Sage 100

I have a prospect in Agri-business. They have a number of needs that are unique to their industry. In doing some research, I found a POSSIBLE solution offered by ICS. I don't have any experience with these guys and would like some feedback from the group on past experiences. Has anybody worked with ICS? What are their products like in general? What is support like? How well to they maintain the products? Do they stay fairly up to date with new releases from Sage? Does anyone have specific experience with their product called ""Crescent Food Management""? Thank you for your candid thoughts.

Shawn, ICS has pretty good software. Unfortunately, it's a very small company. The owner, Gary Willitt, is the primary salesperson, programmer, and support person. I have one customer with his software; ICS sold it to him directly and I found out about it after the fact. They don't stay up to date with versions. We have to let Gary know when we want to upgrade and to which version, and then he needs time to bring his software up to that version. Getting tech support is very difficult, and certainly not timely. How's that for candid?

@ShawnSlavin Imagine my next sentence in double bold, double underlined 48 point font. DON'T GO THERE!!! I have made comments in the past about ICS and Gary Willett - none positive. The ""success story"" on the Crescent Software website is Uesugi Farms, which was our client. It continues to be a CPA client, but we are no longer involved. The implementation was a disaster and was due to his poor programming control procedures, poor programming code and many other factors. @KarenOLane pointed out some other problems. Effectively Gary is the salesman, implementer, trainer and programmer. His staff do not add much. He is impossible to contact many times and actually misses critical client meetings with no explanation. This was the largest of 4 clients we have had with his software. The other food industry client continues to use his mods, but will not let him touch anything, and when they decide to upgrade we will find another solution. The other two clients only used his WMS software and both were disasters. One got rid of Sage 100 altogether and we are in process of converting the other over to ONE components. We have had detailed meetings with ACSG to develop around their existing enhancements to provide a solid food package and are still in process, because we have another client that needs something. We just completed a successful installation of a large fruit and vegetable distributor in LA using ACSG enhancements and customizations. By the way, all the food industry specific modifications were developed by @MichaelBuscher in my group. Michael and I really know the unique requirements of this industry, having worked with clients since 2009.

@JohnHoyt, they are a relatively small shop. They contract with farmers to grow their crops. The provide the seed, fertilizer, pesticides, etc. They do the harvesting and own the product when it leave the field. They pay the farmer to plant the seed, lease their field, and tend the crop. They pay the trucker to haul the product to a processing plant to finished the processing ,freeze the product, store the product, and fulfill shipments to customers. They have some custom tools built in Access to management production of AP invoices and AR invoices on a load by load basis. This feeds data into Sage 100 for accounting transactions, bill payments, invoicing, and inventory. As the industry matures and regulations grow, they need to gather more and more non-accounting data relative to the production process, quality control, lot traceability, field management, crop management, etc. It doesn't make sense to build something custom if there is something out there than they can leverage.

@ShawnSlavin All of those are standard types of operations. Lot traceability is now more critical than in the past.

@ShawnSlavin I concur with everything that @KarenOLane and @JohnHoyt have said. Lost a good client because those issues three years ago.

Even if their product was good, as @WayneSchulz and I have always said, going after a vertical opportunity for one deal rarely works out well.