Infor Adage (Discontinued) vs. Infor VISUAL

It is a factory process ERP suitable for flow manufacturing, perhaps the best in its class for functionality and value. Great for medium sized manufacturers.. especially food manufacturers.

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

• Stability, it reminds of a old COBOL system found in plants. It just runs and never stops.
• Established, Infor Adage made an A grade platform.
• Support, even though Infor Adage is not supporting it anymore, other companies are still developing add ons for it.

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

• Infor has moved onto their new manufacturing package, so they have slowed in their development of Adage, and the user interface is a bit dated, but functional. It could use a technical refresh on the operator screens and access. It is not web based.
• Integration with EDI is weak. There is poor support for ASNs (Advanced Ship Noticies) and freight management has to be brought in from the outside.
• Security takes a while to update and administer.

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.

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

I was not here for when Adage was introduced but I can say having had experience with Oracle I can say that it can hold its own. When it gets down to, Adage is easier and cheaper to maintain then other ERP's. It can do the same tasks other ERP's can do and does them well.

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's scaled well with our company, and we haven't seen the need to switch packages, it works well for us.
• Our IT staff doesn't spend time fighting application or data failures, it's a clean running package (we have an IT staff of 3).
• We can get our work done, and it handles business loads well.

Incentivized

• I cannot comment on business impact.

Incentivized