Ideaca Dynamics AX Tips and Tricks - Workflow

Ideaca's AX experts provide answers to common AX 2012 questions, helping you leverage your Microsoft Dynamics AX investment. This video discusses 4 new workflow features in AX 2012. For more information or to contact us, visit www.ideaca.com

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Beginning with the End in Mind: The Solution Design Document

Imagine for a moment that you are building a house. You know you want 3 bedrooms, a functional kitchen, and extensive entertainment technology incorporated into every room. Go! Those are nice ideas, but they really don’t narrow it down much, and they certainly aren’t enough to communicate to the myriad of contractors, sub-contractors and trades. What would this house look like? Could your general contractor estimate on these requirements?

You wouldn’t expect such enigmatic ideas to be good enough for a construction project, so why would we expect IT projects to be any different? Most IT projects begin with similar vague ideas. Statements like “central information repository”, “seamless integration with the enterprise systems”, “easy to use graphical user interfaces”, and “improved business processes” are common high-level requirements. These types of statements are traditionally present in project charters and speak to the business goals. But just like that house you want to build, these are not enough to provide the required clarity to all of the stakeholders.

Enter the Solution Design Document

Sandwiched between the project charter and detail technical design documentation, the solution design document fulfills a critically important role in any IT project. Why do we need pretty pictures? What’s all this non-technical stuff good for? What does WebDAV mean? These are the types of questions I’ve received over the years and here is my response;

• It provides the big picture to a broad audience.
• It communicates what the outcome will look like and how it will be achieved.
• It provides sufficient detail to allow project sponsors to make informed decisions.
• It uses language that is not exclusionary or overly technical while at the same time contains detail to be of value to technical resources.

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Ideaca Wins Business Intelligence Partner of the Year at 2012 Microsoft Partner Network IMPACT Awards!

 

Ideaca has been selected as the winner in the Business Intelligence Partner of the Year category at the 2012 Microsoft Partner Network IMPACT Awards! Ideaca was also named a finalist in the Dynamics ERP Partner of the Year category. We are extremely excited for this win and cannot wait to continue to compete next year! For more details read here: http://bit.ly/W9TP7P

 

For more finalist read here: http://goo.gl/cFk11

 

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Ideaca's Company Video

Ideaca is proud to be launching our first ever company overview video! Designed with clients, prospects, and employees in mind, we have built something that truely reflects what Ideaca is all about...
 

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A crossover into MS Dynamics AX

This article is a personal and subjective story on what to expect when switching from other ERP systems into AX. My specific experience is with some smaller scale project-centric ERP systems and might be different from experiences of other users/consultants.

After working with AX for a couple of months and after attending a boot camp training on AX in Fargo, ND I thought it was time to reflect on the overall differences between AX and other ERP systems that I have been working with over time.

First of all I have to state that all of the ERP systems I have been working with were smaller than AX, both in functionality, breadth and complexity so I will sometimes compare apples and oranges here but this is part of the experience as well.

Targeted markets

Dynamics AX is Microsoft’s ERP flagship and is positioned with the likes of SAP and Oracle. And that’s the market, Microsoft is targeting: medium to large size businesses with multiple locations, multiple legal entities, dealing with multiple currencies and governments.

This in itself differentiates AX from previous ERP that I worked with. Most of them claimed to be multi-company and multi-currency but they really were not. The software packages were initially written for a specific vertical for small to mid-sized businesses and they grew with the companies that initially bought it. So all the features feel like they were tagged onto the solution and never really as integral part of it. AX on the other hand was designed from the ground up to handle these environments and transactions. So I found it especially easy to handle these things in AX whereas in other ERP solutions you had to jump through several hoops to get it working for the client.