Archive for April, 2013

Transport Management in Dynamics Ax from Synergy Software Systems, Dubai

April 29th, 2013

Transport Management Solution for Microsoft Dynamics AX
Manage the key aspects of your transportation network with our integrated material management integrating warehousing and transportation, and vehcile management solution. We offer the ability to plan vehicle routes whether long-haul or multi-drop local delivery and track delivery progress in real-time to measure driver performance built in the Enterprise Dynamics Ax multi company, multi geography system.

• Ensure high Fleet utilization
• Management of enquiries, quotations and sales orders.
• Management of Full Shipment and Grouped Shipment.
• Unified fleet Multi-company or Travel Subcontracting by trip segments.
• Assignment of vehicles and drivers.
• subcontracting all or part of the journey.
• Trip Monitoring
• Outlay Control in trips: gasoil, motorway toll, etc.
• Drivers Liquidation.
• Incidence control: Manage aunexpected events (crashes, fines, etc.). delays penalization, etc.
• Consumption Reporting.
• Gain visibility of in-transit vehicles and products
• Optimize shipments by consolidating orders taking into account transportation constraints.
• Connect transportation activities with the rest of your business; dock management and trailers in-transit visibility.
• Plan land verify loads (Load Management).
• Handle seamless load sequencing, order planning and picking to those loads (Order Management)
• Plan routes (Logistics Management)
• Cross docking, handle the transportation costs associated
• In-Transit status, location
• Statistics,
• Shipment traceability

Some key aspects;
Garage Module:
Preventive and accidental maintenance of tractor units.
Stock control in garage.
Repair external vehicles (automatic turnover).
Waste control of each vehicle.
Incident control of each vehicle.
Control of external garage.
Supplier orders.
Contract per month (fix fee) or per service.
Revisions control, transport cards, credit cards, etc.
Reporting on consumption,

Interfaces with external applications:
MS-MapPoint Interface calculates mileage and time.
Petrol Pump Interface that imports data consumption when you close travel sheets.
Petrol Stock Control.
Interface with different GPS systems: trip tracking, driver settlement, costs and consumption control.
Graphic Monitoring of vehicles on the way.
Web System Interface to consult the trips in real and historic time and tooffer trips to external drivers.

Report and analyse:
Integration with Analysis Services. Integration with Reporting Services.
Integration with WSS y MOSS.
Cost and incomes analyse.
Real and projected statistics of kilometres.
Goal and measures Analyse based on KPIs.
Configurable dashboards roles.

And of course you get all the standard Dynamcs Ax features -multi dimension and multi company financials. Management reporter, CRM, HR, Project Accounting, and if you need it Retail, Lean manufacturing, SharePoitn integration, Lync integration, Outlook integration, Excle and Word integration, Case management, Graphical workflow engine, full PO cycle with vendor approval, encumbrance accounting, PO budget control, rfq, Vendor Portal, and much, much more.

To take your transport business into the 21st centruy call us. 0097143365589

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Posted in Microsoft Dynamics Ax

Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 on SharePoint 2013

April 28th, 2013

The Microsoft Dynamics AX team has released a hotfix that will allow customers and partners to install Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 on SharePoint 2013.

Steps to install Enterprise Portal on SharePoint 2013

1. You must install one of the following updates if you plan to run Enterprise Portal on either Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013, or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. Choose an update that matches the SharePoint version on which you plan to deploy Enterprise Portal.

· Update for Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2013 (KB2767999)

· Update for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 (KB2768000)

2. After you install the SharePoint update, you must run the SharePoint 2013 Products Configuration wizard.

3. Download and install the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 setup hotfix (KB2830441).

4. Download and install the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 claims-mode authentication hotfix (KB2823664).

· For more information you can read this article on TechNet “Deploy an Enterprise Portal site that uses forms-based authentication”

5. Reboot the server and then install Enterprise Portal. For more information about how to install Enterprise Portal or Enterprise Search, see Install Enterprise Portal and Install Microsoft Dynamics AX Enterprise Search.

Alsso see article on TechNet : Enterprise Portal on Microsoft SharePoint 2013

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Posted in Microsoft, Microsoft Dynamics Ax

Has your ip address been pinged recently?

April 28th, 2013

A home science experiment that probed billions of Internet devices reveals that thousands of industrial and business systems offer remote access to anyone.

HD Moore, a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the Internet around the world

On Tuesday, Moore published results on a particularly troubling segment of those vulnerable devices: ones that appear to be used for business and industrial systems. Over 114,000 of those control connections were logged as being on the Internet with known security flaws. Many could be accessed using default passwords and 13,000 offered direct access through a command prompt without a password at all.

