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Sage MAS 500
November 2006 • Volume 4 • Issue 4
Sage Software has again received distinguished recognition from three top industry publications. Sage Software was ranked 30 in the Manufacturing Business Technology magazine’s Global 100; and was included in Supply & Demand Chain magazine’s Executive 100; and was selected as a Start-IT magazine 2006 Hot Company.
Does information flow freely between your business applications?
To stay competitive as the business environment becomes more crowded, successful organizations continually evaluate their processes for areas of improvement. End-to-end system integration can reduce operating costs, enhance customer service, and increase staff productivity.
You use a number of business processes. Which processes are you still performing manually? Which business processes have you automated? Does information and data flow between your automated systems?
To achieve end-to-end process automation requires the evaluation of four key areas:
The first step in business process improvement is to review any existing manual processes as candidates for automation. Let’s take a look at the automation available from Sage Software and its partners that might be beneficial for your organization.
For most organizations, core accounting is one of the first areas to be automated. As a result, you may not have reviewed the efficiency of these processes for a while. How effective is your budgeting process? Are financial reports available by department and distributed automatically each month? Do credit card transactions flow seamlessly into your cash receipts in Accounts Receivable? A variety of tools from Sage Software and its business partners are available to enhance these processes, here are just a few:
If your business includes buying and selling products, the process of ordering and fulfillment may be one of your largest operational expenses. Are warehouse operations efficient? Are you managing your inventory to optimal levels? You may want to consider adding some of the following functionality to optimize your distribution efficiency: warehouse management, warehouse automation/radio frequency solution; small package shipping automation; and inventory replenishment. Product Extensions from Sage Software such as credit card processing; and Sage Business Partner solutions such as rental processing, inventory allocations, and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) are also available.
Tracking prospects through the sales cycle is becoming more and more critical to closing business. Sage Software offers three industry leading products with varying levels of sophistication. If you already use a contact management solution, such as ACT! by Sage, it might be time to consider upgrading to Sage CRM or Sage CRM SalesLogix in order to take advantage of sophisticated lead tracking and customer service tools.
New labor force regulations are signed into law on a regular basis. Do you have the tools and information you need to ensure you stay in compliance? If you are a project-based organization, can you accurately record labor costs to ensure projects remain profitable? Can projects be tied to manufactured products? Consider the following from Sage Software:
If you build products as all or part of your business, production planning may be one of the most labor-intensive aspects of your operations. Automating this process can allow you to realize efficiency gains resulting in lower costs and quicker time to market. It might be time to review your operation and see if you can benefit from any of the following modules:
Sage Software Business Partner solutions include process manufacturing, product life cycle management, engineering change management enhancements, CAD/CAM integration, quality assurance, enhanced planning and scheduling, and rules-based product configuration.
E-commerce today means more that a Web storefront or EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) transmission. Self-service portals for customers and employees can provide dramatic improvements in productivity; your staff will experience fewer interruptions accommodating routine status inquiries. Working in conjunction with Sage CRM SalesLogix, you can create an integrated Web portal for your field sales force. Ecommerce modules for Sage MAS 500 include: eCustomer, eOrder, and eSalesforce.
With software solutions implemented, the next step in creating your end-to-end solution is to make sure data is flowing smoothly between them, eliminating duplicate entry and reducing potential errors. The integration between the Sage MAS 500 modules facilitates that flow of data. Let’s take a look at the optimum connectivity between functional areas:
Distribution to Accounting: Fulfilled orders and received shipments post automatically to the receivables and payables systems. Accounting personnel have access to complete shipping information, such as package tracking numbers, serial numbers, and ship-to addresses. Credit card transactions flow into the cash receipts system and post automatically against customer invoices.
E-commerce to Distribution and Accounting: Orders placed online flow automatically into your fulfillment system, allowing for appropriate verification and check points. Credit card transactions flow from the Web into orders and cash receipts.
Manufacturing/Distribution and CRM: When a production cycle is complete, you can automatically fulfill customer orders. Your sales and customer service employees can query the manufacturing system for the availability of products. Your purchasing department has a clear picture of the raw materials needed for the next production run.
CRM to Accounting and Distribution: When you close a sale, your prospect becomes a customer. All the information about the prospect can flow into the customer records in accounting, and the products sold can become an order in your distribution system. You can enter new opportunities for existing customers as well. Resource Management to Manufacturing and Project Accounting: Enter employee time just once in Sage TimeSheet, and data can flow into payroll, manufacturing, and project accounting.
Sometimes the most important processes to automate are those that connect with customers and suppliers. A wide variety of EDI solutions are available for specific industries and applications. Make sure these are implemented to work seamlessly with your distribution and accounting systems.
Are you taking full advantage of the wealth of information contained in your data? Tools available for Sage MAS 500 such as Business Insights Explorer and Alerts are easier to use and more powerful than ever.
We can help you create or enhance your custom reports and activity alerts or build the key performance indicator charts and graphs relevant to your business.
Do you have systems that need to be implemented, upgraded, or integrated? Give us a call today to discuss your needs in creating a fully optimized end-to-end solution for your business.
Sage MAS 500 7.05 is a maintenance release shipping to customers in October and November. There are five components of the release:
Let’s take a closer look at each of these in turn.
A signature aspect of Sage MAS 500 ERP has always been its modern architecture and development platform. Being built on Microsoft SQL Server and Visual Studio gives customers the benefit of an industry-standard platform, ease of finding qualified staff to maintain and enhance the system, and confidence that the system will remain compatible with new operating systems and hardware in the future.
