• Achieve Fast Time to Value

With prebuilt industry capabilities for manufacturing, distribution, services, retail, and Public Sector, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 helps you meet your business requirements by deploying your solution quickly and delivering results right away. Streamline your organization end-to-end with rich ERP capabilities, including human capital management, financials, and compliance management. Support specific business requirements easily with packaged solutions from the worldwide Microsoft® Partner Network.

• Grow Your Global Solution

Removing barriers to international growth is essential for business development. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 enables you to expand your operations to new geographies with builtin, country-specific localizations in a single solution to meet regulatory requirements for 36 countries.1 Enable entities across your multisite, global organization to share the same data, business rules, and processes in order to harmonize and streamline business practices. Also support your business growth by easily adding users and transactions, as well as
configuring more complex business scenarios.

• Work Smart and Fast

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 can help you improve productivity by providing RoleTailored access to information, tasks, and business processes along with powerful business intelligence. Gain deeper insight into critical business data across your organization with relevant performance indicators, self-service business intelligence, and reporting in key business areas.

• Drive New Business

Take advantage of new business opportunities by improving the insight into your business, and having the ability to implement change more
easily. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 offers unlimited views on your business, giving you the visibility you need. Enhanced modeling capabilities, such as the Organizational Model or workflow, then helps you manage changes in the structure and business processes of your organization, and fosters innovation with a central business process repository, including capabilities for five major industries.

• Support Business Today and Tomorrow

Choose a flexible deployment model that best supports your organization and can easily be adjusted to meet your changing business demands: on-premises or in the cloud. Easily complement your installation with cloud-based services and take advantage of the flexible Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 solution architecture that enables incremental implementations, changes, or upgrades. Choose the governance model that best fits your organization: centrally managed, decentrally managed, or a combination of both.

• Gain a Competitive Edge

Differentiate your business from competition. The ability to rapidly adapt your system to support your unique needs can give you a significant edge over your competitors. The model-driven, layered architecture allows you to develop and maintain unique business processes easily and enables a relatively easy upgrade to new releases.

• Get Everyone on Board

Employees want to use a solution with a familiar and intuitive user experience that makes their jobs easier, and is simple to use and learn. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 enables people to find, sort, visualize, and use information through an easy-to-use user interface that looks and works like Microsoft Office. Work easily with everyday tools by sharing data between Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and Microsoft Office 2010.

• Connect and Collaborate

Easily connect employees, customers, suppliers, and partners through integrated self-service collaboration capabilities. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 enables you to streamline basic supply chain collaboration with self-service, Microsoft SharePoint®– based vendor, customer, and employee portals, and end-to-end business process integration through Sites Services.2 Simplify advanced supply chain collaboration with adaptable web services and share information easily by using collaboration tools such as Microsoft LyncTM and by creating SharePoint collaboration sites directly from within Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012.

• Lower Your TCO

In addition to improved productivity gains, lower your total cost of ownership (TCO) through simplified life cycle management and quick installations. Use Microsoft Dynamics ERP RapidStart Services to help ensure a quick and reliable setup and configuration of your ERP solution. In alignment with the RoleTailored design of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, the simplified Business Value Licensing model ensures that you buy the exact number of licenses you need—no more, no less— with options to easily add more licenses as your business grows.

• Leverage the Power of the Microsoft Platform

It’s our fundamental value proposition: The interaction of ERP, business and productivity applications, communications solutions, and the underlying technology platform—that works on-premises or in the cloud. We call it pervasive interoperability. With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2102, you get a business solution from Microsoft that is backed by an ongoing commitment to research, development, and innovation. Combined with a global ecosystem of specialized partners, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 uses the power of the Microsoft platform to deliver a powerfully simple solution.

We heard from customers and partners that to get a good return on investment, the user interface is a key component. Enterprise Portal (EP) needed to score high on both look-and-feel and usability in this release. To meet and exceed customer and partner expectations, the user interface has gone through a major revision in this release. We built our user experience on the already familiar Office and Windows platforms. User interaction was made intuitive and consistent across the product, information and actions are easily discoverable, and tasks are completed in fewer steps, leading to a reduction in time spent on tasks.

The key capabilities of EP user interface

Action Pane:  Built along the lines of SharePoint 2007 and Office 2007 successful and well-adopted ribbon interface, EP has Actions Panes in this release.  The toolbars in the list and task pages have been replaced by the Action Pane. The commands are organized into a set of tabs along with relevant icons for visual cue. The tabs on the action pane display the commands that are most relevant for each of the task areas. This improves the discoverability of actions and simplifies accessing and acting on the application features.

