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Posts Tagged ‘nyc’

SAP Business One Vs. SAP Business ByDesign

Monday, February 6th, 2012

Is Business By Design replacing SAP Business One?

Some people have asked, “Is SAP Business ByDesign replacing SAP Business One?”  The answer is no.  There are clear statements of direction for each product and differentiations between them.

We are a reseller of Both SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign so we can talk about this from a fairly objective standpoint.

Let’s first look at SAP Business One. B1 is a single integrated solution designed for small to mid sized companies from 5 – 100 users (although there is no upper limit). It incorporates Financials, Sales, Service,Inventory, Purchasing, Basic Manufacturing, CRM, Reporting and Microsoft Office Integration. The core system is designed to work with a number of third party Modules and Enhancements that offer additional functionality and sit within the core system rather than being separate bolt on’s. Many are certified by SAP.

SAP Business One suits companies in in Distribution, Manufacturing, Basic Retail, eCommerce and Services. It is licensed on a named user basis and currently runs on a Microsoft SQL Server database although SAP Business One in The Cloud is planned for later in 2012 hosted via partners. The plan is for SAP B1 will eventually support SAP HANA for real time business analytics in the near future as well.  It may even replace Microsoft SQL Server all together and use the HANA database for all functions.  This will simplify the number of components to install and should dramatically increase performance since HANA is an ‘in-memory’ database technology.

In reality, the ‘sweet spot’ for SAP Business One installs seems to be the 5 to 25 user space and SAP Business ByDesign is the 20 to 200 user space.

With over 35,000 installations worldwide, Business One is a very stable and affordable solution for businesses looking to enter in to the world of ERP Software. Companies can benefit from some of the key functionality that has made SAP the Global Market Leader in ERP Software for a fraction of the cost of “Big SAP.”   It’s best to thing of SAP Business One as the ‘next step’ after low end solutions like Quickbooks Enterprise.

SAP Business ByDesign is a complete On Demand business solution aimed at mid sized companies. You pay for what you use and available modules include Financials, CRM, HCM, SCM, Project Management, SRM, Compliance Management and Executive Management. It is licensed on a named user per month basis and accessed though a web browser meaning the customer doesn’t need costly servers or internal IT support. As with any On Demand solution, you are entirely dependent on your internet connection so a Business Class Internet connection high reliability is needed.

Currently ByDesign is seeing most of it’s success in larger rapidly growing companies.  Some notable customers include Pink Berry and Skull Candy.  It’s has much more functionality for certain industries such as Service companies, but can still handle distributors and light manufacturers.  Over time, the core technology of ByDesign is targeted as being the replacement for ‘Big SAP’ but it’s not there yet.

So as to summarize, SAP Business One is ideal for smaller distributors outgrowing the likes of Quickbooks.  SAP Business ByDesign is for larger faster growing companies, especially those in the service sector.  SAP All In One, is really a stripped down version of “Big SAP.”  It’s for complex companies in a variety of industries with budgets in the $750k to 1.5 million range for a system.

Here is a slide from SAP showing where they feel the positioning is.

image

In conclusion, SAP Business One is ideal for Small to Mid Sized companies needing an easy to use, customizable solution to meet their business needs. ByDesign is great for companies who are expanding rapidly or changing in their dynamic frequently and offers the flexibility of an On Demand solution. When HANA is embedded into SAP Business One, it may propel the solution to the lead position among competitors and nobody else in the ERP space that Business One competes in owns a technology like HANA.

10 Reasons to Upgrade to Epicor’s Latest Enterprise Software

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Epicor 9 – Ten reasons to purchase or upgrade to

  1. ADVANCED BUSINESS ARCHITECTURE

    As your organization continues to grow, you need a business architecture
    that allows you to take advantage of modern technology developments.
    Epicor ICE (Internet Component Environment), the underlying technology
    framework for Epicor, merges the flexibility of a true service-oriented
    architecture (Epicor True SOA™
    ) with Web 2.0 concepts to not only meet
    business requirements today, but offer the flexibility to adapt to
    future opportunities.

  2. INCREASE USER PRODUCTIVITY

    Enabling continuous performance improvement within your business means
    empowering your employees to be more productive. Epicor True SOA™
    features the Epicor Everywhere™
    Framework, a unique technology that
    allows you to extend your current applications to Microsoft®
    Windows®, Web browsers and mobile devices. By extending Epicor to familiar and
    convenient productivity tools and leveraging Web 2.0 concepts, such as
    enterprise search, presence, and real-time communication, ICE enhances the
    user experience and productivity.

  3. HIGHER QUALITY AND LOWER COSTS

    Lean manufacturing and total quality initiatives are critical to continued
    success in a highly competitive market. Epicor’s next-generation solutions
    are well positioned to support just that with business process management
    (BPM), a solution that lets you create and model your business processes
    within your Epicor business application. The system can put records on hold,
    automate notification, invoke custom code, and require additional data
    entry (such as a password for electronic signature) based on your unique
    business rules. Additionally, product data management capabilities include
    document vaulting in Microsoft Office®
    SharePoint® for rapid retrieval and collaboration.

