Financial Management

Measure financial effectiveness and performance

Microsoft Dynamics NAV for financial management give your people a way to raise the visibility of financial metrics and the effectiveness of financial management throughout your organization-all using familiar tools and existing skills. Strong financial management, made possible by Microsoft Dynamics, enables your people to establish a firm foundation to realize the potential of your business through strong, manageable growth. And Microsoft Dynamics NAV works like the familiar technologies you already own.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV offers a full general ledger solution that provides the basic facilities necessary for setting up a company and posting to the general ledger: chart of accounts, general journals, value-added tax (VAT) facilities, recurring journals, and source codes. Microsoft Dynamics NAV makes it easy to accomplish a spectrum of financial management tasks, such as:

• Setting up accounts in the chart of accounts. For each account established, there is a balance/ budget window that shows budget figures and/or actual figures for the entire chart of accounts, or for individual accounts.
• Viewing continually updated balances and net changes.
• Checking how journal entries will affect the liquid accounts before they are posted. Easily track posted general ledger entries and reverse entries that were posted with incorrect information.
• Entering figures in the general journal in any currency.
• Defining the fiscal year as beginning on any date and dividing it into accounting periods.
• Creating budgets in a matrix window, for a day, week, month, quarter, year, or any accounting period.
• Developing budgets based on department, project, or business unit.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV provides a wealth of financial management features, including:

• General Ledger- Gives you flexible options and tools for setting up a company and posting for charts of accounts, general journals, value-added tax (VAT) facilities, recurring journals, and source codes. You can customize your general ledger for inter-company transactions and inter-fund accounting that spans geographies, or organize financial operations by company and consolidate different charts of accounts into one merged or parent company.
• Fixed Assets- Control and manage the entire lifecycle of your fixed assets-from acquisition to disposal-to maximize the value of your business investments. Fixed Assets equips you to accurately record, track, depreciate, and dispose of your company's assets with minimal effort and maximum flexibility. Define information for an asset and group assets. Identifies an unlimited number of depreciation books for each fixed asset, and describes the required depreciation conditions. Businesses can choose from several standard depreciation methods: straight-line, declining-balance, and accelerated. Also sets up maintenance information and record maintenance performed on fixed assets.
• Multicurrency- Expand into international markets with confidence and handle foreign currencies with ease. Whether you need to share financial data with international partners or manage accounts with customers and vendors in other countries, Multicurrency reduces the complexity of global transactions.
• Receivables and Payables-Defines flexible payment terms, discount periods, and payment methods, and takes advantage of other functionality including defining flexible payment application policies and finance charge terms. Reverses incorrect applications and customer and vendor transactions posted manually in journals, including all related ledger entries, VAT entries, and bank account entries.
• FlowFields-Helps ensure that users receive the most up-to-date financial data and continually updates and recalculates the contents of a FlowField online. Users can drill down from all FlowField amounts to view which entries were included in the calculation of the amount.
• Lookup Buttons-Gives users direct access to information in a table. For example, from a journal line users only have to enter information correctly once, and it can be reused consistently on all subsequent occasions. This makes data input quick because there is no need for data reentry.
• Cash Manager-Includes bank account management, enabling organizations to create, modify, and delete bank accounts, transfer between bank accounts, and set up customer/vendor bank account cards. Cash Manager automates and controls the entire check-writing process and enables users to write checks in more than one currency.
• Traceability-Helps ensure all transactions have a complete audit trail, so even complex business transactions become transparent. The Change Log records all direct user changes to master data. A chronological list of all changes to any field, in any table shows who made the changes.
• Security Features and Business Rules-Specifies which personnel and roles may see which information using record-level security. For example, a salesperson may see only sales figures for their region or managers may see only budgetary amounts for their departments.1
• Intercompany Postings-Creates intercompany transactions between any two companies within a group controlled by the same legal entity. The Intercompany Transaction report documents all intercompany transactions, simplifies the intercompany reconciliation process, and provides an audit trail.
• VAT, Sales Tax, and Other Use Taxes-Uses posting groups to automatically calculate VAT, sales tax, excise tax, or other use taxes for customers and vendors. Specify whether unit prices on sales and purchase lines should include or exclude the tax. For VAT, check that VAT registration

Empower financial managers to succeed

Sound, responsible financial management is at the heart of business success. Now you can give people across your organization the tools to reach their professional goals and keep your organization's financial operations and performance on track. Microsoft Dynamics is designed to help people work efficiently, focus on tasks that add the most value, and collaborate productively.

