Forum Energy Technologies (F-E-T): Upgrading NAV 13 to Business Central 14

In episode 20 of “Inside Dynamics Communities,” Ryan Gonzales, Senior Sales Director, Dynamics Communities and Summit NA, and Pam Misialek, Community Director, Dynamics Communities and Summit NA, host Forum Energy Technologies (F-E-T) employees Jessie Sanger-Picard and Rama Kadiam, who discuss F-E-T’s migration from NAV 13 to Business Central 14.

This episode is sponsored by Summit North America, the largest independent gathering of the Microsoft Business Applications ecosystem, taking place Oct. 15-20, 2023, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Register today to connect with thousands of users across the Microsoft business applications ecosystem at the for user, by user event.

Highlights

00:53 — Forum Energy Technologies is a global oilfield products company that serves sectors of the oil and gas industry including drilling and production infrastructure. Pam asks Jessie to explain how F-E-T uses Business Central.

01:24 — F-E-T has about 80 ledgers — mostly finance, but others are for operations. At any given time, there are 500 concurrent users in the system. Since the company is global and has various product lines, users are logging into the system from all across the world.

02:20 — Rama describes Forum Energy Technologies’ process of migrating from NAV 13 to Business Central 14. The first step, she explains, relates to customizations. The team ensured that while migrating, all customizations stayed the same.

Further, the team added some extensions while upgrading, and plans to exclusively utilize extensions in the near future. Furthermore, the next step in the migration is code conversion.

05:21 — Pam asks Jessie and Rama if there were any major lessons learned during this migration. Jessie explains that there were some third-party extensions and systems used. F-E-T did not change any of the extracted files, but also “didn’t vet them well” during testing. When F-E-T went live, a lot of this got rejected, she explains.

Additionally, Jessie explains that during the migration, F-E-T had to update its Avalara code to an extension, which also wasn’t vetted deeply.

08:14 — These are a few of the things Jessie wishes F-E-T would have dug a bit deeper into while testing, but notes that the organization does very extensive testing of the BC system on a regular basis. As it relates to testing, during the second round, user acceptance training (UAT) and training were grouped together, but separated during the third round.

10:35 — The biggest difference between NAV 13 and Business Central 14 relate to navigation. F-E-T encouraged users to spend time every day testing the system, getting familiar with it, because its more about “getting acclimated to the look.” Personalization, she explains, was another issue with the new version.

12:57 — In closing, Jessie and Rama emphasize the importance of testing because “the more you find out before you go live, the less you have to deal with after you go live and it makes your life a lot easier.”