From the Sage MAS Team - Page 2 - Sage MAS Community Forums

Customizing your ERP System

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So you just installed your new MAS 200 version 4.40 ERP system. Now what? You may have heard that you should avoid customizing your system, and rather you should change your internal processes Read more...

Staying Agile in a Competitive Software Market

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One of the Sage core principles is "Agility." In software development, agility has become a way of life. Read more...

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The Problem Is Defining the Problem

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“If I had an hour to save the world I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.” - Albert Einstein Read more...

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Less is More - Really it can be!

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Consider this: MAS 500 - Less updates. More Benefits. Read more...

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The Future of Sage MAS - Ensure Your Voice is Heard!

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Find out how you can get directly involved in influencing the future of Sage MAS Read more...

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enhancements

I Love My Job!

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Yes, I really, really, really do love my job and here are a few reasons why. Read more...

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Musings on a diet cola...

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Not long ago I was having lunch with my fellow brown baggers in the Sage lunchroom when I noticed that all the women in the room were drinking Diet Coke, while all the men were drinking Coke Zero. Being in the Diet Coke camp myself, I mentioned to the gang that we were falling nicely into the gender-specific marketing plan of the manufacturer. Read more...

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Net Promoter – do you know your score?

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You may know a lot about your customers – their business and industry, revenue contributions, but how do you know how loyal they are? Read more...

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Me and My New Car II - Insight, Innovation, and Inspiration

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Wonder what my new car has to do with inspiring innovative ideas? Read more...

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Me and My New Car - A Customer Experience

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What does my new car have to do with interactions we each have every day? Read more...

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Have Your Development Tools Been "Eclipsed?"

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Want to know what the MAS 90/200 software development team uses to build and enhance MAS 90/200? Read more...

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Could You Be the Next Winner?

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Last year Sage MAS 90, 200 and 500 customers were well represented in the winners circle. Will that winning streak continue? Read more...

FREE webinar "Translating Strategy into Action"

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Companies spend considerable resources to develop a strategy that defines their business in the marketplace. However, all too often these bold intentions do not represent the reality of product and service delivery. Speaker: Jeff Greenberg, CEO at Ergility Smart Process Solutions Read more...

Beta & Controlled Release - A Critical Phase of the PDLC

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Have you ever wondered what you could do to make a product better? Here's your opportunity! Read more...

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IdeaScope: Changing the Face of Enhancement Requests

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Do you have lots of ideas on how Sage could improve the software you use each day but don’t know where to send them? Or does it seem that when you provide enhancement requests you aren’t sure if they are getting to the right people or even being heard at all? Well that experience is about to change! Read more...

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MAS 90/200 - Tuning for Performance

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With the migration of MAS 90/200 to the 4.x Business Framework comes new performance challenges for the application, especially on older machines and networks. This posting discusses common performance tips for MAS 90/200 that can help ease the transition to the more powerful and flexible 4.x version of the product. Read more...

MAS 500 Best Coding Practices

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Top 10 best practices for well performing, well mannered, multi-user MAS 500 code. Read more...

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Any Recent Vertical Successes?

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I'm just curious if anyone has had recent success selling to or upgrading clients in a particular vertical? When I refer to vertical, I do not mean distribution or manufacturing. I'm looking for something more specific such as food & beverage or industrial equipment, supply, & service. If there is a vertical that you feel is working for you is there a particular sector of that vertical such as manufacturing, distribution, service, or retail that stands out. I look forward to your responses. Read more...

Sage North America will launch a new brand advertising campaign

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On March 16, Sage North America will launch a new brand advertising campaign that breaks through in a number of ways. All the ads in the Sage Experience campaign use an eye-catching technique of simulating someone breaking through the surface of the page or computer screen. All inquiries go to new landing pages on our primary Web site, www.sagenorthamerica.com. Read more...

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Greetings from Vertical Marketing!

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A quick introduction Read more...

