Upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Business Central: What Will It Look Like?

Upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Business Central: What Will It Look Like?

If you’re using Microsoft Dynamics NAV—it’s likely an upgrade to Business Central (BC) is in your future. With a big product change like this, you’re bound to have questions—and maybe some concerns, too. At ArcherPoint, we clearly love NAV and BC and believe you should be excited about the move, but we understand your concerns. In this blog series, we discuss a few of the most burning questions we hear from our NAV customers. Our goal is not to sell you—but to educate you so you can make an intelligent informed decision about when, why, and how you should upgrade to BC.

Question #1: Is Moving from NAV to BC Really Considered an Upgrade? Regardless, What’s It Going to Look Like for My Company?

First, there are many approaches to moving from one version of a product to another or from one product to a different one. It gets confusing because they’re all lumped under the term, “upgrade.” In short, it doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is determining the best approach to making the move for your organization. Since every organization is different, dealing with different challenges, budgets, and processes, every “upgrade” will be different. This is also true for moving from NAV to BC.

So, the very short answer to the question of what your “upgrade” will look like is this: The approach you need to take will depend primarily on how old your current version of NAV is, along with the number and complexity of your integrations, your customizations, your add-ons, your processes, and other unique factors. This does not mean an upgrade is impossible or cost-prohibitive!

For example, you might assume that if you have a very large database or a large number of customizations, an upgrade is impossible. Not true. In fact, the ArcherPoint upgrade team recently successfully moved a company with a 3.7 TB NAV database with 1,200 customized objects, 1,544 custom fields, and 9 add-ons…in 9 months…for a fixed fee…and with a go-live runtime of under 2 days. This would be considered by most to be the poster child of the “impossible upgrade” scenario NAV users fear.

What’s the secret? Knowledge. It simply boils down to being educated on what needs to be accounted for AND knowing how to approach each facet of the move. It is imperative to have a partner that understands how to do NAV/BC upgrades inside and out, appreciates the importance of fully understanding not only your current NAV solution, but also how your business operates, and follows protocols and best practices for upgrading.

ArcherPoint’s NAV-to-BC assessment process includes the following:

1. Understand native functionality within BC as there have been extraordinary advances in technology that could benefit your company.

2. Consider the right option for your situation. Options include BC SaaS, BC Azure, BC hosted, BC on premises

3. Work with you on a plan to move your customizations out of the base business logic and translate them into the AL programming language as Events and/or Extensions.

In the next blog in this series, we’ll discuss Events and Extensions—what they are, why you need to know about them, and why you should start Eventing now.

To learn more answers to your upgrade questions, download this free eBook, Upgrading from Microsoft Dynamics NAV to Business Central: Everything You Always Wanted to Know…but Didn’t Know to Ask

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