There’s a dangerous trend in the ERP service industry. I frequently encounter this when I’m speaking with client sites that’s asking to migrate to Navision and existing Navision clients asking us for support.
One of the first things we do when we walk in to a new client was to ask questions. Why are they switching? What is your current problem? Why are you doing certain things the way you do it? When going through the questions, one of the more common responses I get when we talk about their existing process in the system is “That’s just the way it works”.
Really? Is that really the way it works? Is your business not running efficiently because that’s just the way it works? Are your competitors gaining market share while you’re losing market share because that’s just the way it works? Are your customers buying from your competitors instead of you because that’s just the way it works? Is there nothing you can do to find out more because that’s just the way it works?
More often than not, the response they received when they’re processing a particular function in the system are given by their software consultant. As experts in the system that was implemented, there’s not much the clients can go by in terms of verifying whether the consultant’s response is accurate or not. There’s not much reason to doubt the reponse given.
This is a lazy consultant’s response. Your consultant is basically saying “Don’t bother me, you’re not important enough for me to find an answer so I will just blame it on the software”.
There are questions that are totally out of the consultant’s field. That’s understandable. Everyone gets stumped, even the most experienced Navision implementors and developers. There are some instances where the the consultant’s hands are tied, like functions related to the executables which we can’t modify. But it’s the consultant’s job to give you an satisfactory answer on why things are the designed the way it is, or if there’s no answer, what are the work arounds or if it can be reported to Microsoft as a future update.
Working with Dynamics NAV (Navision) a little more than 12 years, I know enough that 99% of the coding in the system are there for a very important reason related to your business and the best business practice. And with Microsoft Connect, there’s an outlet to make suggestions to improve the product that you use.
Especially with an open source software like NAV, there’s no reason that you, as a customer, should accept answers like that. That’s just the way it is.