Compete more effectively with better insight into financials

Microsoft Dynamics NAV for financial management can provide tools and insight to help your team make more informed decisions. These tools and insights can help your company set a competitive direction for your business. With Microsoft Dynamics financial solutions, you can transform financial and executive management of your company into a dependable, efficient process.

Realize your vision for growth

Microsoft Dynamics solutions for financial management can help you promote the kind of business growth you want to bring about. Business and technical expertise from Microsoft and its many partners can assist you in gaining the best value from your technology as your requirements change.

Business Intelligence

Better insight into business performance

Business analytics aren't just for Fortune 500 companies anymore. In today's fiercely competitive economy, leaders of small and midsize companies are turning to business-intelligence solutions to spot trends, so they can act quickly and capitalize on opportunities.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV helps you make smart business decisions quickly and with confidence. Direct access to real-time, business-critical information and a wide range of analytical tools can help you manage budgets, create and consolidate reports, and look for trends and relationships. With Microsoft Dynamics NAV you get a good overview of your business with the ability to dig into details.

Quickly create strategic business reports

Every business needs the regularly-scheduled profit and loss statements, in addition to deeper analysis, before expanding into new territories or adding a new product line. Microsoft Dynamics provides software that enables your managers and staff to get up-to-date information on business performance. People can use either pre-defined functions for simple reports, or use OLAP cubes when deeper analysis is needed. Your staff will be working with tools that resemble familiar Microsoft Office Outlook and Excel, so they can get up to speed quickly. They can save time on simpler reports by using customizable templates, and highlight core information with Gantt charts, drill-downs, summaries, customizable views of OLAP grids, and others.

Share information in real time

Microsoft Dynamics solutions for business intelligence and reporting help people share business-critical information with business partners and colleagues, whether they're halfway down the hall or halfway across the globe. You can capture and share information via a Web browser, empowering team members to search, share, and collaborate in real time. And once the information is in hand, decision makers can display and analyze the data according to their unique needs.

Empower decision makers at all levels

Microsoft Dynamics for business intelligence and reporting can play a key role in organizational efficiency and customer-service excellence. Your employees, from warehouse personnel to financial analysts, will find it easier to record, classify, and access information, and practice better decision making. For example, when a call center employee logs a certain number of complaints about a product, managers can receive an e-mail alert notifying them of a potential problem that needs quick attention.

E-Commerce & Portals

Effectively manage your business relationships

Microsoft Dynamics NAV User Portal

User Portal is a role-based portal that instantly increases employee productivity. User Portal helps employee focus on their jobs by delivering all the critical information employees need on their own homepage, helping them become more productive. All that's needed is access to a Microsoft browser. With User Portal it's easy for your employees to access data in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, no matter where they're working. Remote users, such as traveling sales representatives, can immediately access their personal homepage. User portal gives employees the ability to access Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution - Anytime, Anywhere, Any Web.

Human Resources Management

Increase employee productivity

People, and their skills and contributions, may be the single most valuable asset in your organization. At the same time, salaries, benefits, and administrative costs in the human resources department are likely to cause some of the highest business expenses. The HR module helps you manage human resources (HR) by organizing and controlling information about your employees. The solution delivers a range of reports and lists for analyzing employee data. You can attach comments to employee records, track absences, and generate reports to keep on top of your most important asset-your people.

Empower your employees

People like to be in control of their personal information and career path. With Microsoft human resource management solutions, you can give your employees easy access to contact records, time-off tracking, performance review files, individual payroll data, benefits updates, and other information that matters to them. Employees can make updates on their own, enjoy a strong sense of participation, and be more satisfied with their relationship with your company. At the same time, in taking care of many basic needs and functions without assistance, they help you streamline human resources administration.

Boost administrative productivity

Even effective human resources departments can be costly to operate and might lack the flexibility to adjust quickly to changing business or regulatory requirements. Automation and the smart use of software tools can go a long way toward simplifying administrative tasks and controlling costs. Microsoft software can help you streamline payroll processing, make recruiting, hiring, and performance reviews more efficient and equitable, assist in ensuring full regulatory compliance, and facilitate consistent, productive communications. In consequence, your business can maximize the positive return on its investments in people, skills, and HR administration.

