University of Washington and Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012
University of Washington's two largest self-sustaining units UW-IT and UW-EO had urgent needs to implement financial ERP in the short-term and form project partnership, while UW central administration decided to focus on HR/payroll.
As part of the solution, we recommended utilizing data partitions, which empowered the holding subsidiaries to:
- Share IT infrastructure across independent businesses.
- Achieve strict data isolation across businesses.
- Reduce TCO for managing IT infrastructure.
Over 120 processes were in scope to be implemented across general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, cost accounting, project accounting, fixed assets, services management. In addition, over 30 integrations were in scope to connect to and from Microsoft Dynamics AX. See Integration for more information.
Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 was selected because:
- Highly flexible chart of accounts and account dimensions
- Simplified integration with other Microsoft products such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint®, Microsoft Dynamics CRM®, and Microsoft SQL Server® Reporting Services—all of which we run in production
- Software with processes focused on public sector needs such as fund accounting, commitment accounting, grants, etc.
- Highly configurable to minimize customizations
- Powerful and flexible workflow
- Application integration technology to allow data exchange with external systems through web services or middleware such as Microsoft BizTalk®
As part of the solution, we designed two major customizations that built on the standard functionality and can be easily upgraded and utilized by other clients with the same business needs:
- True multiple funding sources (customers) to a project (without funding rule, priority, maximum amount and percentage, which is only a partial solution for ‘services’ projects). This allows any project contract/customer to be selected for any project, so a project can be set up as a service to be billed to various customers, which works perfectly in a services environment. This customization was a solution for a deal-breaker and beyond Microsoft’s willingness to consider as a standard solution. Our solution made Dynamics AX work seemingly easy for the University of Washington, while complexity was dealt with in back-end.
- Enhancing standard financial dimensions framework by allowing priorities logic through setup, avoiding time-intensive customizations due to the complex nature of integration framework (see illustration below) and enabling end-to-end processes (procure-to-pay, order-to-cash and project management and accounting flow) consistent use and tracking for financial dimensions, which is crucial for University of Washington's fund accounting and is applicable to many organizations outside public sector that want to utilize the robust functionality of financial dimensions.