  4. OPTIMIZE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN

    End-to-end management of goods from sales order to shipment requires
    streamlined processes both internally and with suppliers. Maximizing
    effectiveness of your supplier network requires utilization of new tools such
    as Service Connect, a business orchestration and integration tool that
    enables faster and more efficient application-to-application and business-tobusiness connectivity. Enhanced solutions for efficiently managing internal
    supply chains coupled with tightly controlling inventory resources and
    orchestration of these resources, maximizes the effectiveness of your
    supplier network while controlling costs.

  5. CHOICE AND FLEXIBILITY

    Epicor ICE 2.0 builds upon an already extensive set of integrated tools for
    enhancing and extending Epicor. Applications and business processes can
    easily be tailored to meet your organization’s specific needs and everchanging business requirements. User interfaces can be modified to specific
    roles, workflow and preferences, significantly improving the end user
    experience. ICE provides the ability to meet the unique needs of your
    organization and individual employees.

  6. MAXIMUM BUSINESS INSIGHT

    You need analysis tools that logically and dynamically align with your core
    enterprise applications and your users. Epicor Enterprise Performance
    Management (EPM) places a heavy emphasis on the active use of the
    right information at the right time for the right people. It proactively
    guides and readjusts the course of your business rather than just passively
    measuring its progress or reserving business intelligence tools for a
    chosen few.

  7. GLOBAL SOLUTION WITH LOCAL EXPERTISE

    Epicor next-generation enterprise applications feature a unique
    “configurable engine” approach, which makes it easier to adopt the legal
    and legislative requirements of the world’s economies and the
    international standards including IAS, IFRS, and GAAP. Epicor created a
    truly configurable ERP platform that can be tuned for small, medium and
    large businesses, different industries, local firms or multinational
    conglomerates without the need for complex source code changes. Epicor
    makes business anywhere a reality.

  8. STANDARDIZATION AND CONSISTENCY

    Epicor provides a consistent, repeatable single solution approach that
    integrates your corporate headquarters with divisions and operating
    locations. Epicor enables the local, regional, or centralized deployment of
    master data and standard processes within a consistent, pervasive security
    framework. This ensures that operational information produced locally,
    cascades upwards into a single consolidated view of global activities that
    accurately reflects your organization’s performance.

  9. STAY CURRENT WITH YOUR CROSS INDUSTRY NEEDS

    Epicor understands that many businesses, manufacturing in particular,
    have diversified the industries they serve in an attempt to strengthen
    business performance and reduce risk in uncertain times. As a result,
    deploying solutions that fit cross industry requirements and stay current in
    the changing environment of business is critical. Recent updates for Epicor
    solutions follow this theme and particularly strengthen functionality in key
    areas for some of our customers’ industries.

  10. SEAMLESS BUSINESS MANAGEMENT

    A complete end-to-end resource based on more than a dozen modular
    business suites, Epicor places significant emphasis on embedded
    capabilities, like customer and supplier relationship management,
    advanced planning and scheduling, business process management, field
    service management and product configuration all available as system
    wide processes. Through a unique combination of sophisticated global
    business management, distributed deployment and master data
    management facilities, you can truly virtualize your enterprise.

Your MAS 90/200 2012 Year End Newsletter

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

2011 In Review And A Look Forward To 2012 And 2013

This article recaps the major enhancement that have come to MAS90 and MAS200 in 2011.  In addition it gives some ideas and thoughts as to what’s coming in 2012 and beyond based on Sage’s product roadmap. Read More

Payroll based on SQL For Sage ERP MAS 200 SQL Customers

As a Sage ERP MAS 200 SQL user, you have an option to us a SQL Based Human Resources (HR) and payroll solution, Sage HRMS based on Abra technology.  Managing HR and payroll in house can save you money and time and allow you to be more responsive to employee needs and to maintain higher levels of compliance with government regulations Read More

MAS 90 and MAS 200 Year End Closing Help

The following are articles that specifically relate to the Year End Closing process

  • Creating A New Company In Sage ERP MAS 90 Read More
  • The Importance Of Budgeting Read More
  • Module Closing Sequence Read More
  • Year End Compliance Releases Read More
  • General Module Closing For Sage ERP MAS 90 And 200 Read More

Tips To Help Year-End Processing Run Smoothly Read More

Dynamics NAV Reporting

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

The different ways you can get information out from the data in Microsoft Dynamics NAV (Navision)

Microsoft Dynamics NAV is part of Microsoft Business Solutions family and is growing force in the mid-market space of ERP applications. It has many options for reporting:

