Sage News and Discussion

Sage Inventory Advisor - Pilot program one day sales training, next day installation training. Just received the attached and responded for attendance on day two which was confirmed. Note these sessions are in irvine CA. I

I will be interested to learn how much revenue potential there is for the typical VAR vs the revenue potential for Sage.

Agree. I'd go to both days but day one is right after a trip North. Hopefully someone else can get to the first day - perhaps @JohnHoyt or @JimWoodhead?

I will take a look.

It's possible I may be able to go. Having seen a demo and considering the client base we serve on the West Coast, I see very little potential for the product and less interest once customers find they have to invest a minimum of $300 per month.

Sage still believes this is the new hot product and it's a one-demo close. (Their words, not mine.)

I requested both days.

I'd rather know what Sage is up to with this then be blindsided with a client asking me to install it and having no clue. At least the training's free and @JohnHoyt there is lunch, hopefully more than bread and water. Perhaps that should be baguette and l'eau du robinet, sans beurre.

@MoiraGoggin @JohnHoyt @JimWoodhead - take a look at what Diane and Brian did with their notes for the Sage Atlas portal. I think we should double down on using Evernote for all these webinar notes and I can create a shared 90Minds notebook to save them to. Can you take notes in Evernote so we can distribute them to the group? I think that would be awesome!

Sorry meant to paste the link from the Sage Atlas upgrade webinar which Brian and Diane made notes on and put into Everote to share. I think this works brilliantly for us: https://90minds-com.socialcast.com/messages/16635105?ref=stream

I agree with @WayneSchulz . Evernote is a great product. I was using the free one but have moved to premium version because I use it for everything.

@WayneSchulz happy to create an Evernote recap, provided that we are able to. The great thing about remote training is that you can do screen captures and add notes, etc. I don't know the setup of the training in Irvine, but would be happy to slip a thumb drive in and if need be use cut and paste to WordPad if nothing else is available.

Would it make sense for 90 Minds to design an alternative product? SIA is using Sage's shiny new connected services to deliver information that customers could/should already have through other means. Should we offer an alternative that is more valuable and better priced? Most of our customers will be approached by Sage; should we have ""a better idea"" when the customers ask us?

@JerryNorman That is an interesting idea and the concept that 90 Minds identify best of breed (or at least better) solutions that we can stand behind gives the group some power in the Sage community and beyond. My feeling is that much of the Inventory Advisor package that deals with optimization of inventory based on sales, projections and general movement is not what a typical Sage 100 user would be looking for. Companies with that requirement would already be looking at software that already includes these types of functions. I reiterate that with Purchase Agent 2013 now supporting Work Order data, it provides the basic information many of our clients need for what they consider to be inventory optimization.

Good point about PA.

I think there's a bigger opportunity for 90 Minds to create a white paper based mostly around existing feedback. If you anonymize it (which I STRONGLY suggest) you can gain immunity from punitive actions by Sage and others. As a group we can issue honest information. If you try to do it as a single person or company you are going to risk retribution - at least until the current regime is recycled.

Wayne, you verbalized what I was trying to hint at. There are several white paper topics that I think would be good for us and the community. They aren't necessarily trivial to produce. Any ideas on that? This would be an excellent topic to explore at Summit. The concept of ""value"" will be top of mind for a couple dozen. This fits in, perhaps with more formally fleshing out the 90 Minds Vault.

@WayneSchulz and @JerryNorman that is a marvelous idea. I'd add to it quotes from customer's that use/using products like Purchase Agent, or have found boi, external dbs, etc. to meet their needs, perhaps add a chart of feature comparisons. And absolutely, anonymize it, but @WayneSchulz could it still be published as a 90 Minds no author names, just a collaboration of like minds?

It could be published and branded 90 Minds without any names of the authors. We would want to be sure that all the content was from members but we would not publish names and therefore Sage would not have a way to call individuals or their bosses.

@MoiraGoggin and @JimWoodhead I cancelled out of this in order to catch up with the real world, so you're on your own.

I'm looking forward to a summary of what occurs here. Two days sounds like an awful long time. I expect that it's mostly training on how to interpret the numberS?

I just got an announcement that this training is being held in the Lawrenceville, GA (Peachtree) office July 15 & 16. Is it worth attending?

I can tell this is a big priority for Sage. I had an e-mail from my Regional Sales Manager first thing this morning wanting to touch base on SIA. Then he had an emergency, so we aren't talking until tomorrow. I did not attend this training, but have been through the 1+ hour demo. I'm simply not getting it as something that I need to spend time selling, because our customer base doesn't need this.

@PhilMcIntosh personally I did get a lot out of the training and was glad that I was able to make it to boh days (sales and install). The sales day shows the product and placement, while install is truly installation - if the wiki they now have on installation was available before this first training set I'd be apt to skip the install day (it's an easy install if you follow their instructions). Here is what is missing on both of those days - deep dive into scripting, writing reports for SIA and learning the formulas behind the calculations. Don't know if that answered the question for you, if you need more info. let me know.

@JohnHoyt I sense that the sell through for these upsells and connected services are career making (or breaking) for some Sage folks.

That's just sad, if true.

@MoiraGoggin did you question them about the missing items? Because I certainly don't want to spend a whole day having the manual read to me...

Well if there was a manual @PhilMcIntosh I'd agree with you, their wiki is their manual. I did ask about reports, since when I was at the class I created one and then decided to ask if I did it right - and it was easy to create. I haven't found anything on scripts yet, will let you know.

@PhilMcIntosh I am going. @MoiraGoggin if you can hook us up with the ""unanswered questions"" I don't mind being a PITA @WayneSchulz & @JerryNorman = The SIA whitepaper had some competitive intelligence in it. They did a great job of telling us whom else we should look at for a great white paper. I bet we could contact them and get reverse intelligence on SIA and then compile it.

@GaryFeldman - I'll post as soon as I have something.

Heard back from the trainer - the tech section of the wiki has field mapping that helps with scripting, but no examples: http://wiki.sageinvadv.net/Field_maps. This list mapping for all the Sage ERPs that work with SIA. On the reporting side to quote - ""When it comes to reporting from SIA, all of the drill in views on the grids provide a CSV download file that can then be sorted and filtered as needed. SIA also has a custom CSV extract / reporting feature that we can use if needed, but this is linking directly to SIA tables on the cloud server and we would need to create any reports at that level until you get to know the table structures. "" This means you can pull any data you want from the SIA csv files using whatever tool works for you. Also, I did ""write"" a custom report while in class - it was fast and easy but outputs csv.