Global Deployments of Microsoft Dynamics NAV: Users Discuss Localization, Performance, Synchro Challenges

If your company is running Microsoft Dynamics NAV in more than one country - or it's planning to - you've probably experienced, or are experiencing, some challenges with the international installation.

At the very least, you probably have a number of questions you'd like answered. Such was the case with members of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV User Group who were participating in an online meeting about international deployments of Dynamics NAV.

The fact is that multi-national companies can benefit from a consistent approach to their ERP deployments. For one thing, complexity will be decreased and user productivity will be increased, making for a more operationally efficient organization.

Common obstacles: localization and inventory

But there are barriers that these firms have to overcome before they can successfully install Dynamics NAV in other countries. For example, one member of the group had a question about implementing Dynamics NAV in an EU country.

"We have visions of a global solution and the first obstacle we hit was a question of how many databases, how many servers, where to locate everything," he said. "We originally had this vision of one database serving the global company so obstacle number one was how to set up and how to handle localization. The second obstacle was this vision of this global inventory where we could be in North America and we could have a view of inventory globally. But we quickly learned that we might need to do something there because the file system really belongs to a company. So it's [our country] being one company and North America being one company and each is going to have its own file system."

The problem stems ...