Sage 100

We are using Scanco's Cloud based product and are having problems with performance and connectivity issues. We recently upgraded to Sage 100 2014 premium and at the same time upgraded to the Scanco cloud version. I am curious to know if anyone else is having issue with this product or has any recommendations about how to optimize it's use.

I have two using it pretty heavily and not having a problem.

@RobertWood what time zone are your clients? Here on the east coast, we find that if our client comes in and the Cloud is not functioning; it is after 9 am before they can get through to someone to help them. For a heavy manufacture/distributor, that starts at 6 am; this presents an issue.

Have you evaluated their network for connectivity and performance issues? Being on the island paradise, response time is probably a nano second or two slower......

Thanks Robert and Madeline for the responding. We are in Hawaii so early morning is not a problem for us.

Thanks Jeff. The performance is inconsistent right now and we don't know yet if it's our wireless network or the connection to the cloud that is the issue.

@ThereseLogeais mentioned to me once that one of her clients had Scanco performance issues. Maybe she will post her experience her and what she did to resolve it.

Mine was related to their Wi-Fi. Since that was resolved, all has been going fairly well. I don't believe they have had any issues contacting Scanco for help. They have been pretty responsive.

Thanks Therese for the update. We will have to evaluate the wireless.

I spent the afternoon at one of our customers that we recently took over, so Scanco was already installed. They told me in my first meeting on issues that the scanning was slow. That has recently become worse, hence today's meeting. The problem they are having is that the response to the handhelds gets slower and slower as the day progresses. I brought in an expert in wireless networks and handhelds who designs and installs wireless networks and does custom data scanning systems, primarily in the over 50 device environment (which is not really what we encounter with Sage 100 systems). My objective was to look at every possible cause and to start eliminating those that were not an issue. The conclusion on the wireless network was that they were getting good response and coverage. He had a few minor suggestions, but nothing that would have any significant affect on the response times. The network support engineer told me that the dedicated server for the scanners was not the most powerful in terms of resources, but should be sufficient. The fact that at the start of the day response times are great supports this. Scanco has been blaming this on the network server. That's one of my favorite pastimes also, when I know I am right, but I do not believe this is the case. They have been stopping and starting the service periodically during the day and this helps only temporarily. Last night the network engineer restarted the server and response today from 6 AM until about 1:00 PM was great, but then started degrading again. I suspect that the cause of this is in the code and may actually be a program issue. It's as if memory is being used but not released and after a period of time the resources are scarce and everything becomes slow. Until they can prove otherwise, I am giving the responsibility back to Scanco.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a buffer in the memory of the handhelds that is bogging down. What happens if the handheld is restarted?

I had a response from Scanco, and they agree it is not the wi-fi or the network, but some type of memory leak. This is very disappointing to me in that they should know this kind of thing. They need to be aware of these possibilities and design and test around them.

Wow, this would seem to be programming 101 issue that should have been caught and resolved early on...

@JeffSchwenk That's what I would have thought. I haven't done any programming for years, but I remember enough to know best practices. These long standing Sage vendors need to understand that they are no longer the only game in town and Sage 100 has a lot of competition, such as Acumatica. They need to improve their approach and not rely on their past.

Here is one of the suggestions for the customer's systems (from Scanco): ""Ideal way out would be to have customer move VM's onto a different SSD arrays and migrate MAS to SQL Server version."" They can't do that, of course, because they are running Work Order and MRP. Do they want it to get out that their system works best only if you are running the Premium version? Those are not solutions. I want to suggest to Sage they certify solutions similar to Salesforce and Apple. When third party programs don't work properly, there is the potential that the customer will just reject everything.

I hope I haven't been too subtle here, and most of you are thinking ""John sounds pissed!

Not getting the warm and fuzzy feeling on use of SCANCO here. The main two players have been SCANCO and ScanForce. Now that SCANCO and ACSG have joined forces to create ""ONE"" we need to know SCANCO is a reliable choice for the functionality. Especially if clients are adding multi-bin. My understanding from ScanForce, because of this merger, is they are now looking at an alternative warehouse solution for multi-bin in an upcoming competing product. We have a client that has ScanForce and plans to add ""ONE"" multi-bin. They are considering moving to SCANCO to ensure long term support for integration of the two products.

