What is a Role Center?

To use Microsoft Dynamics NAV, your employees log into a Role Center: their own personal user profile and personal place in to your business management system. It displays the tasks and activities they need to perform, providing them with an overview of what they’ve done and what’s next in line. In short, it enables them to focus on their tasks and organise their time – the way that works best for your company. But that’s not all...

Personalising your Role Center is easy

Another aspect of the RoleTailored approach that can have an impact on your company’s agility is that each Role Center is extremely easy to personalise – without the help of a programmer.

Take Laura the Accounting Manager. When she wants to personalise her Role Center, she can do it herself. By showing or hiding elements, she can choose the level of complexity she works with, perhaps adding more features as her own role expands, or removing things she doesn’t use. On her own. No IT. No Cost.

Laura’s Role Center, along with the Role Centers of her colleagues who share her role, can be configured by her manager or a super-user. This controls the level of access Laura has to the system. High access gives her greater autonomy; more restricted access makes for greater security for the company. Again, with no IT. No cost.

Based on a survey of 2,000+ peoples

How did Microsoft arrive at the RoleTailored user experience? Simple. It looked at companies like yours. In fact, Microsoft asked more than 2,000 people in

• Real-world situations – it watched people, like your people, to find out how they worked and why they did it that way.
• Usability studies – it watched a randomly chosen group of people using its Role Centers, and made sure they found them easy to use.
• Desirability studies – it asked them questions to help it build a user experience they wouldn’t want to live without.

All this input went into creating the Microsoft Dynamics Customer Model. Microsoft was able to define 61 distinct “roles”, each representing a typical view of real people in real jobs covering essential business functions in the areas of Finance, Sales and Marketing, IT, Production, Logistics, and Customer Service.

Design Goals

Once Microsoft had defined the roles, it used them to produce the most intuitive, effective user experience yet created for a business management solution. Its principal design goals were to:

• Build the RoleTailored experience
• Reduce complexity
• Help users focus on important tasks
• Promote a quick overview of actions
• Increase collaboration
• Create an intuitive and familiar user interface

21 out-of-the-box Role Centers for a successful, modern business

When you open Microsoft Dynamics NAV, there are 21 ready-made Role-Centers ready for action. Because most people have more than one ‘role’ in a company – especially if it’s quite a small operation – you can combine different roles to make up each user profile, which becomes a Role Center.