The Role Tailored concept
With the NAV 2009 release, Microsoft marketing decided to introduce the concept of Role Tailored ERP. Until now, most ERP systems were module driven, which means that the application has an area for finance, CRM, sales, purchasing, and so on. The access to the individual modules was separated. A purchaser needs to switch to sales in order to see the sales orders.
Most people in a company have specialized tasks that the ERP system should support. In a classic ERP interface, the users would have to decide themselves which parts they need. This has changed.
This is a "purchaser's" Role Center. As you can see, all the information needed by this person in the organization is in one place and usable in a workflow-like way. Also, the Sales Orders are accessible from the main menu. It is completely different to the menu found in version 5.0 or before
However, the Role Tailored concept is not new. Dynamics NAV partners have been implementing it for many years. In the classic menu, it was extremely easy to create new menus and most companies implemented their own menus per role. When the 'Microsoft Outlook' style Menu Suites where introduced in version 4.0, end users could create shortcut Menu Suites and these also quickly became role centers. You can clearly see that the role tailored concept is like coming home for Dynamics NAV.
