Sage 100

Read from the bottom up. Are we interested in going further with SI and obtaining some additional ongoing education? Hi Stephen, Group wise the reception to Debbie's presentation was very positive. We have a few members who are big promoters of SI with the remainder in the group either doing nothing until FRX flops over and/or seeming to use no one single solution although some have done ""onesies and twosies"" of competitors. I still contend that this market will break down to the people who created FRX report layouts once and never changed them. I think in those cases it's a tougher sale to migrate to SI because you have to quote a customer a few thousand to convert reports plus throw in a different UI ... these are typically very low end users who just want to the software to work without any intervention on their part. During the session either Debbie or Rob mentioned that SI is really a BI tool with financial reporting - which I think is your strongest marketing point and attractive to a segment of the FRX market who may want more from their reporting and are very comfortable with creating reports and layouts. This whole subject should be a hot button for our 90 Minds group and I sense there is some interest in working further with SI. Let me take the temperature of the group and see what they have to say. Of course the overriding issue for SI is that replacing FRX is very much like shingling your roof. Until FRX breaks not many customers are looking to replace something that perhaps they use once a month/quarter/year. Eric Anderson in our group is a big SI proponent and may become our lead in this area. Also I told the group that I think it would be helpful to break out future sessions to beginners and intermediate so we aren't spending a lot of time focusing on one or two members issues with more advanced topics. --- Wayne Subscribe to our weekly email updates for Sage 100 ERP 160 Oak Street Glastonbury, CT 06033 Direct/SMS: 860-516-8990 - Fax: 860-760-6165 On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 4:33 AM, Stephen Coull <stephen@alchemex.com> wrote: Hi Wayne, Trust that you are keeping well. Following the session that Debbie Hill presented to your 90 Minds group in California about 2 weeks ago, I was interested in your feedback from the session, especially with regards to the ""conversion guide"" process to the new In-Memory Report Designer Add-In and how this was received. I am aware of an email that you shared with Darryl Smith, our Technical Director, when he posed the question on whether the group felt that there was merit in Sage Alchemex developing a tool to automatically convert from Frx to the Report Designer Add-In format or if the manual process would suffice? Anyway, I value any feedback you can provide me on this and in other areas, so as to make Sage Intelligence a more suitable value proposition to the existing FRx base and to your group. If you would prefer to discuss telephonically, I would be happy to call you on a date that suits. Regards, Stephen Coull Sales Director Sage Alchemex Tel: +27 (31) 266 9112/3/6 Cell: +27 (82) 901 7482 Fax: +27 (31) 266 9804

For new customers and many existing that never knew about or used FRx, SI is the tool available within Sage 100 (and other Sage strategic packages), so we need to be on top of this. This is especially true as it relates to the BI aspect, which is becoming more critical to clients in their competitive environments. This can be a great source of business consulting work. I like the idea of someone, such as Eric, being the lead within the group. I also support having group knowledge and expertise in the alternative financial and BI report writers. We have certifications in Renovo and a large client base with F9, which are great options for clients that only want custom financials. Last year we had several custom training sessions with Debbie and this helped our consultants reach a higher level of expertise. It would be advantageous for this group to have this expertise as we did with FRx.

I'm in agreement with John

Me too.

Chuck and I are too. I don't know that going after current FRx customers is best, thought. The broader BI element, with dashboarding, should turn up new customers who never thought about going beyond period financial results. In our limited experience so far in interesting Sage customers on this, it is the CEO/GM who changes the mindset of the Controller towards this.

In my view the FRX customer who had us create their FRX and never changed them and is unlikely to want to change them is probably best served by allowing them to look at RenovoFYI. It's probably the closest match to FRX. I have some customers who don't want to look at anything except their FRX statements and they don't want to know what goes into making/creating - they just want to carry on in pretty much the same way they've been used to.

Wayne, that makes a lot of sense. We haven't taken a hard look at RenovoFYI yet. Guess we should!

Do you know the cost for RenovoFYI?

Renovofyi is a little more expensive than the others but they have a direct conversion for FRX to Renovofyi so it is a little more cost effective if you are converting complicated reports. I understand that Renovofyi is about to rollout a Cloud/subscription model. I'll let you know what I hear about. They do have a Small business version for under 3K.

Although with that said.. I feel that Intelligence reporting with the designer add-in will be the goto low end package in the future,

Renovofyi pricelist #Renovofyi #pricelist July 2012

I'm very concerned about the low end customer who has a dozen FRX reports and zero interest in building new ones themselves or migrating them to a new system. I am unsure that they are going to be willing to pay $ x,xxx plus another $ x,xxx for migrating the reports. My fear is that we'll have a bunch of 75% of the way there reports in SI where the customer isn't happy and we're not paid. This won't be all the customers but of my FRX users it's a fairly high number. For those customers who enjoy creating FRX and who have created Crystal then I definitely see SI as being a better choice for them. I think you need to adjust expectations. I remember when all reporting moved to Crystal there was more than one consulting firm who projected all sorts of custom Crystal reporting writing. Some even hired dedicated Crystal people. Did that work materialize? Undoubtedly in some cases yes. More often I noticed that the work was something customers didn't value that highly and many firms backed off the aggressive marketing of report writing as they saw demand for PAID work fail to materialize.