10 Reasons for Migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central - Cloud

Migrate from Dynamics GP to Dynamics 365 Business Central and empower your business with automation, advanced tools, and simplified business operations. In this blog, we will explore whether you need to migrate or not and the top ten reasons why it would be beneficial to make the switch to Business Central from Dynamics GP.

We are living in an era where automation is helping us simplify our personal as well as professional lives. There are a lot of complex activities that we have simplified using automation. In our daily lives, we use devices like automated appliances, smart devices, self-driving cars, and a lot more.

When it comes to leveraging automation in business, we can successfully eliminate recurring tasks, manual errors, and complicated operations using automation.

Are you utilising automation in your business?

If not, you are far behind your competitors and can achieve exponential growth that can be attained using modern business solutions embedded with AI and automation.

No doubt, Dynamics GP is a powerful ERP solution that has been helping you for years to grow your business. But modern business challenges and fluctuating customer needs have outsmarted the capabilities of Dynamics GP.

To meet the cutting-edge competition and eliminate modern business requirements, Microsoft introduced Dynamics 365 Business Central as an all-in-one cloud-based ERP solution with modern tools and capabilities to offer automation and flexible user-based subscription licencing.

Businesses that embrace advanced- technology and system flexibility have started moving from Dynamics GP to the Business Central cloud. This migration lets businesses avail themselves of top-notch features that can simplify entire businesses, connect different departments, and boost revenue generation.

Before we move on to understand the top reasons why businesses are migrating to Business Central, we must understand a bit about Dynamics GP.

Origin of Dynamics GP

In February 1993, a company named Great Plains developed the application Dynamics GP. In late 2000, Microsoft purchased Great Plains. Since its inception, Dynamics GP has become one of the most popular options for managing enterprise resource planning. With time, Dynamics GP changed its features and became indispensable for several small to medium businesses.

However, with time, the requirements started changing. Companies began looking for better scopes with advanced digital transformations to achieve more.

What is Microsoft Dynamics GP?

Dynamics GP, also known as Great Plains, is an ERP solution capable of managing and streamlining the entire business. However, it is specifically built for small and midsize businesses with complex finance and supply chain capabilities.

Generally deployed on-premises, Dynamics GP tracks all processes to make the business efficient and productive to deal with day-to-day operations. Also, it comes with flexible integration capabilities that allow businesses to integrate native solutions with ease. You can easily integrate Power BI, Microsoft Outlook, and SharePoint with minimal effort.

Dynamics GP can help you with:

• Accounting and Finance
• Supply Chain Management
• Inventory Management
• Project Management
• Data Reporting and Analytics
• Sales and Service

What is Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, formerly known as Dynamics NAV or Navision, is a modern cloud-based ERP solution specifically built for small and medium businesses. It streamlines, connects, and manages different business departments and boosts business growth with a collaborative approach.

Based on Business Central licencing, it comes with different modules to simplify operations, including finance, supply chain, project management, manufacturing, customer service, and advanced reporting.

Business Central is the solution for modern businesses that leverages the latest technologies of AI, BI, ML, and IoT to offer automation, seamless integration, extensive customisation capabilities, a user-friendly interface, and advanced data reporting.

It offers the following benefits to businesses:

• Centralised Data
• Real-time Data Insights
• Enhanced Cash-flow
• Improved inventory control
• Unified Customer Data
• Cloud-Based Capabilities
• Total data security

Why should you migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central?

The mainstream support of all Dynamics GP versions has ended, and extended support is soon going to end. The mainstream support contains all the major software updates and upgrades that are essential for the business to sustain changing business needs. And extended support contains primarily security patches.

With the end of mainstream support, you will have to face a lot of system complexity that can make your business unstable due to an inefficient ERP solution. Also, you may have to suffer from:

• System redundancies
• Low business growth
• High operational costs
• Business complexities
• Low growth opportunities

If you want to eliminate such factors and boost your business growth with modern tools and capabilities, you should consider migrating your system from Dynamics GP to Business Central.

Once you migrate, you will be able to avail of the following factors:

• Meet modern business demands
• Get a unified solution
• Extensive customisation capabilities
• Seamless integration
• Hassle-free updates and upgrades
• 24*7 Microsoft support

See Also - Why Small Businesses Should Migrate to Dynamics 365 Business Central Now?

Benefits of Dynamics GP to Business Central Migration

There are numerous benefits to moving from Dynamics GP to Business Central, among which some of the major ones are discussed next:

• Avail Automation

Leverage automation to enhance overall efficiency and productivity while eliminating manual and recurring tasks from the system. Also, it will help you reduce the manual errors in the system to make operations run smoothly regardless of system redundancies.