Scanco has always been overpriced in my opinion, plus you have the extra cost of Bar Code Master, and their products and support have been up and down over the years. This year is the first time I have reconsidered them for about 8 years - partly because they are a vendor member of 90 Minds and partly because of ONE. Scanforce is looking for an alternative solution for multi-bin. The only ones I am aware of are SWK (Hightower) and IIG solutions. ICS is still out there, but I have made it quite clear here what I think of them. Perhaps SWK should team up with Scanforce. They could call it TWO.

@JohnHoyt - Very interesting!!! Wasn't it just last year (or year before) that Shaun and Devin stood in front of the MOTM group and said it was a new day and a new way at Scanco after transitioning to the new leadership team. This truly sounds like a response one might have received five years ago. I recall many ""entertaining"" Scanco postings from the days of yore. I would be very interested in hearing the feedback from Scanco management if you reach out to them as their feedback was totally unacceptable. Is it truly a new day and way there or are old habits hard to break??????

ScanForce was not at liberty to divulge with whom they are partnering on this but we should hear something very soon. ACSG's multi-bin seems to be the forerunner although the others are still out there. At this point, if we are recommending the ""ONE"" multi-bin solution, then the ""ONE"" scanning solution should also be the choice. (along with WO or JOSCAN) It has to be solid.

I was not happy when I heard about the ""ONE""group and told ACSG that . Based on one of the webinars they did I think we can still get ScanForce and Multi Bin but not all the new features of Multi Bin but I'm not sure if Steve would even consider linking to ACSG's Multi bin at this point . I am not happy that the ONE group is telling me who I have to ALSO USE if I want to use one of their products.

I wish it had been this kind of new day . . . https://youtu.be/D5Y11hwjMNs

@JohnHoyt - I would not trust Sage ""certification"" of 3rd party products as they would take the money and not test the stuff. Hell they don't even test their own stuff!

@PhilMcIntosh I'm glad all of this has not stifled your cynicism!

So perhaps Sage should contract with a small group of brilliant consultants like . . . 90 Minds to do the testing and certification.

@JohnHoyt - why would Scanco being Scanco stifle my cynicism?

@PhilMcIntosh I was actually thinking about all the good news announcements coming out of Irvine lately. ;-)

Today's response times at our customer had been great on the handhelds from 6 AM to about 1:15 PM. Then they went from 2 second response to 10-20 second response. The network engineer is monitoring the system since that occurred (45 minutes ago) and reports that there is barely any CPU usage on that server - minimal compared to what it can handle.

Does the response degrade on all the handhelds at once?

Yes, it does.

@VenessaGriffin I believe you are experiencing a similar issue with Scanco Cloud Solution at one of your clients. @JohnHoyt has been working diligently with one of his clients and I am hearing similar issues between your client and his.

The latest technical response from Scanco as of 7:30 AM EDT: They are investigating using 64 bit ODBC to determine the performance improvement over 32 bit. They created a 64 bit version of the ConnectIt service, and first tested it with the 64 bit driver that comes with Sage 100. 64 bit service with 64 bit ODBC driver does perform better on 64 bit server: it needs less memory and it manages memory better overall. It is a read-only driver, so they needed to test it with the 64 bit driver from PVX. The result of that test is that the driver keeps crashing, so they are working with PVX to resolve that. Scanco is convinced that the root cause is IO (slow access to the MAS90 directory) that causes the ODBC queue to grow. Going 64 bit will help with the queue when ODBC does have access, but when IO is slowing down, it would be out of Scanco's control. They cannot do much if the hard drives do not respond fast enough. Scanco has asked if we can upgrade to Sage 100 Premium, and I commented that I assumed this would take the ODBC factor out. They agreed saying that by using SQL Server they would not be constrained by the limitations of ProvideX ODBC. This option is an issue at this point, since this customer uses WO/MRP. (Not my choice, of course. We inherited this.) It would be a large investment to convert to a production system that runs under SQL (i.e. JobOps) and to upgrade to premium, just to get the scanning to run properly. This is not what Sage 100 users and consultants have been required to do in the past to continue with the ProvideX versions. If Sage decides that SQL is the only option going forward due to the complexity of current technology and third party software, then I may accept that and deal with it. I actually would prefer that, but it cuts out the smaller users who cannot afford that investment. That is not the case, and I have heard no mention from Sage of that ever happening. In this case, however, this is an OEM vendor asking us to do this. This is a 15-user scanning system, which Scanco admits is one of their larger systems. Perhaps the issue is that when we have larger user counts, Premium is recommended/required. I understand that, but no one determined that up front.

