What is an ERP

ERP or Enterprise resource planning is a management software for your business; normally a suite of integrated modules or application that an organization or company makes use of  to manage their business processes which basically includes:

• Manufacturing
• Product planning and development
• Inventory management
• Marketing and sales
• Shipping

The ERP gives an integrated real-time view of all your core business processes by making use of a set of common databases managed by a database management system. ERP systems keep track of business resources such as raw materials, cash, production capacity as well as the status of business commitments: be it purchase orders, sales orders or payroll. The modules or applications that together make up the whole system share data across many departments like purchasing, manufacturing, accounting, sales and others that entered the data. ERP allows for easy information flow between the various business functions, and manages the connections to the stakeholders on the outside.

Today companies and organizations consider the ERP systems to be a crucial organizational tool as it integrates the different organizational systems and facilitates transactions and production which is error-free. But ERP systems are developed in a way different from how the traditional systems were developed. ERP systems today run on a wide variety of computer hardware as well as network configurations, normally making use of a database like SQL Server or Oracle or some such. 

We have decided to go in for Microsoft Dynamics Navision as our new ERP. Will keep you posted on how things go.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV

So what is Microsoft Dynamics NAV? Microsoft Dynamics NAV is an an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software product from the software giant, Microsoft. It is meant to help with manufacturing, finance, supply chain, e-commerce, analytics and customer relationship management for both small as well as medium-sized businesses. Resellers for Microsoft Dynamics NAV have full access to the source code of the business logic which is said to be easily customizable. However, our consultants have warned us to keep our customization to a bare minimum so we do not face extra problems when we are ready to apply a Microsoft Dynamics NAV upgrade in the future. In order to modify the system, the Microsoft Dynamics NAV consultants make use of the programming language C/AL also known as Client/Server Application Language which is proprietary. Navision originated in Denmark but was bought out by Microsoft in 2002.

Choosing the Best ERP for Pharmaceutical Companies

We have already been using an ERP for the last 7 years or so and although this was developed locally and specifically for the pharma industry, they were all but professional but in the end, once all the modules were implemented, everything fell in place although we had to make a few changes to our systems to adapt to theirs. Our pharma company already has our products being exported out of the country to places like Africa, CIS, Central America and the South East Asia.We are now getting set to grow in leaps and bounds and are looking to capture the European and U.S. markets as well. 

We did take a look at other ERPs which are globally recognized. One of them was SAP; apart from not being user friendly, it was not cost effective as the licensing is not based on concurrent users but on named users. We have over just over a hundred named users, but in our existing ERP, we have at most 25 users logging in at any given point of time. Also, our users keep on complaining that it takes a lot of time to make their entries and it takes forever to even raise a requisition.The vendor tells us that whatever shortfalls we had pointed out in their existing version have been eliminated in their future versions. But then we will need to pay for the licenses all over again. As it is we pay 15% of the original license fee every year for free updates.

We found that many pharmaceutical companies of repute some of them being multinationals are using Microsoft Dynamics Navision with a Pharma vertical called Elixir which is specific to the pharma industry in India and developed by an software company from India and endorsed by Microsoft. Since we were looking for an ERP which is globally recognized we finally decided on Microsoft Dynamics Navision with Elixir. It seemed to suit our pocket as well.