General Consultant Discussion

http://www.prweb.com/releases/RKL-eSolutions-Invests-in/JobOps-for-Sage-100-ERP/prweb11917439.htm This sounds like a mess. So we now have a VAR and a consortium of end users owning this 6 or 7 person company. They are also all but admitting that X3 is not a good make to order/job shop solution. (Any X3 vars disagree?) Is there a re-emphasis on 100? If there is, is X3 coming up short in sales?

I have a customer that I migrated from X3 to Sage 100 Premium two years ago. They have a single level bill of material process. They thought the X3 manufacturing procedures were too complex... it requires several steps to create a finished good and backflush inventory. Using Sage 100 they enter qty produced, print labels and update. Of course you can pick any software and find a feature a competitive product doesn't have.. the key is to identify the priorities.

I agree about the ownership structure of JobOps - it is a mess. It was a joke under BDO, and the new owners have yet to prove they are any better. No, X3 does not do make to order, and I'm not convinced it's a near term priority. They are targeting larger companies where this is not the standard production method.

Interesting. Make to order/engineer to order/configure to order from my experience is the majority of manufacturers in the US (at least NY Metro area). Outside of food & beverage and some medical device, most stock manufacturing has been outsourced to lower cost labor pools. If food had a longer shelf life and low cost labor areas had a better reputation for food safety, you'd see that outsourced too. Its the specialized type manufacturing where customers want fast turnaround, alot of interactive communication about complex components etc that you can't really outsource and this is the area products like JobOps or Epicor address so well. Jobops does well with these areas but doesn't scale into more complex manufacturing which is often called 'project manufacturing'. IE building an expensive boat or something. Project manufacturing combines the functionality of a system like JobOps with Job Cost where you have phases and milestones along with progress billing, milestone billing, variably based fixed fees etc. JobOp's big achilles heal is still the lack of a real multi-level bill of materials. Even with the BOM module, it takes it and 'flattens' it out into one level, doesn't really understand subcontract steps, and doing setting up jobs with subassemblies is very clunky and gives users very little visual visability into the overall production process. Epicor does have something they call Kanban manufacturing mode where you basically say how much of the finished product you need and it automatically does everything in terms of applying materials and labor and creating the finished good and can automatically print bar coded labels as part of a single function. MAS of course has the BOM Production Entry which is somewhat similar but without real labor (but you can simulate it with misc. item codes well enough for most small companies)

This also seems like it's a clarification of an earlier press release which did not implicitly say that there was a financial investment. I'm not sure what the purpose of this release was other than maybe provide some comfort that JobOps wasn't sold off to an investment company who would then milk the maintenance revenues without making improvements. I'm not sure where they see evidence of Sage 100 stepping up in stature within Sage. I've not seen anything from Sage which spotlights a product other than ERP X3 of which Sage seems to have placed all their chips.

@MarkChinsky That's what is so frustrating to me... I have heard from sage on many occasions state the target market for Sage 100 is the small and medium size distributors and light manufacturers. If light manufacturing is comprised of a majority of make to order discrete manufacturing (I realize that in addition some process manufacturers make to order), then what is the justification for Sage not upgrading the job cost module? Seems ridiculous.

The intention of the X3 team is to provide make to order and all the variations, but it is not a priority. (They're still trying to purge the system and code of all the French.) The original market - Europe - apparently does not do as much make to order as we do in the US. I agree with regard to JobOps that the subassembly setup process could be improved, but I consider a multi-level bill of material to simply be a representation of what is being done. It is not what actually occurs on the floor. For that reason by actually placing items on steps where the work is being performed you reflect exactly what is happening. @MarkChinsky I understand what you are saying - JobOps should have the feature of mapping a multi-level bill into the appropriate steps and/or subassemblies so we have the BOM visual representation, as well as work tickets that include all parts on the correct operational steps. @DougHiggs The next question after yours is why didn't Sage purchase the JobOps product themselves? It already is primarily business framework and integrates seamlessly while providing real time transaction visibility. They absolutely had a chance to do this, but chose to pass about 2 years ago. That was when management considered Sage 100 to have a limited life and that X3 would be the go to package of the future. It appears at this point they are starting to rethink that.

John. Some more advanced solutions, and I'm not pitching for Epicor, its just what I know, allow you to setup a BOM and router (Epicor combines the two together and calls it a 'method of manufacturing'. With Epicor you can define a subassembly as 'build as assembly' or not where you reference the assembly, but its not in the bill, it refers to another bill. If you don't select it as 'build as assembly' then the subassembly is fully represented as an indent within the main bill (and so on). You use build as assembly if you often make the subassemblies and stock them for use in the parent without there necessarily being a demand for the parent item. Adding 'make to order' is a mighty big road to hoe after the fact as it requires a major rethinking in design. You have to rip apart the quoting and order entry functions and add alot of manufacturing functionality into it. You also don't want the nightmare that MAS500 is that requires creating a unique part number for every variation of an item ever made that sits in inventory forever. Even jobops allows you to use a 'cable' or 'window' part on a sales order, even though it can have almost infinite variations. In MAS500 (and 100 w/o jobops) every item with a different variation becomes permanent new item number