Sage 100

Anybody know of a good solution for a Sales Order status tracking dashboard? Client company in distribution and light manufacturing hired a logistics manager from the oil & gas transportation industry. He is set on having a board that live updates the status of open sales orders with a traffic light indicator to identify credit hold, waiting on materials, ready to ship, etc. Any thoughts on a third party or possibly how to accomplish with a website? Can Sage be connected to PowerBI? Not sure the most efficient direction to take this.

I've definitely seen people do this. Perhaps with a tool like Sage Alerts which refreshes periodically then displays on a wall mounted monitor. I am sure that third parties like Website Pipeline could create options that are web viewable. All depends on what the value is to the customer to solve this issue.

@KathrynForadori, what edition of Sage 100? If Premium, then PowerBI could be a very good option. If the customer uses O365, the chances go up even more. Don't give up if not on Premium. However, you will need some way to pull your data from Providex into a SQL platform to make your reporting more real time. DSD has a tool that can do this for you. You can always use SSIS to pull the data but in the end, as your project grows (no one ever want's less information) you will probably save money using the DSD tool rather than re-invent the wheel. The key is getting data updated on a regular basis. With SQL, you can install a desktop component for PowerBI that makes the data available on the web in real time. This provides you the platform to work with at a very reasonable cost ($10/month for developers). As with all dashboard projects, the labor won't be cheap to do. (That doesn't mean it will be supper expensive either.) There is a lot of design work that needs to go on well before anyone starts coding or building components. Each widget on the dashboard is essentially a single report. Therefore all the same design steps needed to layout al report are required for each widget. A dashboard in essence is a set of reports assembled into a single presentation.

Give @DanBurleson a shout. Dashboards are in his wheelhouse!!! He is completing a project for me that I am in awe about.

Thanks, @JeffSchwenk . PM sent

@ShawnSlavin , the client is using Sage 100 Advanced 2014. They are not a big spender and I think SQL mirroring is definitely out of the price range. Might be able to bait them into 100c Premium with the current promotion, but not confident they would move quickly enough. The dashboard doesn't need to be elaborate, just a list of open orders with status indicators. The trick is getting it to ""live"" update instead of running a static report all the time.

You could use a linked server in SQLExpress to report off of.

Champaigne tastes on beer budget? Sounds like the real time updating is the element that changes pricing a lot. The dashboards can be created with Sage Intelligence, Biznet and Solver BI360. All will connect to PowerBI. Real-time refresh, as explained by Shawn, is dependent on the db. Consider offering 3 options. Basic: SI with automated reporting generation. Enhanced: Si with PowerBI distribution. Premium: includes sql migration, PowerBI, etc. Gives the logistics manager a way to get in touch with budget reality.

JobPack has a scheduling dashboard that might help your client.

I saw a presentation by Website Pipeline today for their Web-based Sales Manager & Customer Service Tools and they do the SO dashboards. Might not be within budget however.

I suggested Website Pipeline as the high-end dream solution, but expect they will opt for one of the more affordable options. This client saw a Website Pipeline ecommerce demo a couple of years ago and pretty quickly abandoned the project based on the price tag and level of effort involved.

WSP has simplified their product offerings lately. If it's been a couple years, you should check them out again. I recently outlined a range of offerings in this area to use in marketing, starting with VI and spreadsheet import/export, then on to ROI's In-Synch, and then to WSP. The reality is that any significant integration, especially not batch-oriented, will come very close to $10k 1st yr. WSP can offer its sync tool only for ~$5k to link between your Sage 100 and , say, and existing Magento site. The b2b site is under $25k usually. My point is that if he wants a portal, I don't see how he gets it for under $10k, and the next level up is double that. If he wants just real-time portal, it requires reporting magic and database enhancements which I don't see happening for under $5k if he's really lucky. I know that's real money, but my immediate question is, ""How much benefit/value does he expect to generate through use of this dashboard?"" You really need to sit him down and work that out. I'm gonna guess that he has no budget for any of this right now. He needs to understand his realistic pricing options.

Hi Kathryn, We had a customer looking for something low-tech (read low cost) to track open orders ready to ship. We wrote a very basic tool in excel and used a data query with dynamic date parameters to grab the information, then used a macro to refresh the data query and flag/highlight rows/remove blanket orders etc. It refreshed every 5 minutes with the most up to date orders. They then displayed the data with excel on a screen back in the shipping area and all day long it refreshes. This isnt the most scalable solution, but might be a gateway for them to get some data and see the value of a higher priced solution. We didnt use SI for this just straight excel to keep it simple and runable from a 'drone' workstation that just displayed the excel sheet.