Of Scrum and transparency in Product Development

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Over the last year or so within our Product Organization we have increased our transparency into how we do product development. Much of the genesis is around how we continue to foster and strengthen our vibrant ecosystem. We want to ensure our development partners within the ecosystem are walking along bringing their respective solution offerings with MAS products as we evolve our releases. Hopefully, this early visibility helps align your product development plans tighter to the appropriate MAS product release cycle.

Essentially, we have taken our Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC) and extended it to include our ecosystem. We appropriately call it XPDLC (Extended Product Development Life Cycle).

XPDLC is well supported by the way we do product development internally. We leverage industry leading agile development methodology – namely Scrum methodology during our product development. Every function within our product development organization (Product Manager, Designer, Developer, QA, Usability Analyst, Documentation) participate in a scrum team; having sprints of 3 weeks duration. At the end of every 3 weeks – respective MAS product organization comes together to do “show and tell” of what got developed/tested over the last 3 weeks. We call these “Sprint Review” sessions. In some regard – every 3 week we pull the functionally tested product together and demo the latest and greatest.

Every team within the organization is synchronized to the same 3 week sprint schedule. It promotes working software that is tested and ready with the incremental net new functionality every 3 weeks. Once we reach these milestones and at regular check point intervals we can now make various aspects of the tested product – source code, design document, etc. available for appropriate external stakeholders to consume.

This model has been helpful thus far. It has allowed everyone to know periodically how everything else is progressing. It has brought down some communication barriers as well as improved project management challenges that existed before. This has provided everyone with a clear line of sight to the end goal on how the entire release is progressing.

This is one of several examples towards our effort to support the ecosystem. I will be curious to know your thoughts and feedback – as we make our journey of opening up our development processes and increasing visibility towards the releases in development.

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Business Framework…let you do implementation better, faster. Whad’ya say?

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With MAS 90 release 4.4 (currently in development) we plan to deliver Inventory, Purchase Order, and Bill of Material modules on business framework. This will be a major milestone where significant functionality will be available on business framework. It has been a valuable R&D investment and we believe it will yield significant benefit to us and our community.

“Business framework” combined with the bundled “Customizer” functionality give MAS 90 a formidable position in the market place. It makes MAS 90 probably the most easy to integrate, flexible and extendable business application foundation in the market place. It allows code-less customization and provide safe upgrade path otherwise not possible in competitive products.

It echoes commitment to serve our customers better whose solution includes MAS 90 base functionality and has a need to integrate/customize as part of their implementation.

Given much of the community do few things regularly – like “Extend or Enhance” base functionality; “Integrate” with some other functionality; “Customize” base functionality; etc. I will be curious to know how various implementation partners, master developers, third party software developers are utilizing business framework.

What are your “aha” moments during this journey of MAS 90 adopting business framework? What success stories and best practices you enjoy the most that you would like to share with broader audience and your MAS product teams?

Specially, I am interested in how business framework is enabling you to win business and do your job better…faster resulting in net gain for our customers. What percentage of your customization is leveraging Customizer? Do you know you can do Web based mash-ups using Customizer?

PS: I already see quite busy discussion forums around MAS 90 customization/business object capability. Let’s not duplicate similar technical discussion that get discussed there. Here, I am looking for how business framework is enabling business wins and opportunities.

PPS: If you don’t already know about Customizer – I will encourage you to review the information material on it. You may find it to be a great knowledge to have as you walk in at customer site.

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Hurry-up And Wait: IFRS Compliance In US May Be A Bit Farther Off Now

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As we change leadership at the Security and Exchange Commission, so too do we see a potential change in the rollout of IFRS compliance in the US. Read more...

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Sage MAS 90 and 200 4.4, Sage MAS 500 7.3 Preview Webcasts Scheduled for February

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Are you wanting to see what we've been doing in R&D for the last several months? The Sage MAS product management team will be providing you an opportunity to get a sneak peek at our upcoming releases. More details after the jump... Read more...

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How to Find What You Need in the Sage MAS Knowledgebase

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a quick video on how to use the Sage Knowledgebase to find answers to your questions must be priceless. Read more...

