Experience
We recently had a existing customer of NAV call us up and ask us to help them out.  They had bought NAV from a different reseller.  It had taken them a year to implement NAV and now that they were live they had a lot of issues that their current partner was reluctant to help them with.  Talks of lawsuit were in the air.  The deal had been a fixed price deal where the expectations were not managed in the sales process.  The owners were disappointed and the staff was exhausted.  Some departments had seen a 100% turnover.

After discussing with the customer in a few conference calls, they asked us to come up to their distribution center in NC and help them with a few problems they were experiencing in the warehouse.  When they went live with the system, they had tried to do a physical count with the RF guns but failed.  As a workaround they decided to trust the numbers out of the old system and import them into NAV and go on.  Now 3 months had passed and the bank was getting suspicious on the inventory valuation and asked the customer to perform a physical count with an outside auditor present.  Since they had never done a successful physical with the system, they called iNECTA up and asked us to be present and take care of any problems that might arise.
 

JG and GS travelled to NC and met with the project team.  They had a 300,000 sqft. Warehouse stocked to the brim of product.  The receiving had some issues as well as shipping, but product was travelling in and out of the system.  They were using Lanham e-ship, e-receive, advanced warehouse, EDI and advanced forecasting modules.  Since we had scoped our project tightly around performing a successful physical inventory count, we started right away going through the motions of how they would access the physical inventory count journals using advanced warehouse, register the changes and then finally move adjustments from the warehouse module to financials and record.  Matching up GL and Inventory systems before and after.

JG had prepared a VM with all of Lanhams modules running well (available from Lanham) and tested the procedure on the standard system before arriving to NC.  During simulation on customers test system it turned out that when a warehouse employee entered the count in one bin and moved to the next, the count was not reflected in Navision until he hit a hot key and pressed register on the gun.  Then all of the bins were populated and the journal registered.  Moreover, if the warehouse employee was unfortunate enough to loose connection while counting, all of the count would be in vain for that batch and the user would have to start again.  The former solution center had told the customer that this was the way the system works and they would have to live with it.  Showing the customer the way the standard system operated, we realized that this was a setup failure.  The situation was remedied.  This simple solution allowed the customer to perform a successful physical inventory count with less than 5% variance.  The count was done in 2 days time with little to no hick-up.

The owner flew up from FL to be present during this important event.  After noticing that things went flawlessly, he shook our hands and said, “Where were you guys when we bought Navision?”

 

What can we learn from this story?

• Always set the scope for a meeting before hand and make sure the customer is aware of it.  Prepare well and try to stick to the scope during the meeting.
   
• Take your time to explain a process in detail to the customer.  Use documentation, flow charts, screenshots or even videos to make sure the process is crystal clear.  A miscommunication of one critical issue can cause serious consequences.