Design the best workforce for your business

You want to make sure that the people you hire and employ today can help you take your business to the next level. They should have the right education, skills, and resources to do so. Company executives and managers need to have the ability to assess and drive every individual's and team's performance in line with business goals. Human resource management tools from Microsoft provide you with the capabilities to gain insight into the makeup of your workforce, define opportunities for improvement and growth, and put in place the teams and business groups that have the highest potential for success. In addition, Microsoft solutions can help you accomplish your human resource-related objectives with measurable, tangible results and at an acceptable cost, so you can focus on your strategic direction.

Supply Chain Management

Simplify business processes and maximize operational efficiency

Supply Chain Management helps you streamline operations and improve your relationships with your supply chain partners and customers. Plan and re-organize production processes to get ready to face four key challenges: business success depends on streamlined distribution, satisfied customers, productive relationships with partners and suppliers, and rapid time to market.

Streamline distribution and help reduce costs

The warehouse management and distribution functionality in Microsoft Dynamics NAV can help you run your warehousing operations more cost effectively. Instant access to accurate warehouse and inventory data increases efficiency and helps your people respond more quickly to customer needs. With a more efficient organization, you can reduce costs, offer your customers more competitive prices, and build customer loyalty.

• Manage inventory across multiple locations: Store your inventory items for all locations-warehouses, service cars, and plants-in one database, facilitating a complete, real-time overview of your business. All items can be treated as stock keeping units (SKUs). This means identical items with the same item number can be stored at different locations and managed separately from each location.
• Optimize warehouse operations: Directed picking helps warehouse personnel locate and pick inventory. Directed put-away helps personnel determine where and how inventory should be placed in the warehouse. And with cross docking, your employees can identify what incoming purchases need to be shipped out right away, helping to streamline the handling process.
• Reduce warehouse management costs: Microsoft Dynamics NAV supports Automated Data Capture System (ADCS) and radio frequency handheld bar-coding devices, helping to reduce warehouse management costs. Entering data directly from the warehouse helps to reduce redundant entry and errors. And because ADCS is integrated with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, everyone in your organization can access accurate, up-to-date, online data.
• Increase inventory accuracy: Cycle Counting helps you track the counting frequency per item or SKU, increasing accuracy and helping you keep your promises to customers to ship on time.

Strengthen and develop customer relationships

Microsoft Dynamics NAV helps you improve customer relationships and win customer loyalty by enabling your people to fulfill orders more efficiently. When customers know you can consistently deliver the items they want, they're more likely to come back.

• Track item numbers efficiently: Vendors, distributors, and customers often identify the same item in different ways. As part of good customer service, companies must be able to cross-reference their customers' internal item numbers. Microsoft Dynamics NAV enables cross-referencing that helps you reference any of the several numbers for an item, and then find that item instantly.
• Substitute inventory items: Avoid losing customers because of stock shortages. Detailed views of your inventory and your suppliers' capabilities can help you track and offer alternative items with similar characteristics quickly.
• Manage returns effectively: Process customer returns from a single window where you access and enter all information related to that return. Assign credit memos, order replacement items, and ship damaged items back to suppliers-all from the same screen.
• Fine tune order promising: Help your salespeople create sales orders. Order Promising calculates the earliest possible date that an item on a sales order line can be shipped and delivered. Whether the order is available to promise (ATP) or capable to promise (CTP), you can calculate shipping, picking, and delivery dates.
• Process non-stock items smoothly: Offer your customers a larger selection of products. Microsoft Dynamics NAV enables you to process a non-stock order the same way you process a sales order for an inventory item. This helps you expand your offerings without increasing warehouse space.

Improve relationships with your suppliers and partners

Uncover inefficiencies in relationships with partners and suppliers and learn how to make business interactions productive. Build on relationships with partners and suppliers to create a more profitable and competitive business model.

• Streamline order fulfillment: Promote automation and self-service. Commerce Gateway opens Microsoft Dynamics NAV for the electronic exchange of trading documents with other systems. Commerce Gateway helps reduce errors and the amount of time spent entering data for items such as purchases and sales orders.
• Connect to partners online: Connect information and processes with security-enhanced options. No matter where you're located, you can exchange information about design drawings, production schedules, and item specifications. Increase collaboration between employees, suppliers, and partners to help them create new, innovative offerings and enhance existing ones.
• Alert your team to changes: Notify your team when you change key information. User-specific alerts and notifications help to ensure that all team members are kept up to date.
• Access critical information: Provide your employees with access to critical business information. Employee Portal helps increase productivity and improve decision-making communications across the organization.

Get your products to market faster

Today's supply chain leaders are characterized by their ability to deliver the products customers want with minimum time-to-market and maximum ability to revamp products to meet market expectations. Flexible planning capabilities can give you the freedom to choose the best manufacturing process to maximize profitability.

