subject: Dynamics Gp Chicagoland Metro Support And Software Development [print this page] Chicago is excellent location for mid-size business engaged in nationwide distribution, packaging, shipping and receiving and manufacturing on order. Implementing ERP applications in such environment is often associated with unique requirements which could not be covered in standard set of modules and popular ISV add-ons. Here good approach would be programming these unique pieces in such tools as Microsoft Dexterity, eConnect, Visual Studio Tools or in VBA scripts in Modifier module. Also when you are running warehouse you are often in needs in certain barcode scanning automation or maybe full size or partial Warehouse Management System. Lets try to review these tools and possible options:
1.Customization or its pluses and minuses. First of all it requires some work before it is deployed in production such as coding, testing, quality assurance. And as it is developed specially for you there is no market to report known bugs and you should expect some software development bugs down the road. Good thing about it might be covering the gap with modest project. You should be aware that future version updates will require customization review and possibly adjustments to make it compatible with the new release
2.Development tools brief review. Lets begin with Dexterity as it is associated with the architecture of Dynamics GP or how it was formerly known Great Plains Dynamics. This is shell written in C++ which was intended to provide abstraction level for business logic in order to neutralize Dynamics from possible future operating system and database platform competition. This was back in earlier 1990th and Dynamics was available those days in Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Dexterity has its own programming languages Sanscript. Dexterity has complete control over dictionaries listed in Dynamics.set file but if you decide to do programming then we recommend you to hire Dynamics GP technology consulting firm as Sanscript is semi-proprietary. Next tool we would like to review is eConnect SDK and it was introduced in earlier 2000th as instrument to address Great Plains from Ecommerce web applications. Currently it is opening most of the core modules and could be programmed by examples available in C++, C# and VB. Perfect programming tool is Microsoft Visual Studio where you can include eConnect libraries and assemblies. Visual Studio Tools is also friendly to developer where you can access existing tables and if required you can create new tables in Dexterity and then address them in VST. And finally we would like to mention Modifier where you can modify existing forms and animate new fields with event driven VBA scripts
3.Dynamics GP in your warehouse. Technically you can attach USB barcode scanner to your computer and use it the same way how you would use keyboard in entering label tag code. But unfortunately GP as well as other mid-market ERP systems might be more geared toward human data entry and processing. This is why we recommend you to consider Warehouse Management System for Dynamics GP which has client software running directly on the scanner OS and Server talking with scanners and Dynamics GP SQL database via ODBC connection