Model dialogs: In the previous versions of Enterprise Portal, viewing, editing and creating items in a list page forced the user to navigate to the task page away from the list page. By navigating away, all the user interactions previously completed on the list page—such as filtering, sorting, page navigation, etc.—are all lost when the user navigates back to the list page after completing the task. Since the navigation reloads and refreshes the list page, the user had to start all over again to regain their previous settings. In Microsoft Dynamics AX6 all the task pages are opened as Model dialog boxes on top of the list page instead of navigating away, so the context is preserved. The task page is highlighted on top of the list and when the task page modal dialog is closed, it puts the highlight back on to the list page preserving the setting along with the refreshed data. This makes finding, viewing, creating and modifying data much simpler and consistent across the product. Built on SharePoint 2010 dialog platform, all this is done through meta data setting by developers without the need to write any code.

Fact Box: In Microsoft Dynamics AX6, all list pages have Fact Boxes and a Preview Pane to provide more information from related objects in context for the selected object. This gives users an overview of a given object, enableing them to initiate more actions in context and thereby reduce the need to open additional windows or navigate to other places in the navigation layer. Fact boxes can also act as preview panes at the bottom of the list page. This allows more information to display about the selected object itself in a list page and overcomes the space limitations of the number of columns displayed in the list.

FastTab : Collapsible and expandable FastTabs replace traditional tabs on task pages in EP. Key fields can be promoted on a summary line that display even when the tab is collapsed. The traditional tabs can display information from one tab only at a time.  But with FastTabs and its auto summary fields, users can get full view of the selected object and all its important data in one shot without the need to navigate between different tabs.

Filters: Enterprise Portal now has a Quick Filter in all the list pages to allow the user to find data quickly. Developers can enable most common filtering fields readily available as Facet Filter at the top of the list page to increase their discoverability. Power users can build complex filtering conditions using the Advanced Filter control which allows multiple filter conditions.

Search: In Microsoft Dynamics AX6, EP makes search seamless by integrating with SharePoint Search through Business Connectivity Services (BCS). Microsoft Dynamics AX queries, Microsoft Dynamics AX Navigation metadata, and document attachments are published as BCS entities through Microsoft Dynamics AX Setup and end users can search for business data, metadata and attachments. For example, a user could search for customers, a link to the report, and any attached documents.

Navigation: In Microsoft Dynamics AX6, the quick launch displays items in a hierarchical view instead of a flat list as in prior versions. This way, related navigational elements are grouped together and are displayed in a familiar Outlook-type navigation control. The information architecture has been revisited in this release with consistent navigation taxonomy. This will help the end users quickly locate and navigate to the correct places to do their tasks.

Actions: Actions on the list page are more discoverable through the Action Pane. Also they can be exposed as hyperlinks on the list columns and as actions in a Fact Box. List Page also supports taking action on multiple items for bulk changes.

New Controls: In Microsoft Dynamics AX6, we also added a number of new controls for displaying complex data in a usable way such as Account control for financial dimensions, Hierarchical grid view for resource scheduling, and Reference field for displaying composite keys.

Export to Excel: Users can seamlessly export any list into Excel through a command in Action Pane. This brings the power of Excel to the fingertips of EP users for analyzing and comprehending large amounts of data from a list page. With the Microsoft Dynamics AX Office Add-in, data could be refreshed at a later time directly from Excel to get the latest information.

LookUps: For quick data entry, lookups with a fewer number of rows (under 50 rows for example) could be made to render in-client instead of on the server. This reduces the wait time for the lookup to load tremendously improving the user experience and reducing the time it takes to enter data.

With these changes, users are now able to get and control more information in less time than ever before. Next time we’ll look at how Enterprise Portal rapidly responds to business needs.

Source : Solutions Monkey

Inside Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6488762

Dynamics AX 2012 is now generally available in 25 countries and 23 languages. The new ERP system now supports more than 40 roles within an organization with a new set of tools, such as the Unified Natural Models, serving as a library of business processes.

Business Analyst vs System Analyst

Business Analyst and System Analyst are job roles evolved with the growth of information technology. Role of Business Analyst (BA) can be observed in many industries but more widespread in IT industry. This job requires various academic and professional qualifications depending on the job requirement. Systems analyst works in all the industries, but they should possess professional background in information management. In both the job roles, analytical skills, proper planning, team work and innovative thinking can be considered as keys to success.

