Consultant Selection for Microsoft Great Plains
 by: Divine Rigor

Microsoft Great Plains is a software package designed to integrate different processes of a business entity. Its numerous capabilities made it more popular than ever before for small to mid-sized companies. Some of the areas that Great Plains cover include Customer Relationship Management, Inventory Management and Retail Management.

Almost all of your critical business data will reside in this software investment. Therefore, careful planning and extensive analysis should be performed before deciding whether or not Great Plains is the right solution for your company. This is where you would need somebody who has the right knowledge who would be able to help you determine your specific needs. But how would you determine the right consulting partner for this critical business need?

Consultants differ in a number of aspects including geographical coverage and consulting fees. Below is an overview of consultants based on our experiences:

One of the many consultant profiles includes huge and established companies like CBIZ. There is almost a guarantee when you work with companies such as these. The drawback however is cost. Big companies tend to be very expensive when it comes to consulting fees. In some cases, these big corporations would have regional offices to help cover a certain geographical area. Unfortunately, most of the times, you tend to repeat your story to each regional office, especially in the case of a multi-state business that is covered by different regional offices.

Individual consultants are what we would normally call ‘heroes of the IT world’. They are experts in their own rights and have more of a personalized approach when it comes to consulting. Cost is also not an issue compared to huge businesses. However, since they cannot afford to do a huge marketing campaign for their services, it is hard to find one.

The new trend in business consulting seems to be that of remote support. IT companies have come around and they recognize that to be in business, they need to be seen nationwide and should offer affordable services without sacrificing quality. Through remote support (VPN, remote desktop connection and various web-session technologies) companies have become successful connecting to their clients without the need of travel. This setup is both beneficial to the company and the consultants. Alba Spectrum is one of the companies pursuing this business model.

Need more information?
Contact us: 1-866-528-0577
[email protected]

For customization work and advice, please contact Andrew Karasev, Alba Spectrum Chief Technology Officer. His works include development of applications with the use of Dexterity, SQL, C# .NET, Crystal Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK.

About The Author

Divine Rigor is the Technical Writer for Alba Spectrum Technologies USA ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ), a Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization company. We are based in Chicago with locations in California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York and contacts in international markets.

[email protected]