So one of the areas that Microsoft is saying it has improved in Dynamics NAV 2016 is eServices. The statement of direction defined this as adding to its capabilities in two ways.
The first in its support for electronic trading specifically in support of some European government standards like Poppel. While I’ve never come across this particular standard in the UK we obviously have many EDI standards of our own that we do need and this should allow us to adapt a more standard approach to EDI using Microsoft's routines and validation instead of our own.
The second is in my view even more interesting as its support for polling third party services and retrieving information back into your core Dynamics NAV system. The example quoted is to access and update currency exchange rate tables but I think that’s not a great example as most companies only have two or three currencies they trade in and only change the rates once a month at most. That means it's probably not worth the setup for the benefit.
What this technology could be used for however is other areas with higher volume and more benefit.
- How about accessing a credit agency to get the current credit rating for all your customers and maybe invoke the required amount of credit Insurance automatically?
- Or filing sales invoices with your invoice discounting company as soon as they are raised again fully automatically.
- Then a big one that would save vast amounts of time would be retrieving price and availability information from multiple suppliers for each stock unit each time is displayed on screen.
- Or going to a vendors quality service and retrieving the certificate of conformity data needed for lot information.
In fact it's not hard to think of loads of situations where data has to be taken and input into your Dynamics NAV system manually at the moment that could be automated and made real time by using this new eServices functionality to access other company’s web services.
Which takes us to the second thing you need to think about. How long before you have to publish a web service to you customers to remain competitive? You have the technology to do that using Dynamics NAV’s web services but do you have the data quality to trust it being used in decision making processes for your customers? If not it's time to put that right while you still can.
Note
This post is part of a 9-part series. A link to all the posts in this series are below (updated as published);
- Intro
- Part 1: First Public Sight
- Part 2: Dynamics NAV 2016: Functionality
- Part 3: Dynamics NAV 2016: CRM
- Part 4: Dynamics NAV 2016 : Office 365 with PowerBI
- Part 5: Dynamics NAV 2016: Workflow
- Part 6: Dynamics NAV 2016: e-Everything
- Part 7: Dynamics NAV 2016: Windows
- Part 8: Dynamics NAV 2016: Engineering
- Part 9: Dynamics NAV 2016: Azure