General Consultant Discussion

Had lunch today with Russ Graf. Many of you may know Russ as he used to be an Avalara representative. He is now working for Netstock who is the company behind Sage Inventory Advisor. He was in town to attend a customer conference and also visiting local resellers and prospective customers. From what I can gather the # of installed SIA appears to be around 200. Does that jive with any numbers others have heard? Will probably try to do more with SIA - seems like an interesting product where end users just need to hear more about in order to generate demand.

Russ Graf Vice President - Sales, North America NETSTOCK 602-418-6045 | russ@netstock.co | www.netstock.co | skype: russell.graf13

We have included NetStock as a Phase II option on 3 recent proposals, 2 on Sage 100 and one on Acumatica. I see a great deal of benefit opportunity in the product for a customer moving a lot of inventory.

If the data is clean. I setup 2 SIA demos for customers in our data center and in both cases the numbers were way off due to bad old data that the customer never cleaned up. The SIA folks were pitching this as an advantage to the customer, ""see if it helping you already"" and to us ""see you have a new consulting opportunity"". The customers both viewed it as more work without being sold that they would be able to recoup the costs. SIA service cost itself is not a big hurdle, the cost of data cleanup was an unknown and both customers thought SIA could save some money in the long run, but neither thought the actual inventory was bad, just Sage 100 due to old corruption (both had been on the system >10 years).

The > 10 years issue is the same for everyone. Crap in, crap out.

It all boils down to whether there's enough pain present to make the change. For many people it's more of a like or should than a must. Until there is pain nobody is buying.

We have 4 installations in various stages. Although SIA has excellent tools to identify issues with inventory, in the future we will propose a detailed review and consulting engagement to fix many of the obvious issues with inventory and processes. We have found in all cases they have been unable to use SIA to its full potential until these issues are resolved. The second hurdle we have found in almost all cases is the Purchasing staff at the customer. They normally have their own methods including Excel sheets for their purchasing requirements and ordering, and are not willing to change, so they become a negative force. When there is no one above them with a spine, SIA cannot proceed as it should. Of course, Sage wants us to sell SIA first and then deal with the problems, because they believe SIA will identify those. I would do the project and get purchasing on board first.

John Hoyt, great feedback.

SIA is a great solution for those clients with issues surrounding excess stock, stock shortages, needing forecasting especially with new product launches or retirements. In addition to what @JohnHoyt mentions, as I've worked on 3 of 4 installs of SIA, the customer's expectations need to be identified first, the data clean up is mandatory and the purchasing staff, and if existing manufacturing staff, have to have a clear idea what this product will and will not provide. As I've worked very closely with NetStock I'd add that changes are added to the product nearly daily and so when supporting this, you'll need to visit the customer's SIA or the demo SIA site frequently. Also, I've run across issues with the coding in SIA and worked with NetStock to correct the issues. One more thing, if your customer has a specific need, such as a seasonal calendar, integration with work order, or other modules, limitations on warehouses included etc. that these can be customized for the customers particular needs.

Decent 15 minute overview demo of SIA: http://vimeo.com/61556941