I'm looking for an ERP tool for a video games development company. After a lot of searching & reviewing, Business Central is looking like the favourite, and from the guarded hints I get from sales people it looks like it matches our size and budget. It's a company of around 300 people (resources), of which up to 50 actual users will log on as finance and project managers, and they have 15-20 project running concurrently, each game using a team of 5-50 resources for up to a year.
I believe BC will cover their company accounting requirements, so I want to ask about the project management requirements. They want to manage project accounting in BC, but the day-to-day task management will be in a separate tool (Jira), and I don't think will require integration i.e. the tasks don't need to be tightly managed in BC, just represented in a rolled-up way, maybe as development phases for example, "concept", "pre-production", "production" etc.
From my limited learnings of BC, it looks to me that Jobs can represent projects, Job Tasks can represent the phases I mentioned, and Planning Lines can represent resource costs, overheads, budgets, actual costs, revenue such as milestone payments etc. They will need some form of visual interface for regular resource allocation and I've found some add-ins that look like they will do that job. The business is very much project-based not product-based, but I'm told they can switch off or hide parts of the product that don't apply to them.
The problem is, I get a different response from every implementer/provider I've spoken to. Some say this approach should be fine. Others, as soon as I mention the word "project" tell me I need Dynamics Finance & Project Operations, which is way out of our budget (as far as I can gather), and seems ill-suited to a one-location small business. Once even told me, "I think Microsoft do something called 'Project'"! Is this just front-line sales not understanding the product?
My sense is that BC is completely capable of handling their requirements if the resource management add-in I mentioned works out. I keep hearing that BC is only good for about up to 50 users though, but no reason why - is that the case? I'm worried that daily assignment of 300 resources will be too much for the system - e.g. 300 people * 240 days * 5 years = 360,000 Planning Lines - is that too much for BC to handle? Surely not given the tech behind it?
Can anyone help answer these questions? Is anyone running a similar setup, at least in terms of scale? Given the size of the company it seem a bit crazy to have to implement F&PO, so if BC really can't do it, it's back to the drawing board!
Thanks, Pat.