Wonder if Scanforce has the same issue.... So is the lag due to pushing the data into Sage or retrieving out of Sage??

It appears to be the behavior of ODBC, so I imagine that is some of both.

So why does it crash in the afternoon? Are they not scanning in the AM?

The volume is not significantly different.

ScanForce loads the software onto the scanners and Scanco does not. At least that is what I understand and maybe that has something to do with Scanco issues.

@DianeRuth That's interesting, but I have no idea what the advantages may be, although I am sure it can speed up overall performance. There should not be issues. Scanco for years was the only significant player for 100 and 500. Why would they have issues at all? I think they have been skating for years.

@RobertGouveia Your issue has improved, correct? Our slowness issue has not yet been resolved although Scanco knows what they need to do. They are moving to the 64-bit ODBC driver and have made changes to their programs to release memory. The issue is that the customer has a large number of standard MAS users and 15 handheld users. It is an IO problem in that the standard users have priority over ODBC connections (handhelds). The MAS program and the RDP server are VMs on the same physical server, so they have recommended these be separated to two physical servers. All of this would not be an issue if MAS was the Premium version, which we cannot do because of Work Order/MRP.

By the way, thanks to all the people who have contributed to this thread and thanks John for your help. We made the program change that Scanco gave us yesterday and I still have not gotten the feedback from users. We will be evaluating that this morning and I will update this thread as soon as it is done.

What were the program changes from Scanco?

@JohnBroadfoot are these VMs on SSDs? If not I would recommend maybe as a test putting a SSD in that server and moving the VM to it and see if that helps. Run it for a week or two and see if that resolves the IO issue. Of course rebuild keys files on some of these tables and make sure the are squeaky clean! I have not switched any clients to Scanco but have several in the pipe - so you guys need to pave the way so mine go smooth!!

I meant @JohnHoyt sorry @JohnBroadfoot

Have you thought of scheduling a service restart at noon everyday?

@JohnnyPabian Yes, VMs on SSDs. They are not scheduling the restart at noon, but end up doing it shortly after anyway.

@MadelineStefanou I never did answer your question. They are both east coast. One is 24/7 and pretty heavy with 20ish (correction 17) users. The other starts operating at 7am typically. I also have a third with 7am start time that I forgot about. Also Eastern Time.

@JohnHoyt and @RonGouveia is there any update on either of your situations?

We have a IT support person that is going to work with our warehouse staff tonight. Scanco did an update to their software on our server but I do not know what the programming changes were. Before the update the Connectit service was constantly taking up 25% CPU usage. After the update that is longer happening and CPU usage now looks normal. The main problem that we have been having is slowness during the late night shift and the IT support person will evaluate that with warehouse staff tonight. I should get a report of that tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.

At our customer changes were made to switch to the 64-bit ODBC driver yesterday morning and there will be changes to what servers programs reside on. Scanco also mentioned the customer's antivirus program (ESET) and asked whether it was excluding properly, although IT swears it is set up properly (I've heard that before). My point through all of this has been that Scanco needed to have specific configurations defined, just as Sage has for hardware and operating systems. They should also have tested for volumes (since this 15-user system they say is one of their largest). That's just best practice.

15 users? Really?

Yeah . . . I would have thought more like 25 - 30, especially in large warehouses in the Midwest. But that's what they said.

The report that I Received from last nights evaluation is that the performance that we are seeing after the Scanco update is much better. Again, Scanco got onto our server and performed that update to their software and I do not have a report of what was changed. I do know that the amount of memory used and CPU usage are both lower. This work will be ongoing and I will give updates as I get them. Thanks Everyone who participated.

We have now had two full days with no issues after the changes were made. Yay!

Knock on wood.

Thanks John taking the lead and getting Scanco to move on this. I appreciate your help.