Business Analyst

The role of Business Analyst could significantly diverge depending on the industry in consideration. During the past decade, the role of BA has mostly associated with the IT industry as an important job. BA acts as a bridge between the customer and the development team. Business process and requirements are translated to functional specifications by a business analyst. The business analyst works with the development team during the entire implementation process. In software development, BA plays the role of testing the implementations done by the team to ensure that customer needs are satisfied. Business Analyst should possess the relevant functional knowledge in the area in which the job is assigned. For example, in an ERP if the development is to satisfy IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) compliance, BA should have a sound accounting background so that, he/she can map the accounting standards’ requirement with the system features. BA should develop a good confidence with the development team so that, any uncertainties are always discussed with the BA before the implementation proceeds.

System Analyst

System Analyst (SA) mainly works with configuring system requirements of an organization. System analyst should have a sound knowledge on computer software, hardware and networking. The academic background of a System Analyst could mainly associate with computer science, information science or management information systems. The main responsibilities include interact with end users and customers, plan the system flow, manage design considerations, and implementation while managing time-lines. SA is responsible of documenting user requests in to technical documentation. SA should always discuss with the end user of the computer system regarding the information flow and their specific requirement. System Analysts experiments with different computer system plans and try various tools and steps until they find the system is the fastest, easy to use and cost is fully optimized. In this process, analyst has to test the system and ensure that information is processed without mistakes.

What is the difference between Business Analyst and System Analyst?

Role of Business Analyst and System Analyst is mostly associated with the IT industry. Both job roles require professionals in the relevant disciplines. Members of both the job roles have to be a good team players and should accomplish organizational objectives while ensuring that the customer/end-user objectives are met. Effective communication, first-rate analytical and problem solving skills play a major part in the success of these professionals.

BA could be from any discipline and need not posses IT knowledge at all in some cases. In an ERP software development, there are BAs with Accounting, Finance, Human resource management, engineering and supply chain knowledge and background. But a SA should always possess the relevant information science/management knowledge. BA mostly collaborates with the end customer(s) of the product and with the development team. SA work with the end users of the organizations and with the IT department.

In summary, System Analyst plays a technical job role and Business Analyst focuses more on business processes and underlying concepts and practices.

Source : http://goo.gl/TVFC1

Public Sector organizations, like educational institutions, not for profit organizations, and governments, are continuously facing the challenge of reduced budgets while still being expected to deliver greater value to their stakeholders.  This challenge has only increased in the past few years with the strain of the recession.  Successful public sector leaders know that they need to focus on results and providing value and accountability to stakeholders.

A proficient Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solution can help Public Sector organizations achieve these goals.  Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 helps manage finances, funds and grants, procurement, human resources, and service delivery.   It helps increase efficiencies within the organization allowing for better use of limited resources.  Dynamics AX 2012 also helps organizations maintain transparency allowing for consolidation of services and reduction of cost, as well as fiscal responsibility to stakeholders.

There are 5 main reasons why Dynamics AX 2012 is a great fit for public sector organizations.

1. Purposely built for the public sector – Dynamics AX 2012 helps manage complex regulatory, budget, and grant compliance requirements to optimize the use of funds.  It has capabilities built in to increase accountability, transparency, and performance unique to the Public Service sector.  These industry specific features are available right out-of-the-box.
2. Improved delivery of services – Dynamics AX 2012 proactively tracks revenues, expenditures, and personnel resources against defined budget objectives. With Dynamics AX 2012 quickly access real-time information to improve decision making and help control spending.
3. Ability to adapt easily to evolving needs of stakeholders – Integrated customer relationship management (CRM) tools can help gain deeper insight into patron and stakeholder needs. Use this insight to adjust processes for better service delivery. Flexible budget controls allows for the agility to align resources with budget objectives.
4. Address mandates – Adapt to changing regulatory and administrative requirements with real-time insight and configurable workflows. Manage complex multiyear, multi funded projects and grant requirements for timely reimbursement.
5. Support transparency and openness – Increase organizational transparency and agility with budget visibility, helping you avoid budget overruns before funds are committed. Role-based security enforces better control and accountability.

These five unique product features, coupled with other features in Dynamics AX 2012 and working with a partner who has a rich background in supporting and servicing public sector organizations, can help your Public Sector organization manage challenges while helping you achieve your organization’s mission.

Interested in learning more?  Read  a case study about the City of Redmond and attend the Dynamics AX 2012 launch event on Sept 8th, 2011.

By Encore Business Solutions, Western Canada’s Public Sector Specialist  Source :ERP Softwareblog

The next release of Microsoft Dynamics AX, version 2012, is scheduled for September 8, 2011. Dynamics AX 2012 will launch at the Global Virtual Launch Event.   As a comprehensive ERP (enterprise resource planning) application, Dynamics AX (formerly Axapta) is a solution for midsize and larger companies. It enables businesses to work effectively, manage change, and compete globally. It makes it easy to operate across locations and countries by standardizing processes, providing visibility across your organization, and helping to simplify compliance.

