General Consultant Discussion

Anyone familiar with Bill Hammer, formerly with Sage, now with Infor? I should also ask, anyone familiar with Visual MFG from Infor?

Know of the name and think he has a pretty good reputation. Check with @BradKain on Infor questions as he is very into MFG and I think about a year ago went through Info training and may have an install or two already (unsure).

bradk@krcginc.com

I have been talking with Bill regarding offerings through Infor. I have contact information if you need it.

He left me a voicemail and sent me an email. He is looking for Visual MFG partners in the Midwest. He says he was at Sage for 11 years and said, ""I left on very good terms and believe Sage is in the best place they have been for years. However there are gaps in their product portfolio and product strategy."" He then explains the benefits of the Infor product. He mentions Sage 300 - is that his background with Sage?

He was the Southeast RAM(?) for many years.

Visual is some pretty old stuff. Although Robust, I don't see it as a future leader

Here's what he says about the Visual product: It doesn't require running two inventories which is the case with Sage 300 & MISys. In addition the product comes with a CRM system that is in the same DB as the ERP/MFG Visual MFG has a multi level BOM (job ops only has one level) Visaul MFG handles Engineer to Order, quality control and can manage scrap so it's a good fit for Fabricators. None of these markets are met by the Sage Portfolio without a 3rd party solution. Have you had experience with it @MarkChinsky ?

I had a customer switch from MAS 200/JobOps to Infor SyteLine last year and I still ended up porting just about all of the custom stuff I had ever done over to that. (And by the way the users hate it so much it is referred to in emails as ""S...line"". Went live 7/1/12 and are STILL using MAS for some stuff). Infor sells direct and are absolute jerks to consultants - the controller had to give me his logon/password for the support site because Infor ignored his requests to issue me one. If you want a better manufacturing solution, talk to xTuple.

I knew Bill Hammer from my Open Systems days, before working with State of the Art. I always touched base with Bill at each year's Insights/Summit. (Not anymore). I believe Bill's background with SAGE may include several products - mostly the ""value"" products (Peachtree). Bill has always been straightforward with me. Sorry don't know anything about Infor or Visual MFG or SyteLine.

Syteline is a completely different product from Visual as ERP 100 is from 300. I'm no fan of any ERP solution for a manufacturer where the fundamental manufacturing is outsourced to a 3rd party. This includes SAP B1 that relies on multiple different manufacturing options. I competed against visual with Epicor. Only reason they stayed in the fight as long as they did is it was kinda cheap and we were dealing with laggards coming off of an old version of Macola. There are alot of better MTO/Job Shop focused ERP solutions IMHO

Thanks for the feedback everyone! It's just what I was looking for.

Bill Hammer wouldn't have a clue about what JobOps does for Sage 100, because none of those Sage sales people bothered to learn about JobOps. So that's why he states there are gaps. Yes, Visual is an old package, so beware because of that. The big red flag to me is when it's Infor - the real ERP graveyard. They merge in everything that's dying. By the way we are converting a 35-user Syteline to Sage 100 and probably JobOps in Phase 2.

I agree with @JohnHoyt in both observations. Criminal negligence by Sage about JobOps awareness.

We picked up Infor Syteline product and have been very happy and successful with it. Syteline is the higher end Mfg package Visual would be the lower end mfg package.