What is the opinion of Microsoft NAV as an ERP solution.

I implemented Microsoft NAV (at the time Navision) in 2000 and didn't have any issues with the software even though we did a fair amount of customization to accommodate our job costing/revenue recognition process. It handled our multi-currency and consolidation needs no problem (which is one of the reasons we picked NAV). Most recently, my client was looking to upgrade from Quickbooks to NAV, Netsuite or Intacct. Since I hadn't seen the new version of NAV for some time (left the last company in 2005), I was actually impressed with all the changes they have made. My client ended picking a cloud solution for its revenue recognition abilities. My suggestion is that you scope out your core processes and business requirements and then find out how each system would handle these requirements.

Susan
It's not clear what type of manufacturing your company does: discrete/ assembly, process; make to stock/make to order; any engineering processes?
Do you own all your manufacturing plants or are some contract manufacturing sites? Do you sell any components intercompany? Do you need a multi-lingual interface/product and BOM definitions? Etc, etc>

When you talk about SAP, which of their software products did you consider? I can imagine that R/3 may be too large to take on. But SAP Business One or Business By Design may be a consideration.
If you have a list of key requirements and background information that describes what you need to do and how you need to do it (business model), you can then start qualifying potential vendors.

Apart from Netsuite/Rootstock above, there are other solutions like PLEX, EPICOR, JD Edwards, Exact,INFOR that may fit.

I am a former manufacturing finance leader who now helps clients choose and use business software, so my perspective tends to follow this line: Define your needs before you look at vendors-an Ounce of Selection is Worth a Pound of Implementation:)

Best regards
Len Green

Susan,

We did a NAV solution in 06, and used it through 2010 (acquisition).

It was stable and light, so remote users had a pretty easy time with it. For our European sub it was great as it is designed well for that.

However, the need to hire consultants to tweak anything was a pain and the lack of good consultants (we used a MSFT certified developer who really failed horribly) meant that getting it to work as well as it could was impossible.

Our choice was before Intacct and NS/1world were available. Intaact was actually honest enough to tell us that they couldn't meet our design needs...so kudos to them for that.

At this point I would strongly push toward NS or Intaact (despite my negative exp with NS long ago, I get from others that they have fixed most of their issues). I would also go with a cloud/hosted solution...which for us wasn't available.

Keith

We are in a service business and we installed MS NAV when it was Navision (circa 2000). It works fairly well for us, although we too paid for a lot of customization post implementation to accommodate our cost accounting requirements. Any data we need is easily extracted into Excel for further manipulation. We use Excel a lot because the user generated report writing capabilities in NAV requires some training - which is a skill set no one on my current staff has. My only beef with NAV is the cost of the annual maintenance and the fact that you must pay to add new capabilities after the initial installation. NAV has a fair amount of after market support, although it is best suited for a company that needs more than just Quickbooks, but mid-to-large companies would likely find it inadequate on the reporting end.

This is about Navision, not Dynamics.

First of all, it isn't Quickbooks, and agreed the canned reports are lacking. But it is extremely powerful if you know how to use it, and can either use Excel or Crystal Reports and develop your own financial/managerial reports.

The system is a little different in that it works as a "pure" accounting system, in other words you need to remember what the transaction should be (debit or credit and place the credit sign where appropriate).

As for learning, 90% of the systems main modules, A/R, A/P, G/L are so similar that when you learn one, you've essentially learned them all.

There are also some glaring issues (like which software doesn't have them), but since Navision is now a "dead" product, going into them is moot.

Wayne
When you refer to Navision as a dead product, do you mean Microsoft is going to sunset it (retire it)? If so, do you know if there is any official statement on that?
Best regards
Len

Len,

I recently went to a NAV user group meeting and listened to the NAV Sales Team promote the latest release of NAV. They also claimed that they partner with over 200 vendors that sell applications that work with NAV. They spent time hawking a product called "Jet Reports" that they say was just developed by one of these "partners". They were also boasting that they continue to add more "partner" vendors all the time.

Any claims made by a Sales guy, I usually take with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that if NAV was a "dead" product, they would not be investing in new releases of it, nor would they be able to attract new "partners" to write more NAV applications. Go figure.