Dynamics NAV covers the following functional areas inside an organization:
Financial management: Most of the functionalities from "off-the-shelf" accounting software can be found in this module. The functionalities include, but are not limited to, G/L budgeting, financial reporting, cash management, receivables and payables, fixed assets, VAT and tax reporting, intercompany transactions, cost accounting, consolidation, multicurrency, intrastate, and so on.
Sales and marketing: This is for the companies that want to track customer orders and determine when the items can be promised to be delivered to the customer. This area covers customers, order processing, expected delivery, order promises, sales returns, pricing, contacts, marketing campaigns, and so on.
Purchase: This module is required when you buy goods and services and you want to keep track of what you have ordered from your vendors and when the goods should be delivered to your door, so you can make the stuff or ship the stuff to your customers. This area includes vendors, order processing, approvals, planning, costing, and so on.
Warehouse: Where are your items in your warehouse? This functional area answers this question for you. Under the warehouse area, you will find inventory, shipping and receiving, locations, warehouse bin contents, picking, put-aways, assembly, and so on.
Manufacturing: The manufacturing area includes product design, bills of materials, routing, capacities, forecast, production planning, production order, costing, subcontracting, and so on.
Job: This module is typically used for companies that deal with long and drawn out projects. Within this job area, you can create projects, phases and tasks, planning, time sheets, work in process, and likewise.
Resource planning: If your company has internal resources for which you keep track of cost and/or revenue, this module is for you. This area includes resources, capacity, and other tools to keep track of cost and revenue for resources.
Service: This functional area is design for a company that sells items to their customers that need to be serviced periodically, with or without warranty. Within this service area, you can manage service items, contract management, order processing, planning and dispatching, service tasks, and so on
Human resources: This involves basic employee tracking. It allows you to manage employees, absences, and so on.
These areas are covered in more detail in the next section of this chapter.
One of the best-selling points about Dynamics NAV is that it can be customized. A brand new functional area can be created from scratch or new features can be added to an existing functional area. All the development is done with the programming language called C/AL.
When someone creates a new functional area, a vertical (a wide range of functions for a specific industry) or horizontal (a wide range of functions that can be applied across an industry), they usually create it as an add-on. An add-on can be registered with Microsoft, with the appropriate fees of course. If some features are added to an existing area, usually it is a customization that will only be used on the database of the customer who asked for the feature.
Making add-ons available greatly enhances the base Dynamics NAV functionalities to fit the needs of every industry in every business.
One thing unique about Dynamics NAV is that the entire code is located on a single layer. Therefore, if you customize an area, you have to do it by modifying the standard code and adding code in the middle of the standard object definition. This made it a little tough to upgrade in the prior versions of Dynamics NAV. However, with the release of Dynamics NAV 2016, code upgrades can be done automatically using Power Shell! We will dive into Power Shell later.
Dynamics NAV uses a three-tier architecture:
SQL Server is the data tier and is used to store the data in a database.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV Server is the middle or server tier, managing the entire business logic and communication. It also provides an additional layer of security between clients and the database and an additional layer for user authentication.
On the client tier, we will find Windows clients and the web client. Dynamics NAV 2016 also supports other kinds of clients including Web Services (both SOAP and OData), mobile tablets, a SharePoint client through the Microsoft Dynamics NAV Portal Framework, and the NAS service.
You can install Dynamics NAV in more complex scenarios, as you can have multiple instances of any of the core components.