Results he published in January showed that around 50 million printers, games consoles, routers, and networked storage drives are connected to the Internet and easily compromised due to known flaws in a protocol called Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). This protocol allows computers to automatically find printers, but is also built into some security devices, broadband routers, and data storage systems, and could be putting valuable data at risk

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Posted in Uncategorized

Management Reporter RU5 – now released

April 27th, 2013

Management Reporter RU5 brings new features to Management Reporter users, and support for two additional countries.

Key features in Management Reporter RU5 include:
• Collapse detailed report into summary view – Any report displayed in the Web Viewer can automatically be collapsed into a summary view; Management Reporter report designers will no longer need to create both a detailed and summary view of the same report

• Default Report Link Location – when storing reports in a SharePoint site or network location, use the new default Report Link Location to easily indicate where most reports should be stored by default
• Management Reporter Web Viewer as default – the default report viewer for Management Reporter users has been changed to the Web Viewer, allowing reports to easily be viewed in the newest interactive report viewing experience. Customers can still open any report in the Management Reporter desktop viewer.

• Report Designer available in Dynamics AX menus – Launch Management Reporter Report Designer from with Dynamics AX General Ledger and Budgeting
• Storage of transaction detail reworked – Transaction detail for each report is stored with the data mart database, and no longer duplicated in the Management Reporter database. This means the size of transaction-level reports is significantly smaller and the Management Reporter database will not increase in size as additional reports are generated and stored
• Language support for Brazil — customers will now be able to use Management Reporter in Brazilian Portuguese
• Language support for Japan – customers will now be able to use Management Reporter in Japanese
• Improved quality – fixed a variety of customer reported issues, including addressing issues involving SQL collation conflicts and data art data integrity

• MR Documentation Installation, Migration, and Configuration Guides now available for download: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5916

• Using Management Reporter with Dynamics AX is easier than ever now that you can launch Management Reporter Report Designer from the menus in both Dynamics AX General Ledger and Budgeting. Only users that have permission to design or generate reports in Management Reporter will have the menu item available.
This video shows how you’ll be able to launch Management Reporter from within Dynamics AX 2012-

How do I get this new Dynamics AX functionality?
Use the following steps to load the Dynamics AX hotfix that adds the menu items:
• If you are on Dynamics AX 2012 R2, then follow the steps in KB 2840107 in order to download the prerequisite update to Dynamics AX.
• Apply the update to Dynamics AX.
The hotfix will be included in Cumulative Update 6 for Dynamics AX 2012 R2
After the hotfix is installed, yet – you will have menu items available but those are not yet configured to launch Management Reporter

Do I need to do anything in Management Reporter? • Management Reporter needs to be updated to Rollup 5 (2.1.1037.12) or later.
• To finish setting up the Dynamics AX menu items, you will need to use the Management Reporter Configuration Console to publish the location of the MR server into Dynamics AX using the “publish server connection” action.
• Once this has been done, the Management Reporter server address and the default company will be supplied by Dynamics AX.
• The Management Reporter client will need to be installed where the Dynamics AX client is installed. This can either be on local machines or on one or more Terminal Servers.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Happy St George’s Day to Englishmen in Dubai

April 23rd, 2013

Depictions of Saint George slaying a dragon often include the image of the young maiden who looks on from a distance. The standard interpretation of the image icon is that the dragon represents both Satan (Rev. 12:3) and the Roman Empire. The young maiden is the wife of Diocletian, Alexandra. It is likely that Saint George was born to a Greek Christian noble family in Lydda, Palestine, during the late third century and he was raised as a Christian and alter became an officer in the Roman Army.

In Ad 302 Diocletian issued an edict that every Christian soldier in the army should be arrested and every other soldier should offer a sacrifice to the Roman gods of the time. However George objected and approached the Emperor and ruler. Diocletian, George loudly renounced the Emperor’s edict, and in front of his fellow soldiers and Tribunes he claimed himself to be a Christian and declared his worship of Jesus Christ. Diocletian attempted to convert George, even offering gifts of land, money and slaves if he made a sacrifice to the Roman gods. The Emperor made many offers, but George never accepted.

Recognizing the futility of his efforts, Diocletian had him executed for his refusal. Before the execution George gave his wealth to the poor and prepared himself. After various torture sessions, including laceration on a wheel of swords in which he was resuscitated three times, George was executed by decapitation before Nicomedia’s city wall, on April 23, 303. A witness of his suffering convinced Empress Alexandra and Athanasius, a pagan priest, to become Christians as well, and so they joined George in martyrdom. His body was returned to Lydda in Palestine for burial, where Christians soon came to honour him as a martyr

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Posted in Dubai and regional news

Why do we need a methodology?

April 21st, 2013

Excel is one of the great boosters of individual productivity. So why do auditors treat it with suspicion despite usually being expert users themselves?

