Dynamics Profile: From IT to Finance, discovering GP success from the user perspective

Contrary to what you might think, Beat Bucher didn't wake up one morning in 2003 and decide he was going to learn something about ERP in general or Microsoft Dynamics GP in particular. It's a story with plenty of chance occurrences, but as with other GP veterans, the allure of a good challenge is too much for some people to resist.

"It was totally out of my control," says Bucher. "I was actually hired in a manufacturing company in Canada as a consultant to fix some process validation in the manufacturing plant. With the production planning, they were using Excel files to do that."

During his first few weeks fixing those reports for his client, a boat manufacturer, Bucher realized that the data was coming out of an ERP system called Dynamics Great Plains.

"I had no clue what that was," he said. "But the director of the manufacturing division wanted to get a better overview and planning ability of his production line and we were using data that was coming from the sales order system in Great Plains to figure out what was required to be sold in the current week and what needed to be produced to respond to the customer sales orders. We sold to other retailers like Sears and Wal-Mart, not directly to users."

The challenge was to automate the Excel reports, Bucher said. The company was running Crystal Reports every morning for the sales and orders, and they had to manually copy the data into an Excel spreadsheet. Bucher reworked that process and within three months, the Excel workbook ...