How do I know what my requirements are? Well, if the internal processes have been defined, this should be an easy question to answer. You should start by the most important and frequent processes and move on to the least important or infrequent processes. The important and frequent ones should be handled by the ERP while the least important and infrequent processes may or may not be handled by the ERP depending on your goals and the budget for the implementation.

Talk to the consultants who will be implementing Dynamics NAV for your organization. Tell them how your process looks like, who is involved in it, what information is required, and so on. They will tell you how this specific process is resolved in Dynamics NAV.

If the way Dynamics NAV handles the process meets the way you handle the process, you've struck gold! You will be able to keep on doing what you're already doing without any kind of modification in the behavior of the application. This is a requirement that may not need any work at all or at the most, may need some tweaking.

If the way Dynamics NAV handles the process does not meet the way you handle the process, two possible options exist: modify the behavior of the system to meet your requirements, or change the way you handle your process to meet Dynamics NAV's way of doing things. You may even consider an option that combines the best of both options.

Is it okay to switch to the way Dynamics NAV handles the process? What will this involve? Will a different kind of information be needed? Who will have to be responsible for the process? Will it be the same people or different people? Will the steps or activities of the process be done in the same order or in a different order than before? Will all of this fit with the other processes? What will be the cost of changing the way we handle a specific business process?

On the other hand, is it possible to modify Dynamics NAV to handle the process in a different way? What would such a modification imply? How much development work will be needed to modify the behavior of the system? What will be the cost of changing the way Dynamics NAV handles a unique business process?

By doing this exercise with all your processes, one by one, you will end up with your list of requirements.

Back to our example of reporting the costs of a specific service. There is something in Dynamics NAV called dimensions. Dimensions are actually meant to be able to analyze any information in Dynamics NAV according to a specific value of a dimension.

One way to resolve the reporting goal in our example is to set up a dimension that will be called service. The values of this dimension will be all the different services the company provides.

The service dimension can then be set up as mandatory in all the general ledger accounts that are used to post expenses. This means that before an expense is posted, whether it is a purchase invoice or any other expense such as salaries, insurances, and so on, someone has to determine the service in which the expense is attributed. If this is not determined prior to the posting of the expense, an error message will be raised. That is, you will not be able to account your expense if you do not attribute it to a service.

This completely changes the process. At the moment, assignment to services are determined a while after the expense has been accounted or are never determined if no one asks for the costs of a specific service. But having all this information can automate the process of getting an amount for a specific service in a specific period of time. If the information is in the system, a report can be automated using the appropriated reporting tools.

Once you have the whole explanation of the standard functionality provided in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the best option in the example is to change the way the process is handled and use the Dynamics NAV way.

Two requirements will come up as follows:

The first requirement will only require configuration work. The second one can be addressed through configuration (setting up the appropriate analysis view, a feature in Dynamics NAV to report the general ledger amounts based on the dimension values) or a custom report can be developed.