Interview:

Mogens Elsberg on business focus

5 June 2008

The general manager for Microsoft Dynamics ERP talks about how companies can get the best out of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009.

Customers can rely on expert partners to play a significant role in delivering the new abilities of Dynamics AX 2009, says Mogens Elsberg, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics ERP. Dynamics AX provides core enterprise resource planning (ERP) functions out of the box and is supported by partners who add industry-specific functionality to match their customers’ business needs. For example, explains Elsberg, a chain of fashion shops can work with a partner that supplies a fashion merchandising solution for Dynamics.

As well as focussing on specific industries, AX 2009 drills down to job-specific functions. “The only way you can realise the return on investment you are looking for when you implement a new ERP system is by looking at the individual and making sure each member of staff realises his or her productivity increase,” says Elsberg.

“Often ERP supplies the same user experience whether you are in the warehouse or in production, you are a CFO or CEO. We believe it should be different by role. We looked at Dynamics users, non-Dynamic users and at how we could optimise for some 30 different roles.” Users can split, combine or modify these roles to more closely match individual working practice or can create entirely new roles to match business need. Partners will provide their own role-tailored user experience for industry-specific jobs inside their industry solutions.

AX 2009 integrates with Microsoft Office 2007, SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server reporting services. “Dynamics users don’t have a huge IT staff so integration out of the box between Dynamics and other Microsoft products is a big plus for our customers,” claims Elsberg.

The AX Role Centre can be populated with the tools that apply to the job, for example a sales manager can incorporate his Outlook inbox. Business intelligence (BI) tools can also be embedded in this centre, to display key performance indicators for example.

Completely flexible access to AX is now on offer, adds Elsberg. An information worker who is a heavy user can take advantage of a role-tailored user experience; a worker in the finance department can use their main tool, perhaps Excel, and work seamlessly inside AX; an occasional user, perhaps a salesperson, can access information in AX simply by browsing.

Microsoft Business Solutions has worked with customers during development to iron out any problems and supplies an upgrade tool that is semi-automatic. Partners are on hand to help customers make the technical upgrade and take advantage of new capabilities. “We have improved the scalability considerably,” says Elsberg. AX 2009 can support more than 3,000 concurrent users on SQL Server 2008, a marked improvement on 1,000 heavy concurrent users with AX 4.

“We also looked at the amount of effort our customers were having to put into staying compliant. In the US, it might be Sarbanes Oxley, in Europe there are regional laws and in particular industries there is legislation. We think, and our customers think, this will increase. The amount of documents our customers have to monitor and keep track of to stay compliant is significant.” The answer in AX 2009 is a Compliance Centre where a company can define how it wants to run its business processes to be compliant and track how it is performing. Elsberg adds: “In the Compliance Centre they can check KPIs and receive alerts. It’s a place where the CEO and CFO can check how the company is doing and adjust accordingly. We also looked at how customers could document their business processes so we added a task recorder. If you want to monitor the accounts receivable process, you start the task recorder, begin using AX and you run through a complete process and it’s all been documented for the auditors. We think the Compliance Centre will reduce workload significantly for our customers.”

Partners will continue in their supporting role by providing services that enhance AX for the customer’s particular business needs. In some cases, the partner will supply software plus service; in other cases it will supply a hosted service, accessed by the customer entirely through a browser. Elsberg says that Microsoft believes the partners are best placed to deliver these industry solutions, not just software but also business processes. For example, a retailer may wish to add a payment card processing service or a distributor may need a time and attendance solution.

There are two levels of partner: industry builders and certified for Microsoft Dynamics. Industry builder products are on the Microsoft Dynamics price list, guaranteeing long-term support from Microsoft. Certified for Microsoft Dynamics solutions have been tested to ensure that they have followed best practice for development, testing and documentation. Partners, working with Microsoft, are bringing these solutions up to the next level with AX 2009 in order to retain certification.