So you’ve had you Dynamics NAV system for a few years now and your data volumes have steadily grown. Trouble is, reports that once ran in an instant now take many minutes and sometimes hours. You end up having to wade through lots of old accounts and items which long ago stopped being used and have even been blocked but still appear in all the default unfiltered lists.
So there’s two halves to this – the master data and the transactions.
The master data records can be deleted (admittedly one by one by default), as long as there is not a transaction for them in a financial year that has not been closed. Be aware that the deletion locks quite a few tables for a while (as the associated transactions are deleted) and may stop some reporting working. A sales invoice cannot be printed once the customer has been deleted for instance and if you need that for your VAT records you could be in trouble.
Often its better just to get the default lists to not show blocked records and leave them, remember you can set a saved view to include them if you might need to get them back.
The second half of this question are the transactions – here there is better news in that there are standard date compression processes to consolidate the transactions. Don’t forget that most totals in Dynamics NAV are made up of a sum of all the relevant transaction so deleting item ledger entries from a decade ago will affect the quantity it shows on inventory now, for instance.
What the data compression process does is delete the detail and replace it with one entry that keeps your current values correct. That means all the sales to a customer years ago can be replaced with one, making your data much smaller but still keeping the reporting integrity. Better still you can compress the data for a particular transaction for a date range, and so slowly work your way through year by year because again it will take a while. Practically, for a lot of companies it’s an overnight process they leave running; if you’re a 24×7 business then this is a process for most of your public holiday’s or shut downs.
The value of the detail warehouse ledger entries (so internal warehouse movements) ten years after the event are surely limited. Limiting your data will make the system perform better especially for reporting. Regardless, you will have to do it one day, so I would advise you determine a policy and start it now before complaints about poor performance force your hand.
Author: James Crowter
I’m passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. For the last twenty five years I’ve worked to help organisations of all sizes and types implement the ERP & CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. I’ve seen that work unbelievably well and enabled those organisations to rapidly grow but I’ve also had some hard projects over that time where it’s felt more like warfare at times.
Since 1996 (and version 1.01) I’ve been working with a small Danish product called Navision that’s now become Microsoft’s Dynamics NAV and I’ve also been using and consulting around Microsoft CRM since 2005. As managing Director of one of the longest established first Navision and now Microsoft Dynamics partners I’ve been involved in the complete history including numerous product councils and system design reviews. It’s my privilege to know many of the key Microsoft executives and product designers and have insight into both where the products are now and their future direction.
So colleagues & clients have asked me to start this blog to share some of the insight that both this knowledge (obviously where not restricted by NDA’s or client confidentiality) and experience can help. Specifically I want to concentrate not on the specifics of how (there are some great blogs already for that) but why. If any user helps their business make better decisions or consultant can give better advice then that will be objective achieved.
I founded Technology Management in 1992 and have led from the front ever since. Helping clients use technology to grow their business is my passion through explaining technology in terms that everyone can understand.
My interest in computing began at the age of eight, long before my school had the equipment to cope. Throughout school and university I developed software commercially.
I hold many IT certifications, such as Microsoft Dynamics NAV (for over 17 years), Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for over 10 years), as well as Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange and SQL. In October 2015, I was awarded the title of Most Valuable Professional (MVP), a title given to a select few individuals (31 currently) across the world specifically for Dynamics NAV.
After years of working with a range of distribution and manufacturing software for hundreds of organisations, I focus on understanding the business requirements of an organisation, what it will take to deliver the systems required to maximise their potential.
Follow me online via my other social channels:
- Twitter: @jamescrowter
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jamescrowter
Or email me directly at james[.]crowter[@]tecman.co.uk.
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