Get ready for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009
Business Process Based User Interface
With the Role Tailored User Interface (UI), Microsoft Dynamics assumes a
trendsetting role within business management solutions and puts people first!
The Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 RoleTailored UI is derived from the
philosophy that human resources are, and increasingly will be, more costly
than computers and software. Lots of investigation among Microsoft Dynamics
NAV users proved the fact that much human time were spent getting around in
the system and retrieving data from the system.
As a direct consequence, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 has radically changed
the basic structure for its user interaction. It is designed to help you
tailoring the UI around the processes and tasks that users are responsible
for in their daily job life, freeing time for other assignments. Benchmark
studies prove that the new Role Tailored User Experience provides a unique
user interface with increased productivity and a greater job satisfaction!
The basic paradigm is to promote simplified processes for each individual in
a company. Ideally users need to have all the information and access to
functionality that they need right at hand, no matter the current process
situation, ensuring tasks expedite fast and efficient.
UI Supporting Individual Tasks
The key entry point for the user is the personal Role Center, at where
you will find all key information and action access collected in a nice and
easy comprehensive overview. The Role Center will help the user to
prioritize important work and quickly access key tasks. The Role Center can
further be integrated with Microsoft Outlook and whatever other solutions
the specific user needs in the job situation.
From the Role Center you have access to the List Places and Task Pages
relevant for the user’s job responsibilities. The List Places presents
overview of a specific business goal (e.g. all open sales orders), relevant
additional information and functionality access. The Task Pages is where you
perform the actual tasks (e.g. create the sales order) and should, like the
List Place include the relevant information and functionality access. Common
for all UI presented to the user is that the information and functionality
reflects exactly the processes and tasks of the specific user’s business
goal. No more, no less.
But the Role Tailored UI is worth nothing without solid knowledge of the
user’s requirements, their goals, processes and tasks put into the design.
Without comprehensive data and analysis of this, you will not be able to
create a User Interface that is better than the Classic Client. It will be
different, but not more efficient!
To inspire you, Microsoft has created a large number of Personas (model
users) compiled from research in a wide selection of companies worldwide.
The Customer/Persona model is a valuable tool in your process of
understanding the concept of role tailoring, but it does not give you the
design for your users. This is where Roletailors.com comes in to apply
expert knowledge to you on how you leverage the Role Tailored Client to your
business and your customers.
For succeeding with a role tailored User Interface, the effort you put into
understanding your users is crucial. The clearer the user’s processes are
peeled from impact of their current solution and appear purely in the
context of the company’s business goals, the more precisely you will be able
to tailor an efficient User Interface and successfully reach the goal:
Minimizing the human time spent on each user process!
The Evolution of Navision
The successfull classic character based edition of Navision, which was a user friendly and easy to manage client/server solution. Relased in the late 1980'ies.
Navision Financials was the first ERP solution for Microsoft Windows and was released in 1995. This screen shot is from a later release named Navision Attain.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 4.0 and 5.0 added the familiar Outlook menu structure to the user interface.