Aptean Food & Beverage ERP vs. Infor VISUAL

I would highly recommend Aptean Food and Beverage to any colleague in the Food industry. The ERP is specially designed for Food Manufacturing and it does it very well.

Incentivized

I struggle to identify a scenario where VISUAL is an appropriate solution. We used VISUAL because it was a legacy system and the cost/complexity of changeover seemed daunting. The user interface is poor as is the interconnectedness of the various screens and menus. This might be an acceptable piece of software for a continuous manufacturing environment with little variation of basic design, but we have had to write multiple add-on macros in order to get VISUAL to work effectively for us.

Incentivized

• Accounts Payable system is well integrated and easy to use
• Accounts Receivable is the same as Account Payable. Easy to reconcile with the bank
• Tracking of inventory and recording of inventory is well managed by aptean
• Submitting and recording Purchase Orders is very well integrated with Inventory and Accounts Payable.

Incentivized

• Infor Visual has a standard way of addressing business operations: sales orders, invoicing, reporting. It is easy to train operators used to using a manual or other ERP system.
• Material control is easy for production runs, R&D material lists and repairs. The process of receiving, issuing and returning material to inventory is facilitated by standard interfaces that are easily learned by material control operators.
• Engineering changes to bills of material are facilitated by the "engineering Master" flexible editing capability. The version control for the BOM's can be as detailed or vague as the process designed dictates. One item of a BOM or the entire BOM can be changed quickly and approved for production that day.

Incentivized

• The Quality Assurance Module needs some better integration with inventory. We still do this process manually
• The Maintenance module needs the same work as the Quality Assurance Module
• The Warehouse Module does sometimes get a bit wonky, but overall is okay.

Incentivized

• VTA has been extremely unreliable. I would not recommend it. It is not customizable at all. There is no logical way to handle shift differentials which is a huge issue with a company that runs 24/7.
• If you do not have a schedule set up, they cannot clock in. This poses a problem for anyone that gets called in on a shift they don't normally work on.

Incentivized

Good Technical and Customer Support during and after implementation tasks. Good Project Plan and Management support for implementation and post implementation. Financial functionality could be more comprehensive particularly with Budgeting and Cash Management. Inventory Management capability was adequate but could be more comprehensive as well. "Out of the Box" functionality was adequate but requested add-ons and enhancements seemed to be a bit pricey.

I gave this Rating to Aptean due to the many great functions it has and how specially designed it is for food manufacturing. The customer support however, sometimes gets a bit irritating

Incentivized

Because of use cases and easy implementation and the vertical and horizontal scaling.

Incentivized

Support for the product is good, but very complicated via ticket process. And emergency tickets dont get resolved right away which then halts usage of the system.

Incentivized

As we have seen the live environment and the use cases where we implement.

Incentivized

Could have used more hands-on approach. There are multiple webinars and information sessions but until you actually use the system, these are not very helpful.

Incentivized

Aptean blows QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise out of the water. Everything Aptean does compared to Quickbooks is 100x better in all aspects from AP, to AR, to inventory management, to purchase orders

Incentivized

We unfortunately did not evaluate any other ERP software. VISUAL was a legacy system and we determined that changing systems would be too difficult, and not cost effective. We reached out to our local VISUAL rep who knew how the software functioned, but not how to apply it more appropriately to our business model, so we continued on with what we had rather than looking elsewhere.

Incentivized

• It has reduced us using multiples platforms
• Our IT costs have been lowered since switching over
• Our Record Keeping and traceability has significantly improved since going to aptean which has reduced a lot of paper record keeping

Incentivized

• I cannot comment on business impact.

Incentivized