Microsoft Dynamics AX was initially developed in Denmark as Axapta and in the year 2002, the company was acquired by Microsoft Corporation. The software was launched in American market in 1998 and now the software supports about forty five languages. The latest version of the software is AX 2011, which has been launched with additional user interface and features to meet the requirements of retail industry and public sector companies.
The software has multi functional modules, designed to meet complex and rare needs of the manufacturing and production units. The common modules are General Ledger, CRM, Bank Management, Accounts payable and receivable, Inventory Management, Master Planning, Human Resource Management, Product Builder, Production module, Administration and Project Accounting.
Some extended features are the shop flow control, cost accounting, questionnaire, balanced scorecards, service management, expense management, payroll management and environment management.
Unique features of Microsoft Dynamics AX
1. Microsoft Dynamics AX provides much drill down features.
2. It provides an appropriate integration of accounting module along with the manufacturing and inventory. In the inventory module, the provision for primary stage picking location, buffer storage, provision for shelves, record of the dimensions of the shelves such as height, width and features such as forklifts and schedule blocking can be done. Axapta can provide recommendation for storing products and picking products.
3. It provides provisions for complex customizations.
4. It can be integrated easily to third party software through the .NET business connector. You can get the web services through the application integration framework and it also provides features to use Microsoft Dynamics mobile tools.
5. It can be used to build enterprise portal using Microsoft SharePoint and the reports are available through Microsoft SQL reporting tool.
6. Microsoft Dynamics AX has high flexibility and scalability.
7. It is very fast in operation. The transactions in the software are carried out fast and the software can be used by more than 3600 concurrent users. When it was launched, it was tested for scalability and it set records for processing more than 300,000 sales order in just one hour.
8. It is priced reasonably and cost of consulting is one and half times more than the software cost. The software comes with options for ten user implementation and also for fifty user implementation.
9. It can be deployed on any database such as SQL Server or Oracle.
10. It has features for multi currency, multi language and it is designed with features to be deployed in many countries.
11. It provides remote access solutions through Citrix or terminal service.
12. Axapta's questionnaire provides automatic questionnaire, which can be send to customers as reminders to get responses.
Disadvantages of Microsoft Dynamics AX
1. It may not be suited for all kinds of industries and the software is basically targeted for certain business types.
2. The add-on support and feature such as integration to third party solutions are offered with low options.
3. The payroll module is not in the core modules but it is a part of other module.