Calico Cottage tackles big challenges with customized NAV end user training

The Challenge

As the world's largest provider of fudge making ingredients, fudge making equipment, and fudge merchandising expertise, Calico Cottage’s unique, on-site fudge-making retail programs are used by retailers throughout the country.  Calico Cottage depends on its Microsoft Dynamics NAV (formerly Navision) solution for daily operations, so when problems with the NAV implementation began to mount, the company brought in Tom Montoya, an experienced NAV veteran, to get things back on track.

As Senior Vice President of IT, Tom was tasked with identifying the specific problems with the implementation and getting them corrected as quickly as possible.  After assessing the status of the implementation, Tom determined that the development effort required to address the issues with NAV would be significant, so he felt the company would be best served by bringing it in house, rather than continuing to have it done by Calico’s NAV Partner. He then set about hiring two experienced programmers.

Because the issues with NAV were affecting the company’s operations, Tom’s primary goal was to hire developers who get up to speed as quickly as possible. With his NAV background, he knew that finding developers with strong NAV experience would be very difficult, so he felt that it would be more effective to hire developers with strong programming backgrounds who could then be trained in NAV.

Once he had hired his development team, the next step was to find adequate NAV training—training that would get them to a level that would enable them to effectively deal with Calico’s implementation. They would be facing a difficult project, so they needed to be well prepared. The problem: There are very few options for NAV training for end users. “From what I knew through my years in the NAV community, training for end users consists mostly of online, self-directed courses that start at too basic a level for experienced programmers and don’t go deep enough,” said Tom. “To be a strong NAV developer, you need focused, in-depth training, and it needs to be in-person—with someone who knows NAV inside and out.”

The Solution

As Tom searched for options, he stumbled quite by accident onto what appeared to be exactly what he was looking for. While browsing Mergetool.com for information a product he was interested in, Tom noticed that the company offered NAV Developer training classes. After reading the description of the offerings, Tom was very excited at the possibility that he had found a solution.

Mergetool.com offers a series of courses on C/SIDE, the development environment for NAV. Courses range from an introduction to C/SIDE to specialized courses working in a “lab” environment on specific topics. Unlike other providers, however, Mergetool.com’s offerings included courses for end users with NAV development licenses. The one-week, C/SIDE RTC Bootcamp was designed to bring developers with programming experience up to speed on C/SIDE, ready to take over some or all of the NAV customization their company requires.

Mergetool.com also offers customized courses and can teach courses on site, using real-world scenarios and the end user’s data, which meant an even faster ramp up for Tom’s team. “I wanted my guys to walk out of NAV training and hit the ground running,” said Tom. “If we could get on-site training that was customized to our issues, we would be way ahead of the game.”

What made Tom even more confident that this was the right direction was the instructor, Mike Doster, a  Lead Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT). With 16 years of experience in NAV, Mike has provided training for 75 NAV Partners and more than 200 end-user installations. He was the lead trainer for NAV Development in the US for 3 years and has written much of the course material and development tests for all the Development courses, including the Development exam for C/SIDE Solution Development in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 and the Dynamics NAV 2009/Sharepoint Integration course material. Mike has received the Top Instructor award for Microsoft Dynamics NAV from Microsoft.

In addition to his experience as a trainer, Mike is himself an experienced NAV developer, successfully working on small and large projects in all areas of NAV. He has successfully upgraded many clients and has acted as a consultant to partners and clients in setting up development standards and best practices for NAV development.

What made Mike even more appealing was the wealth of training materials at his disposal. As an MCT and because he actually wrote much of the material available today, he was in the unique position to customize course materials to fit the needs of the students. This was something Tom was not able to find anywhere else, and with two developers to teach and a very aggressive timeline, a customized course would be the best option. Tom also decided to have Mike come to the Calico Cottage headquarters to teach the course. On-site training would allow Mike to use Calico Cottage’s current implementation, giving Tom’s staff direct and practical applications for their training, rather than theoretical scenarios with hypothetical data that they would have to apply to their system later. 

The Result

As promised, Tom’s developers were able to gain a deep  understanding of C/SIDE in a very short time. In just one week, they not only learned C/SIDE, but they were even able to make significant progress in understanding and addressing problems with the company’s current implementation. 

Three short months later, Tom’s team discovered fatal flaws in the original implementation and determine a plan of action.  Without the intensive training provided by Mike Doster, Tom estimates it would have taken a year or more of attempting to resolve the issues with the original implementation, possibly never being able to resolve them. The team would have spent considerable time working on “surface problems” while never making it to the core issues.  The team was able to assess the core issues with original implementation, determine that they needed to start over with a fresh implementation, and then were able to begin proactively planning it. 

Tom and his team have been delighted with the results of Mike’s training. The payoff has been far greater than he anticipated. “Not only was Mike’s training less expensive than anything else out there—IF there had been anything like this for end users, but the time we saved in ramping up skyrocketed, so we made a very wise investment,” said Tom.

There have also been other cost-saving benefits to getting the right training: The company will save time and money with a more effective NAV implementation, and Tom’s team, once they have completed the implementation, can work on opportunities to make the company even more profitable. Mike was able to take him team from stuck to fixing, from reactionary to proactive. 

“With Mike’s help,” Tom says, “we’ve moved from not being able to answer simple inquiries—‘How many widgets have we sold this month?’—to planning more projects and additions, such as e-commerce and CRM. I couldn’t be happier.”  

Related resources

• A list of scheduled classes can be found here