• Make changes quickly: Alter capacity plans and manufacturing policies, and implement the best manufacturing process to accommodate changing demands and new projects. You can also change the method by which your warehouse operates by quickly switching from standard pick method to wave picks, for example.
• Improve service item tracking: Service management functionality helps you register all your service items and parts, access service level agreement information, and track all components of a service item and view their status.
• Make more informed decisions: Customizable reports, graphical key performance indicators, and rich drill-down capabilities help provide your people with instant access to the information they need to do their jobs. With easy-to-use tools for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), you can extract, analyze, and present data from any angle across your entire business. And the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client style of interface is familiar and easy to use.

Manufacturing

Respond quickly to your customer's demand

With Microsoft Dynamics NAV for Manufacturing, any size company can boost operational efficiency and effectively manage production, including production orders, bills of material, supply planning, and capacity requirements planning. Flexible processes and integrated information equip you to make accurate promises to customers, respond quickly to last-minute requests and changes, and take advantage of new business opportunities to help your business stay ahead of the competition.

Production management

• Improve coordination of made-to-order requests
• Simplify make-or-buy decisions
• Modify components and operations as needed, even on released production orders
• Plan product family orders that share the same routing to create efficient build schedules

Bills of material (BOMs)

• Integrate different types of BOMs and customized definitions into manufacturing operations
• Support time-to-market and time-to-volume objectives
• Create, track, and process multiple versions of BOMs and routings

Graphical scheduling

• Access an overview of production schedules displayed in Gantt charts
• Use drag-and-drop functionality to reschedule operations

Order promising

• Promise orders more accurately with available-to-promise(ATP) and capable-to-promise(CTP) insight

Exceptions handling

• Quickly make exceptions and last-minute changes to meet customer needs

Supply planning

• Plan from the sales order, production order, or purchase requisition, or use traditional master production schedule(MPS) or material requirements planning(MRP) methods
• Facilitate materials flow through the supply chain with multi-location planning capabilities
• Update and change all materials, costs, and operations simultaneously

Demand forecasting

• Analyze sales patterns from multiple perspectives
• Compare forecasted demand with actual sales
• Consolidate and distribute demand plans with multiple stakeholders for collaborative planning

Capacity requirements planning

• Implement realistic plans according to all incoming resource capacity demands
• Redefine order modifiers and reorder policies as needed
• Accommodate changing shop floor workloads Simplify planning with calendars and machine center allocation tools

Warehouse and inventory management

• Integrate manufacturing and warehousing functionality
• Optimize warehouse layout and space utilization
• Maintain up-to-date inventory information

Manufacturing costing

• Understand item costs throughout the production process, including inventory, WIP, and cost of goods sold (COGS)
• Manage sales and purchase prices with customers and vendors

Automated data collection system (ADCS)

• Collect and use accurate inventory data in real time
• Increase the visibility of accurate inventory data throughout your business
• Improve warehouse efficiency

Project Management

Accomplish your goals

If your business is project-driven, your managers need to keep close control of project performance, costs and revenues, and labor, as well as other resources. Microsoft Dynamics NAV helps you plan and manage jobs and projects with support for budgeting, billing, and resource management. You can manage project costs efficiently by tracking resource expenses and usage, planning capacity, and predicting availability. By monitoring projects effectively, you can make confident, informed decisions based on comprehensive information.

Control costs and improve profitability

Microsoft project management solutions can help managers and staff structure and run projects with optimal cost-efficiency and profitability. With these innovative software tools, they can create just the billing structures they need and track the actual expenses of labor, materials, and other costs more easily. Your finance department can ensure a healthy cash flow by reducing the length of billing cycles, always staying on top of unbilled receivable amounts and transforming them into revenue. The solutions also allow them to be constantly aware of changes in key values such as costs or margins, so they can take needed action promptly.

Streamline project management

With Microsoft project management solutions, your people can track project progress, identify issues, and implement changes quickly. They can accelerate project workflows through automation and make important project information available to all stakeholders with immediacy. These solutions can integrate with the business management software already at work in your financial management, human resources, or other lines of business, so people can spend less time administering business processes, and more time pursuing new business opportunities. The Microsoft project management solutions also offer the flexibility to adjust to the needs of different business roles in project management.