• Powerful Data Reporting

Analyse and build data reports to properly utilise the information, along with understanding the business as well as customer needs. You can even go for a Power BI integration to get advanced data analysis and visualisation capabilities.

• One-click Integration

Business Central comes with seamless integration extension technology that lets you integrate the required business solution from the Dynamics 365 ecosystem with ease. Also, third-party solutions can easily be integrated using APIs without writing a line of code.

• CRM Capabilities

D365 Business Central comes with the basic CRM (customer relationship management) capabilities that are sufficient for a small business. These standard Dynamics CRM capabilities will let a business manage customers and offer the highest level of satisfaction.

• Scalable Solution

GP is an on-premises-based ERP solution that needs a huge investment to scale its performance. But D365 BC eliminates all such costs with cloud-based deployment, which empowers businesses to scale the hardware, software, or entire system with minimal investment and a high ROI.

• Low Maintenance Cost

With Microsoft cloud-based ERP solutions, you don’t need to worry about updating or upgrading the system to make it more user-friendly. Microsoft will take care of all such updates totally for free and will not hamper your existing business operations, resulting in almost zero maintenance costs.

Top 10 Reasons of Migrating from Dynamics GP to Business Central

Business Central is a modern-day solution that understands business requirements and transforms its capabilities via customisation's and integrations to become a perfect ERP solution. Currently, there are numerous reasons that justify a business’s decision to move from Dynamics GP to BC. Some of the major reasons are:

1. Perfect Cloud Solution

Unlike Dynamics GP, Microsoft Business Central is a perfect cloud-based solution for small to medium businesses. As a result, the business owner can use the software anytime, anywhere, 365x24x7. Even one can use the Windows system or iOS desktop, laptop, mobile, or whatever to access the data by downloading it from the Windows Store, Apple Store, or Google Play. Whereas Dynamics GP is not a suitable cloud solution, and Microsoft has already stated that the upgrade is still not in their plans. So, GP is not an ideal option for modern technologies, businesses, and tools.

2. Business-Centric Technology

Microsoft Business Central is a next-generation application that is easy to customise. One can customise any screen and enhance business efficiency. It has a user-friendly and intuitive look.

3. Automatic and Free Updates

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business central upgrade is free of charge. As a result, you don’t need to pay again and again to upgrade to the updated version. Isn’t it a great way to get a good return on investment?

4. Easy Migration

If a business needs to implement a new ERP, staying with Microsoft will make the migration process more manageable. Automated data migration tools can migrate all data from Dynamics GP to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The most beneficial part is that the data migration will be for the master data, or standing data, and the transactional data that has been done in the long past.

5. Scalability

Business Central gives a business the scope to flex up or down depending on the requirements of the business.

6. Seamless Integration

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is integrated with other products of Microsoft, like Outlook, Excel, or Word, and most importantly, the Microsoft Power Platform. Hence, it is an easy and intelligent decision to buy all Microsoft products for seamless integration for all operations.

7. Ongoing upgradation

Microsoft has announced that it will release Dynamics 365 Business Central upgrades twice a year to make it business-friendly. This will help to have an Intelligent Edge enhancement and the top features suggested by the GP community.

8. Cost-effective

Dynamics GP is slightly expensive every year. But with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, a business can run an ERP solution cost-effectively.

9. Top-notch Security

If we consider the security aspect, Dynamics 365 Business Central has higher security than Dynamics GP, with various levels of data encryption and secured servers.

10. Developer Community Support

Microsoft Business Central is reinforced by approximately 1,000 dedicated applications that encompass its capabilities, developed by independent software vendors (ISVs). These apps can cover nearly any need, from credit card payments to warehouse management and beyond.

Why should you choose Dynamics Square for GP to BC Migration?

Dynamics Square has been in the business of offering Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation, support, and migration services to global businesses. With over 350 global clients, we have gained extensive experience in understanding businesses and their unique requirements. This lets us understand the core requirements a business requires to surpass the competition and push it towards growth.

With the Dynamics GP to BC migration service, we will analyse your entire system and find gaps where improvements can be made to make it flexible and scalable. Once we have the data, we will move forward to migrating Business Central while carrying forward your existing customisations and integrations. It will help you work using the same system configuration on the same data from day one while employing advanced technology to simplify business operations.

Our certified Dynamics 365 consultants will seamlessly perform the Dynamics GP to BC migration processes while following the Microsoft approved methodology. After the implementation, we will offer you training to help you utilise Business Central entirely.

If you are still unsure whether you need to migrate your system to Business Central or not, feel free to contact us at +44 207 193 2502 or you can write us an email at info@dynamicssquare.co.uk with detailed information.

Read Also - Download our GP to BC migration eBook