  • Built-in Dynamics NAV report designer – Microsoft Dynamics NAV has always had its own report designer, which requires an in-depth knowledge of C/SIDE (Client/Server Integrated Development Environment) to make it useful and has been the trusted friend of veteran Navision developers. It is definitely the most robust report writer you can use with Dynamics NAV. It might not be as fancy and user friendly as the reporting options described below, but it makes it up in versatility and straight down to business engineering. In NAV 2009, from the Classic client, you can view reports in the Classic report layout and from the RTC (RoleTailored Client) you can view reports in either Classic report layout or the Client Report Definition (RDLC) report layout. An RDLC file is a file with an .rdlc extension that is created by Visual Studio Report Designer and stores the layout information for the report. Classic reports support to be discontinued in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 7.
  • RDLC Reports - You use both Report Designer in the Classic client and Visual Studio Report Designer to create RDLC report layouts for Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009. Anything that you want to appear in the Visual Studio designer must appear on the sections of the classic report, which makes creating a new reports a bit longer and tougher than if you were to create the same report in the Classic report designer. When you run an RTC report, the dataset is generated by the classic report and is passed to the RDL layout for formatting. RDLC report layouts provide some new features that are not available in Classic client report layouts, for example, charts with 3D effects, images and colors, dynamic sort by different columns in a table. One of the big benefits of RTC reports – you can save straight to Excel or PDF.

(more…)

Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 Version 4.5 Starts Shipping

Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

Version 4.5 of Sage MAS90 and MAS200 Now Shipping

Sage started shipping Version 4.5 of MAS90 and MAS200 on September 8, 2011.  This new version includes a variety of functional enhancements.  Details of these enhancements are in the following pre-release guide:

MAS 200 for Microsoft SQL Server now Available in the Business Framework

This is the first release where new purchasers of MAS200 have the option to use Microsoft SQL Server, version 2003 and 2008.  Bringing SQL Server to MAS200 allows for much faster reporting and an easier time integrating potential custom or 3rd party solutions.  Note that this doesn’t mean a 3rd party solution should directly write to the underlying MAS200 SQL Data tables.  Always do that through either the Business Object Interface (BOI) or Visual Integrator which ensures the integrity of the accounting transactions within the system.

Remember that the SQL Version will not support the non-business framework modules such as payroll, work order, MRP or Job Cost.

Highlight of Enhancements for MAS90 and MAS200 Version 4.5

  • Payroll
    • Enhanced Benefit Accruals, More Deduction Calculation methods
  • Automatically create Purchase Orders from Sales Orders
    • There was basic functionality of this in prior versions of MAS90 and MAS200 but this gives much more automation and granular control to those companies that wait to get an order from a customer before creating a purchase order to their vendor or supplier
  • Price Level by Customer and Product Line
    • This gives an additional granularity level in using the 36 available price levels because now instead of it being a single level for the customer, you can say if a custom buys say, tires, any tire, they get “good pricing” which is 10% off list, but if they buy headlights, they get “best pricing” which might be 20% off of list.
  • Family Pricing.
    • I.E. if you by 10 or more markers you get a discount, BUT now you can mix and match colors.  They don’t have to be the same exact item number to group up for quantity pricing.
  • Enhanced Sales Order integration to Job Cost
  • Distribution by Lot and Serial Number
    • This is a long standing feature request.  You can now ‘allocate’ a specific lot or serial number during Order Entry, not just invoicing.  This means the warehouse picker no longer has to be the one to choose which serial number or lot to ship to a customer.  Especially useful for companies that might sell something like carpet where the person taking the order wants to ensure the customer gets more from the same lot so that the colors match better.
  • Split Commission by Customer
    • The ability to setup, up to 5 salespeople associated with a customer.  Previously, MAS 90 and MAS 200 supported split commission, but only as a manually entered, per order, setting.
  • Commission by salesperson, by customer by item. 
    • Now at the intersection of a specific salesperson, selling to a specific customer, a specific item, you can setup a specific commission.  Of course you can set it up less granularly than that as well.
  • Sage MAS Intelligence Improved
    • Some performance improvements and the ability to handle Reporting Trees.  A concept more advanced GL users were used to in FRx.
  • Free Sage CRM Server and user license.
    • Now all users can install Sage CRM and one single user free to see if you like the solution. If you do, simply purchase additional user licenses.  No need for a separate installation of the old MAS90/200 EES which conceptually goes away with this release.

What’s new in prior versions of Sage MAS90 and MAS200?

This MAS90 and MAS200 blog post we published earlier shows you what was added with each prior release of MAS90 and MAS200 so if you are on a version older than 4.4, you can get a feel for all of the new functionality you will receive.

Upgrade your MAS90 or MAS200 Now!

Call us at 866-677-6290 or email us at info@clientsfirst-us.com to talk with an expert on what it would take to upgrade your current version of MAS90 or MAS200 to version 4.5.

Sage ERP MAS 90 and 200-4-5 Pre Release Guide 6-24-11