The guide gives a pictorial representation of Sage offerings along with the Advantages of various product offerings and suitability to various industry segments.

A good piece of information packaged well in a small article

Excerpts

By market share, SAP is the largest business applications software vendor. Oracle is number two. You probably knew that. Do you know the third largest applications vendor?

Sage, with 8% market share, is the third largest business applications software vendor. And in the SMB segment (companies with fewer than 500 employees), it’s the largest. Sage is a $1 billion plus company whose software products power hundreds of thousands of organizations’ mission-critical functions. However, given the evolution of this highly acquisitive company, its product portfolio and corporate background might merit some explaining. We’ll give it a try.

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The Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suite provides employees in sales, service, finance, operations, and management with an integrated 360-degree view of business operations through embedded front-office and back-office functionality. At the heart of the suite, Sage MAS 90 and 200 ERP and Sage MAS Fixed Assets provide back-office financial and operations functionality. Embedded SageCRM supports front-office sales, service, and marketing automation, while Business Insights Explorer and the Business Insights Dashboard provide business analysis functions.

By enabling business information to flow between different functional areas of a company, the Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suite empowers every employee to improve the bottom line. For example, salespeople using the customer relationship management (CRM) functionality have instant visibility into inventory levels, credit holds, purchasing cycles, and more. This visibility improves each salesperson’s effectiveness. Additionally, the Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suite gives marketing personnel visibility into warehouse overstocks, so promotions can be designed to improve inventory turnover

MAS 90 Utility:

Beginning with version 4.1 of Sage MAS 90 and MAS 200 the customer master file  holds detailed monthly sales totals. In prior versions this data was only retained for one period using a PTD designation. This new level of detail is helpful to companies who are asking “what sales volume did my customer have last year during the month of February”.

This new feature works exceptionally well except that when MAS90 converts data it will lump most of the totals together in prior years to the last fiscal period. Instead of separating out the historical detail it creates lump sums for conversions. Moving forward the details are tracked apprpriately.

Thankfully Randy Marion at Martin and Associates came up with what must be the worlds most helpful utility. His software does one thing. It recalculates prior history for both customers and vendors and places those totals into the correct monthly column on the respective master file.

As with any recalc process, it is advisable to create a backup prior to execution of this utility. Additionally, it is advisable, but not mandatory, to rebuild the keys of the following list of files for EACH company prior to execution. An exception to this rebuild recommendation is if this data is freshly or recently converted from any version with legacy (.SOA) file structure.

The utility is simple to install and use. Move on program file into the SOA folder, execute it by logging into MAS 90, running Syzcon and run
“arapfxv2”. It’s that easy. I’ve done this dozens of times with clients. Never an error message. The utility runs smoothly each and every time.

This utility is must have that can be used by resellers during an upgrade to correctly display various sales and purchase history for data acquired prior to version 4.10 or 4.2 in Sage MAS 90 or 200 ERP. This tool recalculates data in Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable to correctly reflect Sales and Purchase istory. This is accomplished by scanning all the appropriate history files and accumulating the various totals in the proper fiscal periods and years.

As a result, Sage Software will begin to phase out the stand alone SageCRM integration for the Sage MAS 90 and 200 product. Their current offering of stand alone SageCRM version 6.0 integrated with Sage MAS 90 and 200 version 4.3 will continue to be available for sale to existing users through December 31, 2008. The integration will continue to be supported until the retirement of SageCRM version 6.0 and Sage MAS 90 version 4.3.

Ref: http://www.s-consult.com/2008/10/07/sage-software-readies-extended-enterprise-11/

At the heart of the suite, Sage MAS 90 and 200 ERP and Sage MAS Fixed Assets provide back office financial and operations functionality. Embedded SageCRM supports front office sales, service and marketing automation, while Business Insights Explorer and the Business Insights Dashboard provide business analysis functions.

By enabling business information to flow between different functional areas of a company, Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suites empower every employee to improve the bottom line. Salespeople using CRM have instant visibility into inventory levels, credit holds, purchasing cycles and more, which improves each salesperson’s effectiveness. When a purchasing agent buys capital equipment, assets input into the system are automatically tracked and depreciation write-offs maximized. Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suites give marketing personnel visibility into warehouse overstocks, so promotions can be designed to improve inventory turn over.

With their extensive analytics capabilities, Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suites provide business managers and other employees with easy access to information that is often hidden inside traditional business management systems. Business Insights Explorer (BIE) is the comprehensive business intelligence, workflow and reporting tool that enables users to quickly drill down and get specific data on customers, purchasing trends, operational issues and more. BIE provides standard reporting templates plus supports virtually endless customization options to help users analyze business operations. The Business Insights Dashboard enables users to capture, consolidate and present key performance indicators (KPIs) in simplified snapshots for easy analysis. In addition, the Dashboard supports up to 12 standard graphical reports to be created and displayed on the user’s desktop at startup each work day. Users select reports, graphs, the level of detail and the order in which to view information. Beyond business intelligence, BIE streamlines the workflow process by enabling users to navigate directly to and perform tasks directly from BIE.

Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suites also include personalization features and product integration capabilities that business owners need to tailor their systems to meet their unique requirements. The user interface can be easily modified without source code, so each employee can personalize screens and views to improve workflow. Third-party vendors also can be added to gain greater visibility into a company’s supply chain.

In addition to providing the operational simplicity of the product suites themselves, Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suites take the complexity out of the purchase, maintenance and service processes with simple pricing, maintenance and service plans. The suites are priced per user and give each user total access to all Sage MAS Extended Enterprise Suite functionality. Annual software maintenance is offered in a single contract covering all functions, plus technical support is offered through a single point of contact.