IFS Applications vs. Microsoft Dynamics SL vs. SAP Integration Suite

Not every Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System does not cover all the industry verticals and all the functionalities and requirements for a specific industry as built-in features. Although IFS Applications does not completely cover all the requirements and all the industry verticals, it can be implemented for any industrial company with minimum configurations and customization, which is very good when implementing an ERP system. Since it supports web and mobile versions of the application as well, the users ind it easy to use.

Incentivized

In the service series, there is a weakness in applying revenue recognition concepts which are a strong point of the project series. It is difficult to get a period sensitive WIP that could be recreated at any time for a point in time (fiscal period).

Incentivized

In our case to have a such a poweful middleware in the cloud, give us a lot of benefits such as maintenance and support. In the integration part to be able to connect SAP and Non SAP applications makes SAP Integration Suite a good investment when our master data in this case is in S4HANA. Less appropriate is that sometimes the updates in production tenant failed and they have to downgrade or repair the issues. Affecting the usage of the tool. I guess SAP team have to be more aware of performing the changes and tested well on development environments and then when they know for sure that is the correct way to go with the update put it in production.

Incentivized

• Accounting
• Finance
• Complex Inventory

• Ability to add companies, and sub-accounts on the fly allows for the growth of the system without conversions, and flexible reporting allows for the quick utilization of the data.
• Multi-Company allows for easy and automated data entry and reporting across multiple legal entities and business segments.
• Multi-Company also allows for easy centralization of business processes (AP check writing and Fixed Assets for example), while spreading data entry across the enterprise.
• Ability to Copy/Paste into Dynamics SL has always been a strength- especially from Excel. The additional power of being able to use Excel for a myriad of calculations, including complex allocations, and formatting the result into a JE to paste directly into the Journal Entry Screen has saved countless hours in data-entry, and made re-use of complex items very easy.

Incentivized

• Enhanced API management features that allow now the integration with a multitude of data feeds and rating agencies
• Immediate evaluation of potential issues and configurable thresholds and automatic notifications.
• The application will monitor all aspects of compliance and update them automatically for several jurisdictions at time

• Project Budget control other than Procurement
• Customer Advance settlement process should be Manual rather then Auto Adjustment
• IFS GSO Support should be more proactive

• When we have a lot of invoices rather than just a few large invoices, we can be frustrated by how long it takes Flexible Billings to generate a lot of invoices
• It would be nice if Dynamics SL had an easy integration to some of the nicer salestax tools such as Avalara and CCH.
• It would be nice if the fixed assets module and electronic banking were not third party.

Incentivized

• Could be even more business friendly with programming language abstracted
• Ability to simulate the integration flow instead of a real run
• Have some kind of an AI-assistant suggesting the optimal design of an integration flow as it's being built (best practice assistant)

Incentivized

Unfortunately, Dynamics' lack of ability to smoothly integrate with our CRM system is causing us to look at other solutions. The efficiencies that we gain by using Dynamics for our day to day accounting are lost in the constant headaches of getting sales quotes to import properly into the system for invoicing. Another major issue for us has been budgeting and reporting. We currently do all of our budgeting and board reporting in Excel, which is too time consuming and inefficient, especially when a system as robust as Dynamics should easily be able to handle this relatively simple task.

Incentivized

SAP Integration Suite is very helpful to us in many ways to manage purchase procedures, stocks, and data of vendors and suppliers. Also, it helps to manage data for service providers. SAP Integration Suite has the tool to conduct training and evaluation. Unique features like the cloud can provide access from any place and by any device is very helpful.

Incentivized

In overall, the companies get many advantages, where we can forget most of the things which can be considered for room for improvement. The user interface is good. It supports mobile versions an has several mobile applications for specific areas with Android, IOS and Windows versions. It allows several deployment options such as remote hosting, IFS Cloud hosting and on-premise hosting of the servers. IFS Applications can be easily and safely integrated with other systems.