Achieve optimal productivity from your resources

With the assistance of Microsoft project management solutions, you can manage your employees, contractors, partner relationships, and material resources to be in line with project goals and client expectations. Using all of your resources to best effect can help you complete projects on or under budget and on time or early, providing additional opportunities for winning new projects and running them successfully. From the first stages of project planning to completion, Microsoft solutions can contribute to an increase in the business value of the resources on each project.

Sales and Marketing

Interact with your customers in a profitable way

Microsoft Dynamics NAV can give people in your organization access to accurate, up-to-date information and the tools to efficiently manage contacts, opportunities, and campaigns-while building customer relationships that help drive sales and encourage loyalty. Everyone in your organization can get the information they need to interact with customers in a profitable way-and make smart decisions based on accurate information about every contact. You can also automate routine sales, marketing, and customer service tasks to make your work environment simpler and more efficient.

Put customer information at the fingertips of managers and employees to help your people build better customer relations.

• Manage contact information
• Organize sales campaigns
• Identify sales opportunities
• Automate sales tasks
• Set up automatic reminders
• Document approval

RoleTailored Center

Help people excel at their individual jobs

RoleTailored design enables people to cut through the clutter, delivering just the information they need, where and when they need it. It offers perspective by providing an overview of the work ahead, so that organizations can plan and prioritize efforts.

The RoleTailored user experience supports the roles your people play - to fit your organization. Whether it's for a bookkeeper or a warehouse worker, each user profile can have its own Role Center that helps users:

• Perform tasks effectively and comfortably by choosing the level of complexity that best fits the way they work
• Take effective action by easily finding and using the information they need
• See the positive contributions they make by seeing the tasks they've worked on and the work ahead of them in the context of the company's workflow

Role Centers give employees the information and tools they need for their specific jobs.

• Out of the box, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 delivers 21 Role Centers optimized for different key employee functions. From the order processor to warehouse workers, people can quickly organize and prioritize tasks to increase productivity and effectiveness.
• Give employees a solution that truly meets individual needs with a comprehensive overview of their work and tasks and the ability to personalize menus to reflect their own work styles.
• Without leaving their Role Centers or juggling applications, people can use their favorite Microsoft Office programs-including Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft Office Word, and more.
• Minimize training costs and accelerate productivity from the start with software that looks and works with other familiar Microsoft products and technologies.
• Easily customize Role Centers to provide access to role-specific tasks unique to your business or industry.

Featured Benefits

Focus on achieving business goals

Microsoft Dynamics NAV can help you automate and simplify processes across your entire business to boost productivity, performance, and business growth. With integrated financial, supply chain, and customer relationship management information from across your organization stored in a centralized database, your people can work quickly and effectively-helping to drive your business forward.

Analyze, communicate, and collaborate

Equip your organization to work as a team and make faster, smarter decisions by connecting people, information, and processes.

• Easily access and analyze real-time data about every aspect of your operations, including individual transactions, customized key performance indicators, trends, and growth opportunities.
• Give people self-service reporting and business intelligence capabilities that reduce ad-hoc requests to the IT department for reports and information.
• Automatically generate custom reports by using Report Designer, an ad-hoc query tool and component of Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services or export to Excel or other familiar programs for further analysis and graphical presentation.
• Accelerate business insight and expand the value of business data even further by combining Microsoft Dynamics NAV with SQL Server Reporting Services and SQL Server Analysis Services.
• Unleash the power to communicate and collaborate effectively-and optimize your technology investments-through deep integration with the Microsoft Office system, including Excel, Windows SharePoint Services, and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server.
• Deliver online access to real-time data, reports, and collaboration tools with Employee Portal in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, a Web-based interface built on Windows SharePoint Services- without having to set up users and train them to use Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Fuel business agility and growth

Meet changing business needs without disrupting your operations or your IT budget-and make the most of your current IT investments.

• Microsoft .NET foundation, three-tier architecture, and Web services make it easier than ever to integrate Microsoft Dynamics NAV with existing systems, share data across other applications, and develop extended functionality.
• Extend your business across international borders with confidence when you can set up and maintain multiple currencies and accommodate more than 30 languages.
• Automate supply chain collaboration and document exchange with partners using Microsoft BizTalk Server and the Microsoft Office system.
• Choose the solution package you need today with flexible business licensing options, and then add capabilities as your business grows-quickly and cost-effectively.
• Take advantage of expert support from your Microsoft Certified Partner, who can help you implement your solution efficiently and cost-effectively, and help your company benefit from a rich ecosystem of finely tailored, industry-specific offerings and add-on solutions.
• Help ensure efficient, consistent deployments with the Rapid Implementation Methodology, part of Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step, a standardized, global methodology and suite of tools that simplifies implementation and upgrade processes.