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I'll See Your MU and Raise You an SP

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In the Sage MAS 500 business, we release bug fixes in a cumulative monthly update (MUs). There's no question there is benefit to some of the gems in them, but do we need to have them come out that often? What if we created Service Packs which provided no other benefit than bug fixes, performance improvements, etc? Read more...

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MAS 500 Implementation: 10 Things to consider

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Several of us are involved with the MAS 500 implementation. I will be curious to know what implementation partner consider as they embark on a MAS 500 implementation. Think of this as a check list one should consider for a successful implementation.

To start the dialogue, here is a list of things to consider during MAS 500 implementation. Feel free to enhance/update the list and share your feedback here.

Thanks to Darrick Coles and Ruedi Schmid – both Development Managers in the MAS 500 team who helped in pulling this list together.

10. Consider skills (technical/functional) needed to maintain the system: MAS 500 leverages Microsoft database technology, although powerful, does require Microsoft trained people and regular maintenance.

9. Consider hardware & system software (like SQL Server version, OS version, Security patch, etc.) need: It may be good time to upgrade existing system software to take advantage of the latest that MAS 500 supports. Where possible maintain a separate Test environment.

8. Consider growth or future changes in your business: It helps knowing future rollout plans and increase use of the software.

7. Consider plans on keeping up with the MAS 500 upgrade and new versions, particularly as this relates to customizations and third party integration.

6. Consider system behavior and performance: It help to do “As is” and “To be” analysis of your business processes. After initial system setup, confirm that the module options, GL account structure, distribution settings, pricing, etc. provide the behaviors you expect. Also confirm that the system performs acceptably – if not, determine the primary cause; there is usually an easy or workable solutions. Often the cause is something outside of MAS 500 like configuration tune up; SQL Server tune up, having appropriate indexes; using file groups, etc.

5. Consider Reporting and other application/programs accessing MAS 500 data need: Depending on reporting needs exploring data can take considerable system resources. It helps educating users to formulate queries that are focused. For larger installation/complex needs - consider replication and doing more advanced reporting and analysis on a replicated database.

4. Consider key system constant need upfront such as Date, Unit of Measure, Currencies, etc. e.g. Units of measure allow for many ways to consider inventory quantities, but can lead to rounding issues. If possible, try to choose an atomic, integer unit as the stock unit of measure.

3. Consider spreading work process to tap computing resources efficiently: Like doing bulk/batch processes/updates at different time of the day. Some of these postings and queries can be particular complex and require many resources. E.g. Manufacturing labor and Production entry, Picking and Committing Shipments, etc.

2. Consider regular upkeep and review of the system’s health: Schedule for archiving and purging, Compare module balances to GL, Review Server and Network resource usage, Permission and Security settings, and Business continuity. Data issues should be reported to Sage; they cannot be fixed if we don’t know about them.

1. Consider time and resource need to implement: As part of the rollout have a plan with appropriate commitment of resources to review business process and the work flow required to perform all the processes. A successful implementation of MAS 500 is key to the ongoing success of using MAS 500.

Here are some additional short cuts to guides and documentation to help you with MAS 500 implementation. Support login required.

a. Hardware recommendation
http://support.sagesoftwareonline.com/mas500/support/documents/matrices.cfm

b. Implementation planning
http://support.sagesoftwareonline.com/mas500/support/documents/userguides/docmap.cfm

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Closing Out a Year in Sage MAS 90 and 200

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Wholly smokes Batman! Wayne Schultz from Schultz Consulting has put together the most comprehensive list of resources, links and things to know about as you prepare to close the books. Check out his comprehensive list (read more to get the link). Read more...

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Season's Greetings, California Style

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OK, OK... I realize most of the country is getting some really nasty weather right now. So sending out "greetings from 70 degree California" posts probably isn't something you're all too excited about. But if it makes you feel any better, it's raining here in Irvine right now Read more...

Keeping a Pulse on Your Customers, One Text Message at a Time

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted some thoughts on Net Promoter Score. NPS does a great job aggregating customer satisfaction for a period in time. But what if you want to know what your customers are thinking right now? Maybe there just might be a way to get real-time feedback... Read more...

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