We’re going to look at the Dynamics NAV client. It’s easy to see the mind behind NAV when we look at the Departments. We have the following in the native install:
- Financial Management
- Sales & Marketing
- Purchase
- Warehouse
- Manufacturing
- Jobs
- Resource Planning
- Service
- Human Resources
- Administration
The Departments page looks like this:
NAV maps the corporate mind into these categories. Outside of customization and specific additional activities, this covers it all nicely.
Financial Management deals with the General Journals and the way everything posts to the General Ledger. It’s interesting to see how everything can be reduced to a journal entry (i.e., for a sale) that posts to the accounts for Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Inventory, Revenues, Costs, and all other buckets into which the accountants want to divide the company books.
But all of those things occur without much detail. The accountants just track the dollars (or Euros, or Clams, or whatever). However, other departments in a company want to track detail.
The Sales & Marketing department keeps track of individual customer orders by salesperson and items sold and quantities, and even who paid for the shipping. Of course all of these activities filter, eventually, to the General Ledger, but only after a tortuous path that goes through the sales process.
Purchasing looks pretty much like Sales & Marketing, but for vendors and items the company buys.
Notice anything about the sales order and the purchase order? They look pretty similar. I think the designers intended that… not to confuse people, but to imply that this is a functionally similar business transaction: one goes out, one comes in. One deals with customers. One deals with vendors. Both use Items but in opposite directions.
The same is true of data structures. Customer data schema look a lot like Vendor data schema. Sales Order Header data schema look a lot like Purchase Order Header data schema. You get the idea.
So while there are thousands of tables, there are only a few score of novel ideas. There are more patterns than surprises.
And that’s what you need to see when you look inside NAV.