Why upgrade from NAV?
Currently, businesses are finding it hard to continue operating on Dynamics NAV. Held back by mismatched information across the organisation, stuck on old technologies, and difficulties faced with making real actionable insights from their data, many customers have found that Microsoft’s Business Central is the way forward.
This is unsurprising, given the extensive capabilities and integration afforded by Business Central. It centralises your critical business data into a single, easy to use solution, delivering an unparalleled all-in-one platform that helps you prioritise and grow. From the home screen, you can quickly perform actions from headline news, KPIs, action items, business insights and more to drive transformative business results.
Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Support
Microsoft support cycles are based on the release date of the operating version. However, all Dynamics NAV versions pre 2017 are now out with the ‘mainstream support’ offered from Microsoft. This means that nearly all versions are either in ‘extended support’ or ‘beyond’ support, resulting in significant implications as no new design changes or features can be accommodated. Once ‘beyond’ support, further concerns arise as vulnerabilities are increased drastically. Without security updates, your system is at serious risk of failure or downtime.
Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Support definitions:
Mainstream support – The full support offering, with new features, security, and other updates
Extended support – Only security updates
Beyond – No further updates of any kind
As Dynamics NAV has been discontinued, all mainstream support will end in early 2023. It’s clear that for many, the next reasonable step is to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. With its bi-annual upgrades and continuous feature enhancements, you will receive extensive mainstream support from Microsoft and Kick.
Same functionality with added enhancements
You can continue to experience the same functionality expected from your Dynamics NAV with Business Central. It’s often the case that Dynamics NAV users have customised their set-up to achieve efficiencies and the best results for their needs. With Business Central, you can transfer your Dynamics NAV customisations as and when you need to. What’s more, with Business Central’s enhanced capabilities, you may find that you no longer need some of your existing customisations, reducing the maintenance resources required and their associated costs. And with enhanced integration features, you can combine your solution with PowerApps and the entire Microsoft Ecosystem to achieve the very best results from your data.
Flexibility
Adapt to your changing needs with a solution that is built to scale, whether you decide to run Business Central in the cloud or on-premises. That’s because you can personalise the solution to best serve you, your teams, and your business. Create a tailored user experience that is dependent on roles, to streamline commonly required tasks by creating role-specific workspaces and dashboards. This way, key information and tasks are readily available at the appropriate user’s fingertips, allowing them to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively.
Enhanced integration
Using the Office tools that you are already familiar with, you can easily use Business Central to leverage rich insights from a number of key data points. For example, when customers contact you, expandable insights are readily available so that you can see a 360-degree view of your business relationship. Such as showing a full history of customer transactions, invoice payments and more. This enhanced integration allows you to manage accounts more easily, by creating quotes directly within Outlook to send with just a few clicks.
Conclusion
As Dynamics NAV becomes a thing of the past and is no longer securely protected with Microsoft’s support you should be considering the next steps in your Dynamics journey, most importantly, to ensure that you can continue to operate without fear of system failures and downtime. With Business Central’s bi-annual upgrades and continuous enhancements, an upgrade could be what your business needs.
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