Jobs in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017

Recently, Encore hosted an event: “What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017”. We presented the best new Features in Dynamics NAV 2017, including improvements to Jobs. Enjoy!

Video will start playing at the correct point in the presentation.

Transcript:

So, as many of you probably know, Jobs is one of my favorite modules within the NAV list of modules and functionality. And I’m happy to say, and you’ll be happy to hear, at least our job-based clients, that it got a nice little facelift for the 2017 version. So what I wanna do is kind of walk you through some of those changes to the job module. And, yeah, show off a little bit of what’s now available.

So specifically, we’ve got a few things. We’ve got a newly redesigned Role Center. So now you can subscribe to the Project Manager Role that’s gonna show you all the cool things that you see up here. And we’ll step through to those things one by one. We also have a newly-redesigned Job cards, so presenting a whole lot of the information about the job, a little a bit better. All right, on that Job card is also pretty cool new stuff.

You’ll also see we’ve got a couple of buttons on that homepage that indicate new processes are available as well. So there’s a new Job Setup Wizard, as well as a Job Closing Process that better ties and integrates into WIP. And also quick access to things like running process like creating invoices out of the job modules as well.

So I’m gonna walk through all of those. I’m not going to go through detailed discussion of WIP. There’s just too much detail, so I’ll keep it a little bit high level. So a couple of quick things to note on the Role Center for the Project Manager…One, I’ve got all of the relevant links that a project manager or anyone running a job needs to know about as well as you can see lists of jobs, the various tasks, access to sales invoices, purchases orders and whatnot, as well as resources and items. Time sheets is on there too so we don’t have to navigate around looking for those things anymore. They’re defaulted here right in my navigation pane.

In the activity section, I’ve got sort of two sections. The blue tiles at the top indicate, effectively, list or filtered list based on a certain stead of circumstances. You can see within my list, I don’t have a lot here, although I do have a nice indicator showing me that I actually have a job that is running over budget. Like all the tiles that you’ve probably seen in the later version of NAV, you can click on that, get a quick view as to which job that is.

You also have just to kinda show it off, a couple of ways of presenting lists, if you haven’t noticed before in the 2017 version. I don’t have a lot here but you can see I can kind of toggle in between in on how I want that list to be presented to me. Constantine is gonna show a little bit more on that, and we will launch into that specific job later, and see why it’s over budget and where.

The next section, the green tiles here represent actions that I can take related to jobs. So we will hit this button here and create a new job. Notice as I hovered over, it actually tells me what function is. So for on-boarding purposes and training purposes getting people familiar with the activities that they’ve got available to them, it’s become a lot easier because that constructions is right there for them.

And the other thing that we’ve got now here is also the Jobs Listing down at the bottom. So previous to this, we always had customers and vendors and items. Now I can cherry pick the specific jobs that I’m really interested in tracking, throw them right down into my Role Center, and I get interesting little KPIs right here that tells me what’s my rough percentage complete based on cost, as well as what percentage of the overall job have I invoiced.

Likewise, just to quickly show you, you can manage that list like you used to, those that are familiar. You guys select My Own Job. I do have the opportunity here to exclude it from the KPIs that I’m going to show next. So I don’t want to clutter KPIs too much. I want to keep it focused on DEERFIELD and GUILDFORD projects. But I want to see Aaron’s job in my list. And there we go it’s added to…add to the list of jobs.

The KPIs that you see here are largely presenting a couple of different things. First one is the Price to the Budget Price. So what you are budgeting or planning to bill a customer versus the data that you are accumulating that you are going to bill the customer. And there can be difference between the two. Top right shows me my projected profitability so far. So blue shows me revenue, cost to date, and then profit margin, which is negative at this point largely because I just haven’t billed this project yet, as per list tile right over here. And then in the last one here, my actual cost related to my budgeting cost. So, really how I’m truly tracking from a cost perspective against this project and we can see that I am going over a little bit.

