Infor VISUAL ERP is a solution built for small to mid-market manufacturing companies. The primary customer for VISUAL ERP is organizations that use a work order to produce their product, as opposed to those in a highly repetitive or process manufacturing environment. These work-order-based companies could be make-to-order, configure-to-order, make-to-stock, engineer-to-order, or a combination of all of these.
I have been in the ERP industry for over 21 years and have worked with companies of all sizes and industries, but primarily have experience with small to medium-sized manufacturing businesses. I am currently in a sales role, so I frequently talk with companies that are interested in one of our Infor ERP products. One of the questions I always ask is “What are you using today?” A lot of times the answer to my question is QuickBooks.
The software industry has no shortage of terms and acronyms, so before we talk about Infor’s Business Intelligence Tool (that’s called “Birst”), what is Business Intelligence (or “BI”)? Business Intelligence refers to solutions and processes that support the gathering, analysis, integration, and presentation of business information. Business Intelligence tools help companies understand their business better, and enable their employees to make better decisions because they have the information they need. At its most basic level, Business Intelligence is what is commonly referred to as “reporting”, like a bookings report, a purchase orders due for receipt report, for example. Business Intelligence solutions take reporting to the next level by making the data easier to consume for end users, easier to analyze, and easier to get answers to difficult questions.
VISUAL Focus is an educational conference for users of Infor VISUAL. If you have never been, it is a fantastic event hosted by Visual South and Synergy Resources. Over the years, the conference has been in a variety of locations like Nashville, New Orleans, Orlando, Chicago, and Louisville. In 2022 it will return to Nashville.
Infor VISUAL 10 was released in December 2020, and quite a few features were added. There are many resources that go into great detail about the new functionality, including release notes, but here are the highlights we think are most important to know. If you want more details, go to the Visual South VISUAL upgrade page here.
Infor SyteLine has been around for over 30 years and has operated under a few different names and brands during that time. The product has been called Symix, Frontstep, and SyteLine. Most recently, Infor rebranded to CloudSuite Industrial, but the SyteLine name really never went away, so you will hear these terms used interchangeably among people who work with the product.
For manufacturing companies, it’s critical to understand your production costs. If you know your costs, you’ll have better control over your profitability and make better business decisions. I’ve had conversations where companies thought certain customer orders were critical to their business, but after understanding their costs better, they decided to turn those orders away because they were NOT profitable.
To help you determine what your cost of production actually is (versus what you think it is), here are the four primary factors to consider:
I speak with lots of companies and many of those conversations revolve around ERP software evaluations. Recently, I’ve had quite a few conversations with companies that are running Sage 500, or any of the other Sage products. They ask me whether the rumors about a Sage 500 end of life are true and if so, what the future holds for their ERP system. To be clear, I represent Infor ERP and that is where my expertise lies. I am not an expert in any competitive solutions, but my views are shaped by what I hear from the people I talk with. In this article, I’ll give a quick rundown of what I think you should expect with your Sage 500 ERP.
I want to start by telling you a little bit about my background because I believe it will give some context to this blog. I proudly represent Infor ERP products and have been at Visual South since 2002. Five years prior to coming on board here, I was an SAP consultant. My specialty was the sales/distribution module, along with the variant configurator. I was part of many full implementations in a variety of industries, taught training classes, and helped with presales efforts. My first implementation was on R/3 version 3.1G and my last was on version 4.6.
I have been in the ERP industry for close to 25 years, both as an implementation consultant and a salesperson. For my customers who have been using ERP for decades, as well as those looking for their first ERP, one of the most common discussion points is customization versus configuration. Let’s take a look at each approach, and I will tell you why we recommend one over the other.
