Sage 100

Does anyone have experience with a JD Edwards to Sage data conversion?

Almost.... Pitched Sage 100 to prospect to replace their unsupported JD Edwards. Prospect said it was too cost prohibitive to renew JD and wanted to look at other products. Turned out the CFO really didn't want to change. They ended up upgrading JD Edwards at about 50K more than a Sage installation. No one really wanted to learn new tricks. Not sure how this would differ from any other migration. If you can get the data out of the old system, it will import into Sage 100.........

Interesting. We have a client with an almost identical situation.

I'm unsure what the question is -- are customers happy after moving off JD? Is there a trick to getting the data off? Do customers notice missing features?

I think the answer to Jane's question so far is no. In our case, the product is not supported well and they have an expensive person on staff that has made a career out of supporting it and lost site of the idea that she should provide a service to the rest of the staff. The client is interested on getting to a product that is more modern, universally supported and does not require an in-house guru. Sage 100 would meet this clients needs. We haven't gotten far enough yet to see what is required to get data out.

@JohnBroadfoot - How much are they willing to modernize their business practices and is the IT person related to the owner??? I was amazed at how early '90's JD looked. But when I started talking about how much they could streamline their operations with Sage 100 AND ACTUALLY changing, I got the deer in the headlight look! Pay vendors via ACH - Never happen here. Interface the POS systems with the GL more than once a month - Nope. Be able to drill down into source documents - Uh, Uh. Scan documents and retrieve them with a click of a button - Really?? Email reports to department managers - Seriously!! When they wouldn't schedule a meeting with the CFO, I knew the battle was lost. Three weeks later they said they were upgrading JD.

In a former life (in a galaxy far, far away) I consulted on AS/400 ERP software, including JD Edwards. I have done a few conversions from AS/400 files to Sage 100, but it has been awhile. Anyone looking at these types of conversions now is probably using the legacy versions on the AS/400. I also have another consultant here in LA who is a technical expert and programmer for AS/400 OS and file structures, so when it gets too much for me, I call on him. Based on what I do now (which is not too technical), I would readily call on him. The file structures for these systems are not compatible with PC systems in their native form, but there are built-in utilities to convert down to ASCII formats. Either that or printing to text files and downloading, which is necessary when they do not have the latest Windows integration when using PC's as terminals. Most of the time it takes less time to have them license the appropriate software to download data files seamlessly to a PC. Oh, yes, I have experience.

@JeffSchwenk, In this case, the IT person is definitely not related to the owner and has been classified as a PITA. I understand that our sales people and another consultant that assists us have spoken with the CFO. We'll see.

For these types of conversions I've done as John suggests- print to ascii text then use a tool like Monarch to strip out the fields. That way you do not have to know what the underlying file structure is as you can view most of the layout from the reports.

My programmer still does a lot with AS400 programming just in case you need a programming source.