One problem is that very few people get formal training in Excel. If they do, then the training will cover navigation and features like use of formulas or pivot tables, formatting etc and be far too short with little evaluation of training effectiveness, or time for structured practise. How many people have been trained how to design a spreadsheet? Most of the design guidelines come from, yes you guessed, audit companies and many of those guidelines are frankly awful and lead to bloated sheets that are difficult to audit and to validate. If an accountant uses pencil and paper to total a series of numbers then it is normal practise to do a square check to ensure that adding across and totalling gives the same result as adding down and totalling across. In Excel the extra work to do this is trivial ….but who ever bothers?

Estimates are that as many as 70% of Excel worksheets contain calculation errors. The problems often manifest when someone else uses a spreadsheet they did not design. a row of figures is the sum of the columns above, but in one cell maybe it was just typed in without a total. When you are doing a one off exercise that may not matter, but its not the basis for a business system. When you do a budget for a group company with 10 companies each with 10 departments and each department with 10 cost centres you have a 100 spreadsheets to check, and to maybe adjust and to combine with cut and paste or look up formulas. Then you go to version 2 or 3… and that is when mistakes creep in. That is why tools like Prophix have such an impact on the the accuracy and speed of the budget process, plannng, forecasting and month end processes. Standard templates and workflow automation minimse the risk of error while also reducing administrative workload and time.

Over recent weeks there have been several articles in the financial press challenging a research paper linking % GDP debt to declining growth rate. A paper, written by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, and published in 2010, stated with authority that growth rates for countries where debt was over 90% of the GDP was 1% slower than it would be otherwise.That analysis may have seriously misled global economists and politicians since 2010 about the growth of companies in a time of debt. Their reasoning and evidence has become a foundation of the arguments for spending austerity and debt reduction in the developed world, especially in the EU. The Greek Irish, Spanish and portuguese and even Cyprus debt crisis might have been handled differently without it. It has now been discovered that it is riddled with methodological errors and inconsistencies, one of which is a fairly bad error in an Excel spreadsheet used for part of the calculation

Some of the blame has been put on “Excel Error”, “Flaw in Excel Spreadsheet” etc rather than the more accurate version of the truth which is a combination of some peculiar mathematics, some strange and poorly-explained methodology, and the calculation logic used. Excel gave the right answer for the calcualtions it was tasked to perform. The error was in the question. Just because you can calculate to many decimal places does not mean the assumptions or the logic behind the formulas are correct.

There have been some previous spectacular disasters blamed on Excel:
– a first-year associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton made an Excel reformatting error that mistakenly added a massive 179 contracts to an agreement to buy Lehman Brothers assets,
– JPMorgan lost $6 billion in 2012 on a credit-derivative bet due to an incorrect risk calculation on an excel spreadheet that drastically underestimated the risk,
– The same company admitted misreporting their ‘Value at Risk’ risk exposure for years due to an Excel error.

Excel is a tool, and like any tool can be used well or used badly. We suffer the same problem with the misuse of mrp and find a warehouse full of stock or system drowning in expedite messages. There is a right tool for the job, and a right way to use it. Scoping, Analysis, Design, Test, Training, Audit, are all familiar terms and the right way is usually the cheapest and fastest in the long run.

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Posted in Project Management

Dynamics Ax compatibility updates Apr 2013

April 21st, 2013

Enterprise Portal in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 now supports SharePoint 2013You must install one of the following updates if you plan to run Enterprise Portal on either Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 or Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. Choose an update that matches the SharePoint version on which you plan to deploy Enterprise Portal.

Update for Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2013 (KB2767999)
Update for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 (KB2768000)

After you install an update, run the SharePoint 2013 Products Configuration wizard.

Download and install the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 setup hotfix (KB2830441).
Download and install the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 claims-mode authentication hotfix (KB2823664).

Reboot the server and then install Enterprise Portal.

—-

Dynamics AX 2009 with SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2012 SP1. – Required Hotfix with KB Number: 2836535

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Posted in Microsoft Dynamics Ax

Virtualisation, latency, bandwidth, memory – how to improve performance. Ask Synergy Software Systems

April 18th, 2013

SQL server 2012 is a super product – when you use it for an enterprse application you have to think about how to set up SSAS, SSRS, SSIS etc, then how many instances: production, test, training development, clustering etc.

If you are to avoid a proliferation of servers, and the associated costs, of hardware, energy, data centre space etc then virtualised systems are increasingly the answer. SQL server performance is significantly affected by virtualisation – at least 15% with best optmisation and as as much as 40%.SQL will also grab any available memory at the expense of other systems.

Bandwidth comes at cost. High latency and low bandwidth can stop your applications- and bandwidth is expensive.