Incentivized

SL itself is relatively easy to use and most of the Help Files documentation is well kept and outstanding in the amount of information that is given. Most end users pick up the functions quickly and are off and running after some limited training. There will always be questions and research to be done, but overall SL is relatively easy to follow for a seasoned user

Incentivized

The user interface is messy and not intuitive. It has a steep learning curve, and flows developed around are easy to make a mess with layout and can be difficult to follow. The debugging is also quite difficult, it takes some time to figure out how to follow the flow and examine data. Error handling is also difficult and not intuitive, it is better to let some errors leak and monitor through ALM.

Incentivized

We have had only one unplanned outage for 2 hours in the last 30 months. We shut down for 30 min to 1 hour once a month, but that is for Microsoft OS updates to the servers. Being a 24/7 world wide operation, the reliability is really important. We do get an 8 hour window on the weekend that we can be down for a short period to install Microsoft Dynamics SL updates, but we do not have many of those. On our last version upgrade, we shut the users out at 9:30 am and were fully operational in less than 6 hours. The upgrade was New SQL server, New SL server and 2 new Citrix servers.

Incentivized

We have been unable to get answers to our questions, solutions to our problems, and they don't seem interested in working in the construction industry.

Many times support will tell you that your issue is an identified bug and will be scheduled in the future to be fixed in a future release. The knowledgebase has gotten worse in recent years and much more difficult to use. many times you can't find the error during the search

Incentivized

The support for SAP Integration Suite is satisfactory. We leverage SAP support through our manage services partner. So far, we have not had many major issues. One concern, to make our rating a ten, would be turnaround time on high priority incidents. SAP Integration Suite drives our key business functions forward. Without a reasonable service level agreement on turnaround, we sometimes find us running into issues running pay, etc.

Incentivized

Just to let it take its course. The implementation for me once I became a part of my former organization was pretty seamless. Just get to know the basics and call the support team to ask questions if you need help on an issue, should they arise. They are ready, willing, and able to help!

Incentivized

Work with an SAP implementation partner, if possible.

Incentivized

Microsoft AX, QAD (in continuation of our previous ERP), Sage X3 was an out of the box ERP that was part of initial RFP. We have chosen IFS based on the compromise between costs & budget, functionality, technical features, and feedback from similar customers that gave their feedback. The project manager team and qualification level of technical or consultant teams were differentiating factors too. Finally IFS application was named in the Gartner’s mid-market ERP Magic Quadrant, along with SAP, and helped us to finalize our choice

Incentivized

We started with QuickBooks Enterprise when our company was young. We quickly outgrew this program as it was not able to accommodate the financial reporting we needed to satisfy our investors. QuickBooks was also very limited in managing our revenue as we grew. We did try Great Plains and Peachtree (now Sage 50) and we discovered that they were rather complicated for our users. They were not as easy to maneuver and manipulate as SL and we felt that SL was much more "user friendly" and simplified, but still able to produce the same results.

Incentivized

Having lots of applications on SAP ecosystems, SAP Integration Suite is the best choice. This comes along with many pre-delivered open connectors, also allows us to develop our own connectors. Event triggers batch processing, credential store and cloud ALM connections helped a lot for plug and play of end to end solutioning.

Incentivized

Since the backbone of the database is MS SQLServer, the database can be easily scaled.

Incentivized

• Positive impact in terms of global process alignment.
• Positive impact in terms of a single system of truth and reporting.

Incentivized

• Dramatic improvement in our ability to judge the profitability of jobs.
• Lots of improvements in delivering invoices and statements to customers.
• Automated AP approvals and imaging made our last tax audit a breeze.
• Ease of reporting data is a big plus. Financial statements with drill down capability are very useful.
• One integrated system means less data moving around and more real time information.
• EFT payments, email statements and live linked Excel charts have improved our efficency
• Too many more to name.

Incentivized

• Ability to have multiple integrations across different SAP systems or modules and be able to actively monitor in one place
• APIs already exist for the different fields in SAP products and are easy to locate
• Can set email notifications to aid with monitoring and alert business process owners of issues

Incentivized