General Consultant Discussion

I have a solution concept, wondering if any of you have encountered the need and if so, what you have recommended or implemented. My client is a US Wholesale distributor. Has 10 different overseas suppliers who confirm their PO's (PO #, quantity, ETA, container #, etc.) via email. It's messy and inconsistent - requiring a .5 FTE to do the manual work. My thought is to give their suppliers (vendors) each a private login to a simple site, which would read PO data out of Sage 100. The supplier would be able to update their PO's (ETA, quantity) and save it. That information can then be used and synchronized back into Sage 100. I welcome any / all thoughts.

Probably will work provided your client is big enough to demand that their 10 overseas suppliers do this. Otherwise I suspect the suppliers will mostly ignore the request.

Yes, that is always possible. So far the client believes the concept is feasible and will be accepted by the majority of their suppliers. I am hoping to get away from 'custom' as much as possible. I have implemented this with email and FTP in the past but with fewer 'trading partners'. Thinking a site would allow control over what changes are allowed given so many suppliers.

You could do this with the Self Service Portal in Sage CRM. Customer login is controlled from native Sage CRM Self Service. PO data is pulled from Sage 100 and displayed via the Portal. Change page can be housed in the Portal for the Customer to enter updates. This would be written back to the Sage CRM database. Variance reporting could be run to show the differences between the Sage 100 PO and what the Customer updates via the Portal. From there you can run a VI for corrections, use another utility to write the updates, etc... Lot's of ways to get the data back into PO. Primary thing to remember is that Sage CRM can connect to pretty much any database and then can be used to display data from that database. The Self Service Portal is just the web conduit to get to that data and control the user access. Base licensing for all of this is included with the single user Sage CRM license that comes with Sage 100. If you are just using CRM to control the Portal, then you can do all of that with the single Admin license. Unlimited Customers can connect through Self Service and there is no additional licensing for that Customer access.

Kevin, funny you mention that, they own CRM. Thanks for these details this might be something to explore with our CRM business partner.