Aptean Intuitive ERP vs. Infor VISUAL

If you have a programmer and are willing to let them learn the system and want software to function the way you run your business this may work well. If you do not have a programmer on staff and are willing to change your business to match the software but think in the future you may wish to modify your ERP software this may work out well. If you want something you can modify quickly this is not a good choice. If you do not wish to modify the code nor your business practices an evaluation would be required. It does allow substantial modifications, but there are areas it may not fit with your business so well. It is possible that Intuitive may happen to make the options you require available in the future.

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

• Easy to Use
• Low Maintenance
• Flexible and modifiable

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

• Documentation. The design of en extensible system works well once you figure it out. Some things can be tricky and time consuming.
• They provide no support for customizations. I can understand not wanting to help write specific custom code, but they refuse to even tell anyone what a method on a base class does unless you pay them $200 an hour.
• Their proprietary design can cause modifications to take longer. If you use one of their forms you can not load it, you must call their launch function and put you code in the "Execute" method. If they were more standardized the documentation issue would not be so bad.

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

We have a lot invested in this from user education to customizations. It would be hard to justify the cost for changing.

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.

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

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

We select Aptean 19 years ago, most of the other SMB packages back then no longer exist. While we have discussed whether to consider other ERP systems here an there over the years we have always come back to the fact that our existing ERP system is well established and easy enough to maintain, and is cost effective

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

• Runs well without a ton of support
• One server license required for site, can run several businesses
• Concurrent licensing keeps costs down for global business

Incentivized

• I cannot comment on business impact.

Incentivized