Last month a few members from our team attended the Sage Partner Kick Off in Costa Mesa, CA to discuss Sage's 2019 year in review as well as what Sage users and partners can expect from the business management solution in 2020. Additionally, Sage held a partner webinar in the weeks following the Partner Kick Off to provide a few more announcements specific to the Sage 100 product line.
We're excited to share a few of those upcoming changes below:
Sage 100cloud 2019 Year-In-Review
This past year Sage asked themselves the question: What is Sage 100cloud? In answering this question they developed 3 key pillars that define who they are and establishes key areas for which they are not willing to sacrifice.
1) Trusted
For businesses that want a feature-rich and stable experience that is built for compliance from the ground up
2) Customizable
For businesses that want to tailor their business management software to meet their exact needs
3) Connected
For businesses that want to control their data while taking advantage of the computational horsepower and anytime, anywhere access of the cloud
As you may have read in our recent blog post, Sage 100cloud 2019 provided over 30 product enhancements making it the company's largest release in 4 years! While every enhancement was created to optimize efficiency, improve user adoption, increase customizability, and enhance security & activity logging some of the more notable features included automated bank reconciliation, Sage Contact to include vendor information & improved performance, and Sage Product Management & Inventory Requirements Planning were introduced to replace the MRP & Work Order modules.
A Deeper Dive into the New & Improved Inventory Requirements Planning
IRP, which was rolled out as a replacement for MRP, is much more fully featured than the MRP module ever was and will continue to be so as Sage builds more features.
*** Spoiler Alert: the ability to add forecasts (which was not included in the original release) is planned for later this year. ***
The Inventory Requirements Planning Module is designed to:
- Eliminate costly production delays
- Automatically generate purchase orders
- Automatically generate work tickets
- Report requirements by job (sales order or work ticket) and vendor
Expanded Name Fields -- Up to 50 Characters!!!
Imagine this: you're trying to squeeze a name into a field that was too short. The example Sage gave was Chesapeake Bay Watershed Preservation Foundation. Previously Sage only allowed for 30 characters for the Customer Name, Customer Contact Name, and Vendor Contact Name.
Multiple PO's on a Single Receipt
This update allows Sage 100 ERP users to enter the full name, ultimately improving clarity and data integrity. How often do you place multiple purchase orders with a single vendor only to have them all arrive at the same time? This new feature is going to allow you to combine all of the purchase orders into a singe receipt allowing for simplified processing.
The NEW 'apply purchase orders' button is going to be visible next to the purchase order number in the receipt of goods, receipt of invoice, and return of goods entries.
Reverse Check Run Utility
If you've ever processed an entire check run with the incorrect information... don't worry, you're not alone, then you know first-hand how inconvenient this can be. This new utility will be available in Accounts Payable allowing the reversal of checks or electronic payments created via Check Printing and the Electronic Payment Menu.
Lot/Serial Expiry
Adding an expiration date to lot/serial items will aide users in shipping, issuing, and using items prior to expiration. Users will also have the ability to calculate a Sell-by Date based on days, months, years which will help reduce the amount of inventory that is wasted due to reaching the expiration date. Expiration dates will be entered when a lot/serial tier is created, when items are received into inventory, or when items are produced through the bill of materials. Users will be able to distribute the items based on the expiration date.
eInvoicing - powered by Paya
Arguably one of the most exciting things Sage is bringing to market in March 2020 is adding click-to-pay functionality, including the ability to accept credit card & ACH transactions. Then importing payments into cash receipts with a single click. Make it easier for your customers to pay! More details to come in March 2020.
Personal Information De-Identifier
Under CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), which impacts not just companies only in California but any company in the US that brings in $25 million or more in annual revenue in and has even a single customer in CA. Penalties with non-compliance are steep. Existing tools within Sage 100 will help you be compliant without altering the integrity of your data. Easy to use and really important, not just for CCPA as states come online with similar legislation, this will become more and more important over time.
Additional enhancements mentioned but not discussed in quite as much detail:
Custom Office
- Deferred User Defined Field Update
- Mask Display Attribute
- Grid Enhancements
Job Cost
- Job Cost Billing Work in Progress Fix + Enhancements
Library Master
- Company Data conversion
- Migration Wizard Enhancement
- List Box Export to Excel
Misc.
- Bank Feed Support Information Export
- Classic Desktop Retirement
- New Common Components Location
Vision & Strategy - Long-Term
Although native cloud is growing fast, there is still a massive opportunity in hybrid cloud. In fact, Gartner predicts 90% of organizations globally will adopt hybrid solutions by 2020.
Benefits of a hybrid cloud solution:
- Maintain on-premise control over infrastructure and data
- Remote and browser access functionality like cloud, but remains on-premise
Question: Are there just two options?
Are we just talking about on-premise and cloud? When we're talking about hybrid, are we talking about people who are just using hybrid as a stepping stone but their ultimate destination is cloud but for whatever reason they're not ready to get there; so, they're sort of pausing in hybrid OR is hybrid a distinct ERP modality that offers specific benefits in which businesses in specific verticals, specifically those in distribution and manufacturing are looking to take advantage of?
According to Forrester, that's exactly the case.
There is a strong appetite for hybrid ERP as a distinct ERP modality. More than 50% of US manufacturing and distribution businesses view non-cloud ERP deployment models as being the best model for achieving revenue growth and cost reduction.
With this sort of understanding and affirmation in the opportunity that Sage has for a hybrid ERP, specifically for Sage 100cloud, as a mature, robust, mature, compliant, feature-rich business management solution Sage has made it their mission to focus on these 3 areas:
- Grow
- Retain
- Innovate
Sage's priorities have never been more focused on the customer than they are for 2020 and we couldn't be more excited for all that's to come this year.
Ready to learn more about the newest release of Sage 100cloud ERP?
