Microsoft Great Plains is main Microsoft Business Solutions product, targeted to mid-size companies. Currently Microsoft is in progress of transforming several ERP products it has: Microsoft Great Plains, Solomon and Navision into several business suites - Microsoft Financial, Microsoft HR, Microsoft Manufacturing, Microsoft Logistics.

These suites may be (in the future) put together and work for your company as integrated ERP solution with web interface (Microsoft Business Portal). If you are midsize company with some manufacturing - you should make the research on light manufacturing packages available on software market. In the case of your commitment to Great Plains (if you use it as your accounting system) you should probably first answer this question - do we need full featured manufacturing or we should implement just bill of materials and have missing functionality be filled with custom Crystal Reports and light Dexterity customization?

And one more thing to consider - Microsoft Manufacturing will be more likely build on Navision manufacturing base. If you have process manufacturing - you should not implement GP manufacturing - it is discreet manufacturing.

If you answer yes on most of these questions, you do need manufacturing

• Do you need Manufacturing Resource Planning?

• Are Cost Centers required?

• Do you base your production on the specific Sales Order?

• Do you track working shifts and allocate the cost?

Now - this is what you can have in Bill of Materials

• Samples bills of materials - to do the replacement of the items

• Purchasing configuration, based on ABC codes and other criteria

• Historical bills reporting

With Crystal Reports you can have this information, having just Bill of Materials

• Sales/profitability by customer, item, region or custom criteria

• Future Sales predictions, based on your criteria

• Employee time and cost allocation

• Simple Cost Centers, based on product line, specific order or other user defined information

Good luck with your research