The Situation
For Environment Canterbury, raising the benchmark by moving from Microsoft Dynamics NAV 3.7 to the latest release, NAV 5.0, was all about securing greater business value and flexibility across the extensive range of core tasks that NAV performed within the business. The extent of their reliance on NAV functionality and business systems covers customer contact databases, financial systems, document management and an array of business processes that Environment Canterbury provides for an area of the country, stretching from Kaikoura to Kurow.
Having made a strategic decision to employ Microsoft NAV as a 360° wide business tool in 2001, this was to be a second upgrade for Environment Canterbury (ECan), who were keen to leverage their original investment and run with the new and fully supported capabilities of Microsoft NAV 5.0.
“Microsoft NAV has given us a solid platform and it made great sense to pursue the opportunities which the upgrade to NAV 5.0 would deliver, keeping us on an up to the minute technology platform that gives us the tools we need and looks to the future.” Helen Sellwood, Finance Manager, Environment Canterbury.
The Pain
Not a question of pain, but more of gain, ECan wanted to harnass the best from an evolving technology landscape.
Microsoft NAV 5.0 sets ECan up for where they want to go.
Helen Sellwood, ECan’s Finance Manager, sees the upgrade addressing the need to balance current needs with future potential. She poses the question: How does a large organisation of ECan’s nature communicate with people? How does ECan make information available to decision makers, internal business teams, the public and community groups?
She says, “To do business well, we need to have access to systems that are easy and intuitive and give people in our organisation powerful tools to get the job done to the best of our ability. The upgrade to NAV 5.0 is all about gaining additional functionality, and introducing new business modules that integrate well with our current business systems.” ECan’s expectations were that many of the gains would be small and incremental – for example smarter changes to menus and navigation making tasks easier, while other significant gains would be made enabling staff to take advantage of running Employee Portal components in a NAV environment. Currently works in progress, the Employee Portal and Jobs Module will offer end users access to the information they need using the familiar web-based interface offered by Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Intergen is looking forward to applying this technology to ECan’s business in the future.
David Roys from Intergen says, “The user interface in NAV 5.0, with a menu system that is based on Outlook’s navigation pane, is now much more familiar to Microsoft Office users. There are still occasions, however, when a simple single-tasked web-part deployed through a web browser is the best way for infrequent users to get the information they need. We have found that making common tasks (such as purchase invoice approval) available to infrequent users through NAV’s Employee Portal is a great way to extend the functionality of NAV to the organisation without giving users another product to learn.”
Upgrade demonstrates the upside of a good partnership.
“Intergen has come to have a good understanding of our business,” says Helen Sellwood. Many of the financial and accounting tasks were complex and involved a good degree of customisation. Intergen and ECan have a good relationship established over several years and were able to work closely together to nail improvements to a number of workflow processes.”
Currently at the settling in phase, attention now turns to leveraging other functionality where possible, and the scope is wide open.
The Gain
Environment Canterbury has continued to leverage their IT investment. The upgrade to Microsoft NAV 5.0 delivers a solid and fully supported platform for the future.