NaviPartner’s new retail solution, Dynamics-Retail.com, was designed to meet some key characteristics – to be cloud-based, to take advantage of Microsoft Dynamics NAV and the open source e-commerce platform Magento, and to allow for rapid setup.
The Copenhagen-based firm has chosen to host its new offering on Azure using the new Dynamics NAV Managed Service offering. Dynamics-Retail.com combines NaviPartner’s POS solution, NP Retail, with NP Ecommerce, which integrates Magento and Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Dynamics-Retail.com was designed as a unified platform that gives companies one solution for physical shop, web shop, bookkeeping, administration and warehouse management. One of its key value added features is the streamlined and automated setup of the full integrated solution.
“We [have packaged] it together so you have an ERP system, and in it you have a POS and you have Magento on top of that,” says Mark Stewart Pedersen – owner/CEO NaviPartner. “So directly out of the box, you can [deploy] it in six seconds and you are then running with a web shop and a full ERP and a POS.”
Pedersen said NaviPartner was able to get its POS running on the web browser-the first time that had been done.
“One of the biggest advantage of getting it into the browser is that now you’re able to run it directly in Azure, so we’re not replicating, we don’t have anything locally. You’re running it directly on the NAV client, running in the cloud,” Pederson says, including on tablet devices like an iPad.
NaviPartner is also one of the early adopting partners for Microsoft Dynamics NAV managed service for partners, which enables partners to host multi-tenant NAV-based solutions on Azure with new administrative tools, licensing, and cloud support provided by Microsoft.
For NaviPartner, Dynamics NAV managed service is an onboarding time saver.
“It’s really simple to onboard people because [we] don’t have licensing in a normal sense, you are able to buy it per month,” Pedersen says. “Normally with NAV, even though it’s ready for the cloud, you still have to buy a license, upload and if you want another user, you have to go in and . . . buy a new license. So it’s not so much a technical issue but from an onboarding perspective that the managed service is good.”
“We are controlling the licensing ourselves,” Pederson continued. “Before we couldn’t just give a price per month per user. We can do that on the managed service. But this is more for our sake than the client’s sake. How fast can we onboard them? We are in a market where people want to launch next week. And in the old days we couldn’t do anything until we bought the license. This is brilliant for the retail business because you can scale it up the weeks before Christmas and then in a dull February, you can scale the system down again.”
Although NaviPartner rolled out Dynamics-Retail.com about six months ago, the managed service piece was just added in November, Pedersen said.
“Right away when it was launched, we contacted Microsoft and said we wanted to onboard this concept,” Pederson said. “And it saves us time because the licensing is a big issue in a classic environment. Of course, it’s good for the customer, too, because you can give them one price and we can save a lot of time in the admin part of it. We haven’t seen the full value in the market yet because it’s December and companies don’t want to talk now. But it will definitely speed up in January.”