SOFTWARE NEWS: Sage breeds Line 500 and MME CRM to create Sage 1000. By Red IT Press

Sage UK has added to its collection of enterprise and mid-market ERP applications with a new product, Sage 1000, that combines CRM, commercial and financial business logic from two of its other products.

According to Sage director of ERP David Pinches, the company developed Sage 1000 to meet growing demand for an integrated system that integrated front-office tasks such as sales and customer management with financial and order processing systems.

According to Pinches, the company was able to bring Sage 1000 to market in little more than six months because it was able to combine elements from its Sage Line 500 and Sage CRM MME ranges. Sage 1000 is built around a browser interface, which will also help to speed implementation times.

"Sage has a CRM application, but some of our users wanted a single-data system where they could move data across the business and apply workflow controls across it. Our competitors have been coming to the market with these enabling technologies, so we engineered the business logic from Line 500 and Sage CRM MME into the new product.

Sage announced the new development in February. Rather than going through its usual process of extensive research and needs analysis, Sage's developers worked with reseller CPIO and two of its clients to develop a rapid prototype for the customers to try.

"We pulled together a very small team of developers and the result was rather than writing specs, they were issuing prototypes in a couple of months. We went to market to test and refine it and were able to ship CDs to our partners at the beginning of May," Pinches said.

Sage 1000 includes a "self-service" interface for CRM users and order processing. In addition to the financials modules from Line 500, the product comes with "operational" reporting dashboards to give managers sight of key performance measures.

"One FD told me, 'All I want is a simple panel that shows revenue for the year to date and the forecast revenue'. Sage 1000 lets them put together dashboards in minues to see product not shipped today, for example, or orders not processed. An admin or finance head could make decisions on the basis of that information the next day," Pinches said.

If users want more sophisticated business intelligence tools to extract and analyse Sage 1000 data cubes , they can connect Sage's IntelligentApps - but only to the financials data, Pinches said. "In a year's time, we will see how we can extend it across the full 1000 dataset. But it's not quite such a big issue, because the dashboards cover 80% of customers' operational reporting."

Initially, Sage 1000 has been delivered for Microsoft's SQL Server database, which provides the Views on which many of the reporting dashboards are based. But the product is intended to be multi-database and Sage will add support for other databases in future releases.

Customers can buy Sage 1000 in three basic varieties, all of which include the CRM, workflow and dashboard functions. The financials version, comprising seven modules, costs £9,000; The commercials suite covering sales and purchase order processing, warehousing and distribution costs £12,000 and manufacturing £15,000. With each version, customers will also have to pay a £1250 licence fee for each concurrent user.

Red IT News 9-May-2006

Categories: Computer software

Story read 245

< back