At Water Cooler Firm, SharePoint 2010 Helps the Dynamics GP Data Flow

When a group of serial entrepreneurs decided to launch a water cooler company five years ago, they knew they had to choose an ERP platform that would start the fledgling venture with the right processes, yet be robust enough for the big enterprise they expected it to become. They believe they made the right call.

Not only is Primo Water Corp., which has already tallied $50 million in revenues, happy with Microsoft Dynamics GP. The Winston-Salem, N.C.-based company also is pleased with Dynamics GP's integration with SharePoint 2010, which it has been beta testing since last January.

"SharePoint 2010 gives us the ability to provide access to real-time information to more people, and it makes the whole process easier," said Mick Gunter, Primo Water's senior vice president of operations.

Previously, employees had to log on to Dynamics GP to see GP-generated reports but now Primo Water can use SharePoint to distribute reports to anyone, even those without GP on their desktops, he said.

Primo Water is just beginning to take advantage of this improved collaborative capability via SharePoint but already SharePoint is helping the company to solve problems by involving more people in discussions, Gunter said. For example, Gunter showed inventory figures to some employees without GP access last week and they looked at the charts and knew right away that something was amiss, he said.

Another key SharePoint 2010 addition is PowerPivot. This analytical tool is powerful and easy to use and reduces the need for upfront IT configuration of custom databases or creation of special data views, he said.

"We're getting data way closer to the source and making it available to far more people with much less effort with ...