There are ways to configure SQL, and specilaist tools that can be used to reduce the problems, and the ccsts and to speed up performance to keep users happy and the business operational.

It has been well established that server virtualization makes the most of the IT investment. However, because Virtual Machines (VMs) share server and storage resources, the only way to get the full value of virtualization is by reducing latency while increasing through.

You can improve the efficiency of all VMware ESX/ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual platforms by optimizing reads and writes for increased bandwidth to VMs, and eliminate application bottlenecks and enable more VMs on a single physical server.

Similarly, across your network you can improve performance by shaping and prioriting packets of data, or by caching regularly sent data. Previously only hadrware absed soltuions were available. Now there virtual solutions that offer even more benefits. Let us analyse your network traffic to assess the perfomance improvements that are possible.

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Posted in Technology

BYOD? Mobile Security and management? Ask Synergy Software Systems for a solution

April 18th, 2013

More than 1.2 billion smartphones will enter the market over the next five years. ABIResearch.

This influx of mobile devices will forever change how business information is disseminated and stored.

According to projections from an Enterasys survey, three out of four individuals believe their enterprise will implement BYOD policies. The same individuals are concerned about mobile device security. With crucial personal information — including financial and medical data — and business information living on smartphones, it’s vital that businesses implement solutions and services that improve mobile security.

What happens if your device is lost? Stolen?

A competitor who accesses all your sales contact data?

A terrorist who gets hold of a mobile device belonging to a security force, an airline official, or a government officer?

Can you track the phone?
Can you disabe log on remotely or wipe the hard disk?

As an IT manager how will you restrict what applications can be used, what phone numbers can be called, what geofence area is allowed?.

Can you remotely deploy upgrades and patches or enforce password policies?

Can users log support calls and get support remotely?.

Are your expanding the use of mobile devices in your ognsiation? Do you need to simplify the management and improve the security?

Ask us about our low cost solutions that are fast and easy to deploy.

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Posted in Technology

Prophix Faqs – Business Modelling

April 13th, 2013

BUSINESS MODELING
1. Q: is Prophix software majorly designed for business that are looking to profit or gross?
A: No bais. Prophix can be utilized for any industry including not-for-profit and can analyze, report and budget on various data – financial, operational, metrics.

2. Q: Hi, Ibehind this suite is there ny programming language?. How complicated would it be to implement a complex business rule like for example an allocation cycle of indirect costs? Thanks!
A: Complex business rule calculations are genrlaly straight forward using the PROPHIX Business Process Manager with no programming language knowledge is necessary.

3. Q: Can you explain Officeintegration, specifically Excel?
A: Import from Excel, save report to Excel, add to a report binder, Offline budget capabilities, and attachment within ‘comments’ to name but a few of the Excel supported features.

4. Q: there is a “Show MDX” in the right click menu, does that mean you can write custom MDX queries for some things?
A: That is correct, but let me stress that custom MDX queries are NOT required to use PROPHIX. MDX is the behind the scenes coding andi sgenerated, invisible to users.

5. Q: Does Prophix include depreciation tables/Tax alternatives. Inventory, Cost of sales..Fifo and
Lifo conversions?
A: The solution does not come pre-loaded with depreciation tables etc, but those can be imported and/or processes can be established when required.

6. Q: What experience do you have with manufacturing companies?
A: We have a lot of experience. Talked about benefits of Prophix from a manufacturing
perspective and also recommended to take a look at our case studies. Also said I would
pass on to Sales Rep.

7. Q: Does the software already have some formulas included (i.e. depreciation schedules) or do all these formulas need to be created by the admin?
A: Certain calculations are established when using tools like our process manager to manipulate data. Other calculations will be created by the administrator, like depreciation schedules so that these can exactly reflect your companies processes.

8. Q: Can Prophix handle a fiscal calendar with 13 periods?
A: Yes it can handle a fiscal calendar with 13 periods.

9. Q: do you have predefined setup’s for industries and/or strategy templates for different business types? How are you reducing the setup effort for your clients?
A: We do not have predefined setup’s for industries however we have a proven rapid implementations and get the client setup quickly through harnessing our intuitive wizards in the software. We use wizards for building the models, importing data and for conducting mass data adjustments etc.

10. Q: In doing an ad hoc report, if a new account has been added in from the general ledger, then will it update in the report as well, without having to update the report when a new account is added in? For example, if you have a detailed report of the lowest level of the accounts, then will it also be displayed , even though the report had been saved?

11. A: Yes, through our dynamic capabilities if a new account has been added into Prophix
from the general ledger, then it will automatically update in the reports . That avoids having to open and to alter each existing report when new accounts are added.

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Posted in Corporate Perfomance Management