Accordingly, the Sage MAS 500 7.05 release has been updated for compatibility with the latest releases of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005. (See the article on page 4 of this newsletter for more details of the SQL Server 2005 enhancements.) You can expect enhanced performance and scalability when you adopt SQL Server 2005. In addition, future modules of Sage MAS 500, such as Visual Integrator, will only be supported in SQL 2005, so you will want to upgrade to SQL 2005 in order to adopt this important new Sage MAS 500 module coming next year.
The Visual Studio 2005 update is important because you will experience considerable performance improvements in both Business Insights Explorer and the Business Desktop. This means overall navigation, both between Sage MAS 500 tasks and in your data querying and drill-down activities, will be quicker, resulting in enhanced productivity of your staff.
With these technology updates it becomes necessary to discontinue support for older versions of Sage MAS 500. Monthly updates for Sage MAS 500 version 6.2 ended in July 2006. Customer support for version 6.2 ended on October 31, 2006. Reporting updates for calendar year 2006 1099 forms will only be available for Version 6.3 and above. If you are still running on 6.2, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to a current supported version, ideally Version 7.05.
In Sage MAS 500 7.0, old inquiry screens throughout the system were replaced with the powerful Business Insights Explorer. The new quick inquiry, or Context Menu Preview, provides fast access to information for simple lookups, when speed is of the essence and the full power of Business Insights Explorer is not needed. The Context Menu Preview has been applied to 67 different functions in Sage MAS 500, providing users with a fast and consistent way to view information.
Each preview window can be personalized for the user in Business Insights Explorer. The personalizations are saved and the quick preview will automatically display in the new format each time it is accessed. Personalization settings include the ability to change the order of the columns in the lookup and set the column width. For example, you may want to put the total due amount for customers in the third or fourth column, so it is immediately visible when accessing the preview.
The preview data is displayed in a grid. Right from the Context Menu Preview window, you can print the entire contents of the preview and you also can export it to Microsoft Excel. This new Context Menu Preview has the potential to dramatically improve the productivity of your staff, and is in itself a big reason to upgrade to Sage MAS 500 7.05.
An example of the new Context Preview inquiry, showing open customer invoices.
Data Migrator Enhancements
Each release of Sage MAS 500 includes capabilities to make it easier for Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 customers to migrate to Sage MAS 500 as their businesses grows. The 7.0 release adds the ability to migrate two more historical data files, Purchase Order History and Cash Receipts, or customer payment history, from Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 3.71 data.
Starting with Sage MAS 500 7.0, all of the information formerly found in printed documentation was added to the Help system to make it available real-time to all users of the system. This unifies all documentation into a single electronic format. In some cases it may be preferable to review documentation in a printed format. Now with Sage MAS 500 7.05, you can print main Help topics in PDF format. This will allow you to print just the information you need.
With this release, existing Service Packs and Monthly Updates for 7.0 have been merged onto the product CD. This will streamline the upgrade process for existing customers and also provide a maintenance release for Sage MAS 500 7.0.
Call us today to discuss upgrade considerations for your specific installation and to schedule your implementation.
As we saw in the article on page three, your Sage MAS 500 ERP system will perform faster on Microsoft SQL Server 2005. But there are plenty of other reasons to migrate to this latest version of SQL Server. Here’s a brief summary of the many new and enhanced capabilities of SQL Server 2005.
The two most important things you need from your database server are availability and security. You want the system to be available (no downtime), and you want to be certain that your data is secure. Many of the enhancements to SQL Server 2005 have been designed to strengthen these capabilities. Enterprise data management has been enhanced in the areas of: Manageability, Availability, Scalability, and Security.
A single management console enables data administrators anywhere in your organization to monitor, manage, and tune all of the databases and associated services across your enterprise. More than 70 new measures of internal database performance and resource usage, ranging from memory, locking, and scheduling to transactions and network and disk I/O have been added to SQL Server 2005. These Dynamic Management Views provide greater transparency and visibility into the database and provide for proactive monitoring of database health and performance.
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 includes innovative high-availability features such as database mirroring, new replication capabilities, and enhanced online operations to minimize downtime and help to ensure that critical enterprise systems remain accessible. Database mirroring allows continuous streaming of the transaction log from a source server to a single destination server. In the event of a failure of the primary system, applications can immediately reconnect to the database on the secondary server. Database mirroring works on standard server hardware and requires no special storage or controllers. Replication increases data availability by distributing the data across multiple database servers. SQL Server 2005 offers enhanced replication using a new peer-to-peer model that allows databases to be synchronized transactionally with any identical peer database. Indexing is an important performance feature of SQL Server. With SQL Server 2005, you can add indexes without interfering with access to tables or existing indexes. Additionally, index operations now take advantage of parallel processing. SQL Server 2005 also introduces the ability to restore data while the server is running. Availability is improved because only the data that is being restored is unavailable, the rest of the database remains online and available.
Scalability advancements such as table partitioning, snapshot isolation, and 64-bit support will enable you to run your most demanding applications using SQL Server 2005. The partitioning of large tables and indexes significantly enhances query performance against very large databases.
A new security model in SQL Server 2005 allows administrators to manage permissions at a granular level, making management of permissions easier. SQL Server 2005 strengthens authentication by taking advantage of Kerberos authentication against a virtual server. Administrators can now specify Microsoft Windows-style policies on standard logins so that a consistent policy is applied across all accounts in the domain. SQL Server 2005 also adds encryption capabilities within the database itself. By default, client/server communications are encrypted. A server policy can be defined to reject unencrypted communications.
With SQL Server 2005, users and information technology professionals across your organization will benefit from reduced application downtime, increased scalability and performance, and tight yet flexible security controls. Call us to discuss the specific benefits of upgrading to SQL Server 2005 for your organization.
