What happens when everything in a company lives inside one person’s head? That person gets sick, takes a holiday, or leaves — and suddenly no one knows where an order stands, what was promised to which customer, or how many items are actually left in the warehouse. This is a very common situation in small businesses. The sales rep writes orders in a personal notebook, the warehouse keeper maintains a separate sheet, and the accountant is the last to hear about a new invoice. Everyone works in their own corner, but the business as a whole stays invisible.
Navision — an ERP (enterprise resource planning) software package — is designed specifically to solve this problem. The core idea is straightforward: bring everything happening in different parts of the company into one place. When an order arrives, the sales team enters it into the program. The warehouse sees that order. Accounting prepares the invoice. The shipment is recorded as it goes out. Everything flows through the same system, and everyone looks at the same information.
Think of it like a bank teller’s counter. There are fixed rules for counting money — no one gets to use their own method. Navision works the same way inside a company. How an order is opened, who approves it, when stock is deducted — all of this is defined inside the program. When a new employee joins, they learn the system’s method, not their own. Work becomes tied to the system rather than to any individual person.
Take the order process as an example. When a sales order is opened in Navision, the program first checks the customer record — does this customer have an open credit line, has their limit been reached? Then it checks stock. If the item is unavailable, the program shows this immediately; the sales rep does not make a promise that cannot be kept. Once the order is confirmed, the warehouse sees it and starts preparing. When the shipment goes out, stock drops automatically. The invoice is generated from the same order record — the numbers are not typed in again by hand. The risk of errors from writing the same order in multiple places by different people drops considerably.
Stock tracking works in a similar way. When goods arrive at the warehouse, the program is updated. When a sale is made, stock decreases. A physical count at the end of the period is still necessary, but the gap between the program’s figure and the real count is far smaller than before. Under the old method, the warehouse ledger and the accounting ledger were kept separately, and reconciling them at month-end could take hours. In Navision, both pieces of information live in the same system, so discrepancies are much rarer. For manufacturing companies or wholesale traders working with dozens of product lines, this difference translates into very tangible time savings every single month.
One of the program’s most practical benefits is this: the manager no longer has to chase information. Opening the computer in the morning shows pending orders, transactions waiting for approval, and current stock levels — all without calling the sales rep, the warehouse keeper, and the accountant one by one. In a small business, this can give the owner back an hour or two every day. Those hours can go toward customer visits, new business meetings, or simply making better decisions with a clear head.
None of this comes without effort, however. Installing and running Navision requires serious preparation. The company’s processes must first be defined in a way the program can follow — this work is usually done with the help of an authorized reseller or a local consultant. Staff need time to get used to the program, and some resist giving up old habits. Turkish language support and compatibility with local accounting rules are also points that need attention during setup. On top of that, the computer infrastructure in many Turkish businesses in this period is still limited; the program needs at least a small local network to run properly across different desks.
For a small business owner considering Navision, the real question is this: how many of our current processes depend entirely on one person? If the answer is ‘most of them,’ that is a structural problem — and it gets worse as the company grows. Navision does not make that problem disappear overnight, but it puts processes in writing and makes them traceable. If you want to know where any given order stands, who approved what, and how much stock remains, a program like this eventually becomes unavoidable. The upfront cost and setup time can feel daunting, but a business that keeps running in an orderly way even through difficult periods will find that the investment pays for itself sooner than expected.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on March 19, 2001 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.