Monday, June 4, 2007

Requisition Management in Microsoft Dynamics GP Business Portal FAQ - Tips for Consultant

by Andrew Karasev

Microsoft Great Plains Business Portal is web application, utilizing. Net technologies. At the same time it had to work with so-called ERP back office, in the case of Great Plains this is Microsoft Dynamics GP server with rich business logic.

Microsoft Great Plains Business Portal is web application, utilizing .Net technologies. At the same time it had to work with so-called ERP back office, in the case of Great Plains this is Microsoft Dynamics GP server with rich business logic. Having said these, we would recommend you to think about MS Great Plains Business Portal as typical peripheral set of modules, however placed in the web pages and hosted in MS Sharepoint environment. This a bit complex mixture of mentioned technologies makes business portal installation and setup complicated in turn, however if you’ve done your homework, the deployment should be smooth enough and you will see that BP does its job. In this small article we would like to review some evident questions and answers in Microsoft Business Portal Requisition Management, which is replacement to former Microsoft Great Plains eRequisition (last version of eRequisition was 7.5, current version of GP is 9.0, we expect 10.0 be released pretty soon – Summer 2007)

• Approval Hierarchy. Unfortunately in User and Admin guides for Requisition Management module, approval hierarchy doesn’t mention and provide the screen shot, where you understand that requisition creators maybe placed on the same level under requisition approver (meaning that approval hierarchy is not binary tree or binary list). This is one of the most typical questions from IT people, who install MS Dynamics GP Business Portal 3.0. Also, do not forget to select approval hierarchy in Requisition Management modules setup

• Required Fields: price, vendor, item id – these fields are mot required for requisition creator, and this “powerful” flexibility allows requisition initiator to create requisition with very generic description, imagine something like this: “I need really powerful new computer with large LCD monitor”. Requisition creator submits such a fancy purchase request and then professional requisition processing job should be done by purchasing clerk: send requisition to multiple vendors to get quotations, then select a vendor (possibly by initial requisition line, allowing multiple vendors deliver goods on one requisition). In other words, this means that you can select the vendor, item id, item price at the later time.

No comments: