Projects take from nine to twelve months, and include the full life cycle of requirements gathering from customers and partners, detailed requirements definition, data and architecture modeling, test design, coding, code review and test, systems integration, final test and quality assurance, and producing the CD-ROMs for delivery and distribution. A typical product release includes 15 to 20 projects. Great Plains recently teamed with works.com and is integrating its order tracking and reporting functions with their online purchasing capability to provide an integrated business purchasing service.

The company pays 75 percent of the cost of medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents, and all the costs of short- and long-term disability insurance and basic life insurance, in a flexible benefits program. They contribute to employees' 401(k) plans, as well as to an annual profit-sharing program that is dependent on reaching company profit goals. All employees receive options to purchase 100 shares of stock when they are hired, with a five-year vesting period, and are eligible to buy stock at a 15 percent discount. There are seven holidays and a Paid Time Off (PTO) policy with two and a half weeks off each year to start, increasing to seven and a half weeks after twenty years. The company pays tuition reimbursement on a sliding scale, with an "A" earning 100 percent reimbursement. After each seven years of employment, employees earn a four-week sabbatical. Dress is very casual; shorts are accepted. There have never been any layoffs.

There is free bottled water and coffee. Concierge services are available, as well as an onsite fitness center and library services. Social activities include team events, such as wine and cheese parties after work, and a December company-wide wine and cheese afternoon event, which includes skits from various departments. The company sponsors a number of sports teams, including broomball, which is similar to ice hockey with a broom and no skates.

Great Plains sells its software only through systems integrators, not directly to customers. The Dynamics and eEnterprise product suites contain accounting, human resources, payroll, bank reconciliation, multi-currency accounting, invoicing, sales analysis, inventory control, and order entry modules for service-oriented businesses, retail, and manufacturing businesses. The largest segment of growth is with Internet businesses, which depend on reliable systems with intuitive interfaces, but more importantly, scalability, to keep up with their rapid growth. More than 200 dot.com companies are now using Great Plains software, from mvp.com, to repairclinic.com, art.com, ingredients.com, birthdayexpress.com, drybabies.com, ugodirect.com, neato.com, and magnetllc.com.

A few examples of customer installations provide an overview of Great Plains products and their target audiences. Cambridge Valley Machining manufactures medical equipment and uses the Manufacturing Series to track raw materials and subassemblies through the manufacturing process. Cinnabon uses eEnterprise to track invoices for nearly 5,600 vendors supplying its 400 bakeries, centralizing data in an SQL data warehouse. Collagen ($70M in annual revenues) manufactures biomedical devices and uses eEnterprise to simplify simultaneous reporting to finance, budget, and project managers. Eye Care Centers of America ($275M) recently upgraded to SQL Server 7, and integrated it with Great Plains software, reducing the size of the data base by more than 30 percent. Peet's Coffee and Tea saved two months of a programmer's time when it replaced its store retail systems, because its eEnterprise system already had interfaces for the new system in place. The Victoria Racing Club in Australia uses eEnterprise applications from General Ledger to Bank Reconciliation to coordinate distribution of winnings for the Melbourne Cup.

Competitors PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle are largely aimed at large enterprises, while Ross, J.D. Edwards, Ceridian, and Cyborg are more specialized products. Great Plains' repeated awards for customer service differentiate it from its other competitors, including Lawson and Best.

Great Plains hired 265 technical professionals in the last year and expects to hire between 150 and 200 in the next year. Candidates are found through online sources, both their own web site and others (45 percent), employee referrals (40 percent), a combination of college recruiting, interns (70 percent of its interns are hired by the company), advertisements, career fairs and networking (14 percent), and employment agencies (1 percent). Between half and two-thirds of the company's new hires are entry-level professionals, including interns. Top schools for recruiting include North Dakota State University, the University of North Dakota, and Moorhead University. Turnover is 22 1/2 percent.

In addition to technical skills, Great Plains looks for candidates that fit its corporate values which include a close relationship with customers, innovation, independent action, a team spirit, exceptional quality, and integrity. Says Mike Slette, Vice President, Human Resources, "We ask candidates to describe situations they have found themselves in before, such as dealing with an angry customer, and how they handled it. Candidates who got angry with the customers or considered them stupid, or just walked away, do not fit our business mission of improving the lives and business success of our customers. We don't have any problem dropping what we are doing and putting a team of engineers on a plane to solve a customer's problem." Reynolds expands on the theme of shared corporate values, "We have a group of dedicated people, with an upper Midwest work style. That is, people take pride in working hard to accomplish something together."

On average, current staff members have at least a Bachelor's degree and an average of six to eight years of experience. Entry-level candidates should have a Bachelor's degree in a technical discipline and a customer focus and an awareness that, as Slette says, "Customers pay your paycheck every month."

Great Plains lists in its career section openings for its own corporate needs as well as for the resellers that sell its software, worldwide. Job seekers may specify technical positions in one of several categories, including Product Development, Consulting, Networking & Telecommunications, Technical Support, Technical Writing, and Training.