 100% by the Dynamics AX task recorder tool and have Microsoft Dynamics AX screen shots in them. At the heart of it we asked ourselves if we were a complex business and the answer was a resounding no. We are a simple business model and we wanted everything to be simple and easy to understand. Our goal was to make our processes even simpler and yet have the desired level of controls which Microsoft Dynamics AX did a great job of bringing to the table.

Microsoft Dynamics AX was great for us and has been great for our customers but I'm not proposing that as your ERP. I'm proposing that whatever system you choose to work with, that you leverage its native strengths and use the ERP implementation as a way of strengthening and simplifying your business processes and getting more for less. I've also run into situations where customers want to wait for writing up the perfect business process before starting an ERP project.That can take a really long-time and you may never start. The ERP application you choose will give you business processes out of the box as a starting point – use that as a spring board to move to the next level.

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.