One quick thing to note, I’ll quickly point this one out. While we have these actions down here in this green tiles, we still have the Actions ribbon at the top, which I can click on to expand, and they do a little bit of redesign on this certainly in the Web client. I think it’s in the Windows client as well. Instead of hitting a number of different tabs like to navigate to, say, the Reports section, you’ll notice it’s all drop-down-menu based when I click on Job Reports, which I really like so you don’t lose context of where you were in that ribbon. You got to quickly see there’s My Report and you get to pick from this list rather than jump in from tab to tab, which is kinda cool. Really small subtle change but aesthetically, it becomes a lot easier to work with.

These KPIs are interactive as well so I said I was gonna launch into this one. So I’m want to look at my actual cost to my total cost. And let me just refresh a few things here. And I know we have a number job-based deployments in the room and customers here. Anyone care to point out a few of the changes that they’ve made to this one. There’s some pretty obvious. No?

Female: [inaudible 01:47:35]

Aaron: Tasks right on the job card. I know that’s a big one. Maybe not for you guys because you have so many of them but for a tighter task list, really quickly being able to see these and how we’re tracking against the job right on the Job card is a big kind of a deal. Otherwise, I normally navigate to the Job Task and then take a look at everything there. So that’s one really interesting thing. I still can do that, launch into the regular job task list if I wanted to see or get a little bit more real estate on that one.

They’ve added a Project Manager to this as well, and that Project Manager is largely tied to what gets presented on your own personalized homepage…a bit smaller. Within the Job Tasks, it’s kinda of a small and subtle change but they’ve started calling the budget, the Budget. It’s not called Schedule anymore. So, again another really small thing but one that we had to go through and train people from the very beginning, no, budget doesn’t actually mean budget. There is no budget column. It’s called Schedule.

And by the way, if you want to bill something it’s called Contract. It’s not called something that’s billable. Well, they’ve changed that just to make it a lot easier for people to understand and use. So finally, I don’t have to answer the question anymore to people assessing NAV, budget is just called budget, and billable is called Billable Activity. I actually got quite a bit of applause when they first launch it.

The other thing, another sort of no-brainer-type change that they made is on the statuses, again, a little small one. The Open Jobs or what the previously called Jobs on Order are now called Open Jobs. So again, a little bit more obvious that the jobs that you’re working on or that you can’t post to is open, not order. Like I said, small and subtle, but a big step in terms of overall usability.

We have some new Fact Boxes on right of the card…if I can get to the button there. So you don’t have to hit statistics anymore like I’ve used to had to do to when you wanted to this type of information. So I can see my Budgeted Cost by Type. So what I’m budgeting for resource and versus items and G/L Accounts. I can see it really quickly there’s probably my biggest problem in terms of budget to actual is I’m overspent on my resources. So we got a couple of new Fact Boxes that help as well.

And for organizations that like to do quoting based on jobs, there is a New Quote Report. I’ll just quickly show you what that one looks like. There we go. So, new standard quote reports so you can bill these jobs or bill the budgets for the jobs in here, and then send them out to the customer right off of the job instead of having them mock something up in a sales order that wasn’t necessarily tied to the actual job itself.

So I said we’d create a New Job using the Job Wizard. So let’s go back to the homepage and do just that. So it guides me through a couple of steps. Yes, I want to create a new job from an existing job, because of my Copy Budgets. I’ll let it default my number…Oops…And let’s see who we’ll bill it to, the Elkhorn Airport. And it guides me through who I do want to copy it from. We’ll copy it at that, from GUILFORD one, and I’m gonna include everything, one of these also. There we go.
My Job has now been setup. It launches the job for me as well, right away. And it pulled in, as you can see, all of the entries that I had asked. And if I quickly specify that I am the project manager on it, and close that, we can now see it show up on my homepage here. Okay.

So, it was that one. And then likewise creating these sales invoices from Jobs also, a simple click of a button and it guides me through the process to create that sales invoice. I’m gonna do it for the GUILFORD job as well. You could do it for all jobs at once. And now my invoice has been created. We leave this guy right here…And there we go. And at that point, of course, I can set the customer [inaudible 01:52:41].

And that’s it for Jobs. So a couple of little things but certainly helped out in the overall usability of the jobs themselves. So, I think, Constantine, I’m over to you now.