Managing Your Supply Chain Using Microsoft Navision

The ability to manage relationships with customers, vendors , and others is fully integrated with standardized functionality for supply chain management. This level of integration contrasts sharply with add-on functionality such as a third-party Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application.

Illustrations of integrated functionality include the following.

• Contact Interactions Reflecting Supply Chain Activities . The system automatically records contact interactions involving sales and purchase documents. For example, an interaction may represent sending a document for a sales quote or invoice, or a purchase quote or order. Each document is treated as an interaction.

• Contact Interactions Reflecting Outgoing Calls, E-Mail, and Cover Letters . The system automatically records contact interactions involving outgoing communications initiated from within Navision, such as originating a phone call. Outgoing e-mail becomes an attachment to the interaction. Incoming e-mail can also be automatically recorded as a contact interaction and attached to the interaction.

• Contacts . You can create contacts from existing information about customers and vendors (and vice versa), and automatically create contacts when adding customers and vendors.

• Create Sales Quotes and Orders for an Opportunity . A sales quote can be defined for an opportunity (where the opportunity represents a potential sale to a contact) and converted to a sales order.

• Contacts and Commerce Portals . Business with a contact can be conducted through a commerce portal.

Other relationship management capabilities go beyond these integration features. As part of generating and qualifying leads, for example, you can create a campaign, assign a subset of contacts to the campaign, define a template for sending information (such as mailings or e-mail) or making phone calls, and track responses for the campaign. The system automatically records the sent information and responses as contact interactions. Contact interactions can be manually added, and contacts can include banks, accountants , lawyers , travel agencies, government authorities, press, and others. The system supports the identification and tracking of opportunities within user -defined sales cycles, and recording the related contact interactions. Contact information can also serve other purposes, such as printing labels or exporting data for external telemarketing.