Compare ERP Software: Microsoft Dynamics NAV vs. GP

Whether you’ve been offering distribution services for years, or you’re just now dipping your toes in the troubled waters of this industry sector, you must be prepared to face specific issues. Complying with lean supply chain practices, meeting ever-changing customer demands, keeping up with distribution trends and finding the right approach to profitability are just a few challenges distributors deal with as we speak. To these, we can add the difficulty of having to compare ERP software products, such as NAV and GP, in order to choose the most viable solution for your organization.

Common Distribution Problems NAV and GP Can Solve

Although NAV and GP are two different software products, especially deployed to match different business needs, they address a series of similar issues, helping you:

• Promote Lean Inventory Practices with Real-Time Decision Making: Business success pretty much depends on making appropriate timely decisions. Both NAV and GP give you in-depth visibility into your organization, including order, inventory, warehouse, financial, supply chain and even customer relationship management (CRM). Getting detailed insight into your business enables you to negotiate more advantageous agreements with suppliers, make better decisions about how to increase value to customers and follow lean supply chain practices, which come along with great advantages, such as reduced inventory levels and distribution costs, improved collaboration with customers and use of defined standards across your organization for consistent result achievement. Further, NAV and GP allow you to communicate information across all of your departments, which can help you avoid bottlenecks.       
• Automate Business Processes to Improve Productivity and Efficiency: If you compare ERP software solutions, you can easily see that both NAV and GP come along with fully integrated tools for business automation. Some time-consuming manual processes you can automate include centralization of information, email invoicing, credit card processing, barcode generation, layout optimization, workload balancing, data re-keying, inventory management, demand planning, order processing, remanufacturing and repackaging activities, etc. By simply automating your business processes, you can improve productivity at all levels and save a lot of money.  
• Use Financial Reporting and Profitability Analysis to Cut Costs: Cutting costs, including overhead expense, is one of the most important goals of many organizations. But, how can Dynamics NAV and GP help you reduce operating costs? Simply put, both systems have features capable to monitor the profitability, performance, seasonality and trends of certain products and vendors; simplify payables/receivables management; create custom budget and reporting templates; provide real-time feedback on business decisions; and export data to other systems, such as Microsoft Excel, for analysis, manipulation and graphical presentation. Moreover, you can use profitability analysis tools to perform a dimensional analysis of purchase and sales transactions in detail by sales orders, customers, products or regions. This analysis helps you identify barriers to profitability.  

• Integrate CRM: Your local Dynamics NAV partner and GP provider can integrate the system's inherent abilities that permit you to review customer credit report, customer-specific pricing, order commitments, databases and documents. The businesspeople who compare ERP software can also observe that both GP and NAV are able to streamline customer support and billing; offer online self-service without compromising security; provide essential data for building new partnerships; track different service options; and even assist users in developing targeted marketing campaigns for prospects and existing customers.    

To sum it all up, these two solutions can improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, boost profitability, promote enterprise-wide coordination, integrate and automate manual processes, and support business flexibility – an important aspect for trying new strategies. Now, it’s time to compare ERP software and see how these two solutions are different.  Our upcoming webinar will provide the answers you need to determine which solution is right for you.  Attend our live webinar on GP vs. NAV hosted by Texas based Microsoft Gold ERP Partner, Clients First.