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User Group Summit North America 2019 Preview: Learning from other GP users is a big plus

by Linda Rosencrance
Contributing Writer, MSDW

Editor's Note: MSDynamicsWorld.com is collaborating with User Group Summit North America to explore the upcoming conference in a series of preview articles.

One of the focus areas at October's GPUG event at Summit North America centers around Microsoft Dynamics GP upgrades. Bryan Robertson, Director of ERP operations at SBA Communications Corp. is one of the experts who will be presenting a session in the upgrade track. He spoke with MSDW about his involvement in GPUG Summit.

It all begins with planning

Robertson is a GPUG Chapter Leader for South Florida. He also sits on the group's Board of Advisors and the Summit planning committee and a recipient of the GPUG All*Star Award from Summit 2018 in Phoenix. At Summit 2019, Robertson has helped select sessions for the upgrade track. He will also be presenting.

I was on the planning committee responsible for reviewing the proposed presentations end users, partners, and consultants submitted for the upgrade track and helped select the topics being presented. I am also kind of a central point for many of the questions coming from the Summit website. I tend to get various emails from users with different questions regarding what the best hotels are. I am also working on the first-time attendee's reception. For the most part, I help wherever I can to ensure Summit is the best conference experience for attendees.

Robertson has worked with Dynamics GP for about 15 years, starting out with a small Microsoft partner supporting the accounting needs of an order management system.

[They were] a small ISV and they had an add-on product for Dynamics GP that integrated the order management system with GP. I started learning GP at that point to support customers. Then I went to GP boot camp and started dabbling in a little bit of sales, implementations, and training.  I have been working at SBA going on 12 years. SBA operates across North, Central and South America and we have a large, very complicated GP environment. I am the Director of ERP Operations and we support 165 users across all GP environments – so much more than just Dynamics GP. I oversee all of our enterprise resource planning systems, so our Dynamics GP, Microsoft CRM, our SharePoint – most applications within Office 365 with exception to Outlook. We deal a lot with Microsoft Flow, and PowerApps, the assortment of Office 365 applications, and Power BI.

We also have multiple content management systems and probably 20 or 25 homegrown applications we have built outside of GP, which feed data into GP. As well as 35 to 40 other applications, we support whether they push data into GP or just simply for the Accounting department. So, anything as it relates to accounting or any resource planning system kind of falls under ERP operations.

Planning for an upgrade

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Dynamics GP GPUG GPUG Summit 2019 Software UG Summit 2019
About Linda Rosencrance

Linda Rosencrance is a freelance writer/editor in the Boston area. Rosencrance has over 25 years experience as an reporter/investigative reporter, writing for many newspapers in the metropolitan Boston area. Rosencrance has been writing about information technology for the past 16 years.

She has covered a variety of IT subjects, including Microsoft Dynamics, mobile security issues such as data loss prevention, network management, secure mobile app development, privacy, cloud computing, BI, big data, analytics, HR, CRM, ERP, and enterprise IT.

Rosencrance is the author of six true crime books for Kensington Publishing Corp.

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