When it comes to deciding whether to upgrade to Business Central or not, there are many things that need to be taken into account, however in our experience, we have found that many businesses are choosing to upgrade for the wrong reasons.
This is why in our latest blog article, we will take you through some misconceptions about the benefits of upgrading to Business Central and what we would recommend your business to do instead!
Misconception 1: ‘We need to upgrade to support our business changes’
You will find that Business Central is a great product to work with. We would love to help demonstrate to you how certain new features will be of great benefit to your business, however it is important to note that upgrading to Business Central shouldn’t be the default strategy.
What does Advantage recommend?
Once, we have got to grips with the changes that your business needs to make, we will be able to assess the following:
- Whether or not the cost of extending the functionality in your existing system will cost less than an upgrade.
- Whether or not the work needed is so complex that there is no logic to investing the time and resources in doing this in an older version of the product.
Misconception 2: ‘We must upgrade as we need mobile access’
You will find that Business Central is predominantly a web-based product and also has both phone and tablet clients to use. This can give your business many advantages such as making information easily and securely accessible from your phone or any other device.
What does Advantage recommend?
There are no doubts that having the mobile access provided by Business Central is a huge positive in an upgrade decision. However, if you only need mobile access for your sales team then you may wish to consider other options such as the use of a Microsoft Power App.
The use of a Power App can allow you to expand your solution to mobile devices with the added bonus of extra customisation as well as offline mode which may make it more suitable than an upgrade to Business Central.
Misconception 3: ‘We need to upgrade as that is what we have been told to do’
It goes without saying but certain Dynamics partners often inform their customers that their Dynamics NAV solution has run out of support with Microsoft and that now means they will need to upgrade. However, this is not the truth.
What does Advantage recommend?
It is important to take into account that neither Advantage or Microsoft will force your business to upgrade at any point. You will find that being out of support with Microsoft means that no new patches or fixes will be applied to your NAV solution, however Advantage will try their best to continue to support your application.
Therefore, the decision to make the move to Business Central should only be made if it is for the benefit of the business not from an over-eager partner.
Furthermore, unless Microsoft changes the way Windows works by preventing older versions of NAV from running, it could become even harder to find workarounds for your support. Until this point, you are safe to stay put if you wish.
Misconception 4: ‘We must upgrade as want to cleanse our current datasets
It doesn’t come as a surprise but an upgrade is a significant benefit if you are looking to clean up your business data – but not a specific reason for doing so. If you are only looking to remove or archive data then this can be achieved within your current system through the use of a data removal exercise.
What does Advantage recommend?
Granted, it can be often difficult to cut down certain data in your system, however vast quantities can still be removed without much effort. Advantage has extensive experience in reducing the size of customer databases without the need for an upgrade to happen. We work with a whole host of different tools and applications that can be used to crawl your databases and identify exactly which data can be ‘removed without a detailed discussion’, ‘removed with a discussion’ & ‘could be deleted with more consideration and effort’.
The results speak for themselves as some of our customers, we’ve helped to reduce the size of their databases by around 50% without the need to upgrade. In addition to this, making use of a BI tool such as Microsoft Power BI can help to split the data used for reporting from the operational data.
Misconception 5: ‘We must upgrade to improve our overall system performance’
It can be said that certain Dynamics partners tell Microsoft Dynamics NAV customers that if their system performance is poor in NAV that an upgrade will fix it for them. There is some truth in the fact that if you upgrade to Business Central you will in fact see a marked improvement in your overall system performance.
This improvement will be experienced as a result of the new and improved features in the new product that will probably enable you to remove or archive old data or only use fresh data. However, it is important to take into account that upgrading isn’t the only way of achieving this. There are a number of things that Advantage can do to make your system quicker.
What does Advantage recommend?
To help your business to improve the overall performance of your system, we are able to evaluate the environment where your system resides, we can clear down data & we can assess any inefficient code in your system and optimise it. This goes without saying but as a business we’ve made huge improvements to the system performance of Dynamics NAV for our customers.
Closing Thoughts
There are no doubts that making the upgrade to Business Central is a fantastic idea and will without a doubt improve the overall efficiency of your business. However, if you are only experiencing one of the above issues then a sensible thing to do would be to explore other ways of improving your solution as it could work out to be more cost effective than an upgrade.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that has read the above article but are still keen to make the upgrade from NAV to Business Central or would like to book in a Dynamics System Audit with one of our experienced consultants then be sure to reach out to us today where we can discuss your project in more detail.
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