Microsoft Great Plains implementation: Restaurants Supply Chain Management Example

Microsoft Great Plains serves majority of US based horizontal and vertical markets. Being relatively flexible and customizable ? it can fit your specific business requirements with light or deep customization. You can have portion of the system customization done by your in-house developers (such tools as Modifier with VBA, MS SQL Server stored procedures, Crystal Reports do not require unique expertise) and the most critical and difficult part could be subcontracted ? especially Great Plains Dexterity. In this small article we would like to give you good example of customization scenarios, where client needs warehouse management, random weight purchasing and by-pond resale to end clients, barcoding.

? Warehouse Management. If your company needs logistics and warehouse management automation ? you should research supply chain management applications available on the market. Usually they are expensive and targeted to large logistics clients. You can use Microsoft Great Plains inventory module features, such as locations or sites, serial/lot number tracking, inventory count, inventory transfers and combine these with simple VB-based barcoding to feed documents from your barcode scanners to Great Plains directly.

? Variable Weight. In the case of food supplier you may be purchasing food in cases or other variable weight units and resell them in pounds or kilograms to end customer. So ? you need parallel quantities tracking with probably serial numbering for each case. This is typical customization for Inventory, Sales Order Processing (SOP) and Purchase Order Processing (POP) modules in Great Plains. It should be done in Great Plains Dexterity to provide seamless interface for GP users. In addition to parallel weight measures (cases and pounds) you may also need average weight control to prevent issues with your warehouse workers

? Repetitive Orders. You may figure out that majority of your customers order the same items each time with regular intervals. In this case you can have customer typical order screen to automate order taking. Plus ? you may have associated and replacement items logic incorporated in this screen.

? Delivery Automation. If you sell on consignment ? you may simply send trucks to your customers every day with recommended combination of items, based on historical data ? day of the week, holidays, seasonal variations, etc. And barcode could help you in automatic picking ticket printing and allocation

Good luck with implementation and customization and if you have issues or concerns ? we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com

Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba Spectrum Technologies ? USA nationwide Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company, serving clients in Chicago, California, Texas, Florida, New York, Georgia, Arizona, Minnesota, UK, Australia and having locations in multiple states and internationally ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), he is CMA, Great Plains Certified Master, Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer. You can contact Andrew: andrewk@albaspectrum.com