Service Management

Make service operations more profitable

Service Management makes your service operations more profitable and helps you organize your service resources for optimum efficiency, forecast and track parts consumption, proactively manage contracts and service agreements, and gain tighter control over costs. In addition, you'll be able to build and establish long-term relationships with your customers with service-contract management and consistent logging and tracking of equipment and services.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV also helps you manage a broad range of other business areas according to your particular needs. You can add functionality as you need it and grow at your own pace.

• Respond quickly to customer-service requests and use information from across your business to make profitable decisions about the costs, inventories, workloads, and financial returns of your service operation.
• Equip people in your organization to manage contacts, opportunities, and campaigns efficiently while building customer relationships that help drive sales and encourage loyalty.

Advanced Supply Chain Management

Advanced Forecasting & Procurement

As a distributor or manufacturer your largest and most costly asset is inventory. Reducing inventory carrying cost and increasing margins can cause a greater effect on the bottom line than increased sales.  By doing both, you will significantly increase profitability.

For the Distributor or Manufacturer 

• Formula Based Forecasting - Best Fit Formula Approach.
• Use Collaborative forecast to fine tune your overall forecast.
• Use Vendor forecast to help your vendors anticipate your future needs.
• Roll-Up usage history and demand based on replenishment path to get a view of your entire supply chain.
• Identify surplus inventory and re-deploy to reduce total inventory.
• Use the unique Lead Time Horizon replenishment method for long lead times typical when importing products.
• Use the suggested order to review products by vendor, including the calculation details of the recommendation.

Specifically for the Distributor

• Automated Calculation of Vendor Lead Times to the Warehouse, Vendor, and Item levels.
• Branch replenishment, including consigned inventory replenishment.
• Order Point, Line Point, and EOQ calculations for short to medium lead times.
• Lead Time Horizon calculations for longer lead times.
• Non-Stock and Special Order item processing.
• Full support for NAV Kit Processing. (NAV Versions 5.0 and newer)

Specifically for the Manufacturer

• Use AFP Production to forecast finished goods and create simulated production orders for the planning horizon. (Typically several months)
• Component demand is considered by the suggested order when purchasing components for production.
• Can be used in conjunctions with NAV Production.

Electronic Data Interchange

The EDI module has been designed as a set of tools that provide the user with a maximum amount of flexibility when dealing with their trading partners. These tools can be used to map any Navision data element to an ANSI X12 standard. Once the mapping is in place, the Transaction Management tools allow the user to easily manage the day-to-day process of conducting electronic commerce.

If EDI is based on a set of ANSI standards why is it so difficult to integrate into most business systems?

Business systems are as diverse and varied as their names and origins indicate. The EDI ANSI X12 standard is an attempt to provide a common intermediate format in which to conduct electronic commerce between trading partners. The interpretation and use of the data elements within these standards is left up to the EDI standards committee in each industry and further modified by the individual trading partners. For example the electronics industry has a different set of requirements than does the retail distribution industry. This is further complicated by the requirements of each trading partner's business system.

Historically software providers have provided a hard coded custom solution to EDI which in turn is rigid and expensive to maintain and modify. A more modern approach is to provide this same rigid interface and use an EDI software vendor's logical mapping tool to complete the link. The problem with this solution is that the EDI mapping tool can only map and pass along data that is provided to it through the traditional rigid interface.

Our approach to EDI is to provide a single mapping tool that maps any Navision data element to any EDI data element without the requirement for programming.

E-Ship

Navision E-Ship integrates the entire packing and shipping function within the Navision database. Until now Navision customers have interfaced with external shipping systems. These external systems, while doing a good job of rating and shipping packages, do not have knowledge of the items being shipped.  Because E-Ship is held within Navision it can easily:

• Shop rates at Sales Order entry time thus allowing you to quote the shipping cost up front.
• Capture package level detail using our unique Scan Only packing operation.
• Interface with Scales to weigh packages.
• Use Barcode printers to print carrier approved shipping labels.
• Automatically calculate the cost and price of the container for COD and Insurance purposes.
• Compare the expected contents weight with the actual weight of the package thus preventing packing errors.
• Update the sales order with the appropriate freight charges.
• Use either G/L Accounts or Resources to post freight charges to a Sales Order.
• Track the cost of shipping by Shipping Agent and Service versus the amount charged to the customer.
• Track Packages and obtain delivery information from within Navision via the Internet.