The Dynamics ecosystem love to complicate things. And now with the AX 2012 R3 it can really get complex, with the biggest codebase ever. The more functionality we demand to get into Dynamics AX, the better it will become, and the more we can sell, right?

Wrong.

Simplicity wins. Every time. (iPod, anyone?)

As a Dynamics AX “expert”, I get to hang out with other Dynamics AX “experts” (and we act all clubby and hip and cool like it’s some secret club – but it really is). In those circles I get to see and hear a gajillion awesome features that allows us so solve ANY problem. (Basically because the solutions is sets of LEGO-bricks we are selling, and you can build anything with LEGO)

Oftentimes, many of the solutions is over-complicated complex. For the ones that isn’t, the difference between a winning or losing solution invariably comes down to simplicity and elegance.

The Fix

Look folks – if we want to win in the ERP-marketplace, we must focus more on simplicity (twitter’s 140 characters anyone?). A few things to think about:

– What EXACTLY is the problem we are trying to solve? Do a lot of people have it and want it to go away?

– What’s the CURRENT way our customers treating the problem? THAT’S our competition – it’s their next-best alternative relative to your proposed solution. THAT’S what your solution has to beat (both from a capability and cost standpoint including accounting for switching costs).

– What’s the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM solution you need to put on the market to solve the problem? BUILD THAT and validate you have a solution that works.

Stop making solutions so hard, complex, and confusing. We are wasting investment dollars that instead could be used for marketing and scaling our much simpler (and cheaper to build) alternative solutions.

Create solutions that only require a few weeks of implementation time, and that is so easy to use that it can be trained in minutes.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
– Leonardo da Vinci