The 2012 version of AX provides hundreds of enhancements to help customers improve productivity, manage change and growth and compete globally. AX 2012 includes built-in industry capabilities for manufacturing, public sector, services, and distribution organizations.

View a list of the Top 10 Microsoft Dynamics AX enhancements including:

• Microsoft Office add-ins to use Microsoft Word and Excel to build templates and documents that combine structured and unstructured information from Dynamics AX.
• New Help system allowing you to customize topics, enabling others in the organization to create Help documentation, promptly applying and distributing updates and using Search and Help viewer to find help on your network or the web.
• RoleTailored user interface including FactBoxes, Fast Tabs, and Preview Panes that let you view data from multiple sources without leaving the current form.
• Time zone improvements including editing time zones, supporting multiple time zones, and synchronizing time zone preferences
• Unified procurement strategy across employees, purchasing agents, and vendors
• Auto-generated SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) reports and basic reports creation using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Charting Control
• Global operations support through development of a report in one language and the reporting framework products for the report in multiple languages
• Ability to create more complex workflows and separate workflows for each line associated with a header, even automated workflows requiring no human intervention
• Graphical Workflow Editor enables drag-and-drop functionality for workflow creation and Work Item Queues help users control what they work on and load balance across the team when necessary.
• Environmental Sustainability Dashboard to track energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions to proactively monitor your organization’s environmental impact plus the new associated data cube to keep track of energy consumption, carbon footprint and KPIs for waste and water usage.
• And More!

Gates is a HERO in many kids plus he is really a visionary, maybe not the perfect person in business and perfect IT person who invented perfect person but he is great person when it come to his vision. I meet many people who hates Microsoft and talk against microsoft but I hardly meet people who hate Bill Gates , his business practice and the way  he come up with Windows may have some ethical misconduct but if we forget about business politics , personally in his life he is such a great person  Respect !

 11 Rules of life by bill gates

Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it!

Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem.
The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel
good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school.
You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity.
Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping:
They called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault,
So don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now.
They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to
you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest
from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your
own room. Keep yourself clean.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT.
In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES
as you want to get the right answer.
*This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters.
You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF.
*Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life.
In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds.
Chances are you’ll end up working for one…

As we’ve covered in great detail in this blog over the last several years, ERP implementations can be a grind. It’s tough to finish on time and on budget while at the same time delivering expected business benefits. Whether you are working for a commercial company or are in the public sector, it’s no secret the the odds are stacked against you when it comes to ERP systems.

However, our experience with non-profits, federal, state and local entities have shown us that certain challenges are especially pronounced in the public sector. Public ERP systems face unique obstacles related to people, business processes, and complexities. It’s not that public ERP implementations are necessarily more difficult than those in the private sector, but there are things that make them unique.

Here are a few distinct challenges to consider before embarking on an ERP implementation for your public-sector organization:

• Organizational change management. Change is hard for employees at most organizations, but it can be even more difficult to manage in the public sector. Employees in the public sector haven’t traditionally been motivated by a fear of having to outperform peers to keep their jobs (although this is changing in recent years), so performance-based incentives may not be as effective. In addition, because government organizations often do not feel the same external market pressures to change quickly, employees may not be used to the large changes entailed by an ERP implementation. For these reasons, organizational change management plans need to pay particular attention to “selling” the changes and positively impacting the culture of the organization.

• Communications. In addition to the cultural change enabled by an organizational change management plan, general communications can be especially challenging with public sector entities. Not only is it important for the project team and executive sponsors to communicate major process and organizational changes to employees, but there are typically a complex series of stakeholders that need to be communicated to as well. Constituents such as internal customers, external taxpayers, and external “customers” all have a vested interest in ensuring the project is successful.  It is for this reason that public ERP systems often take so long and cost so much to implement.

• Complexity. Another challenge for government organizations is that they are generally larger, more complex, and impact people more than in the commercial space. It’s rare to find a small, nimble, and simple government organization – no matter how relatively small it may seem compared to other government entities – so the complexities can be material.  Business processes, systems, people, and organizational structures can all be more complex than what you might see in the commercial space. For this reason, you want to make sure you have a software solution and ERP implementation partner that is accustomed to these complexities.

Public sector ERP implementations are difficult, but as is the case in the public sector, they’re not impossible if managed effectively and with the right implementation partner. However, getting there is easier said than done.  The above three variables are three key complexities to consider as you begin your organization’s ERP initiative.

Source