Visual South Insights

How are electronic payments used?

Electronic payment systems are just what they sound like: a way to send or receive funds online. Depending on your business, you can execute financial transactions electronically through a variety of ways:

Working toward a quality product

Manufacturing a quality product is at the top of the list for every manufacturer in order to obtain and keep customers. There are quality control measures that a lot of manufacturers use to control their quality, and a few of them are listed below:

What is ERP?

I have been in the ERP world for over 25 years—primarily in sales, but I’ve implemented ERP software for companies as well. My experience is largely in manufacturing environments, so that is the point of view from which I write this blog.

Maximizing capacity

For many reasons, you get a direct return on investment when maximizing your current manufacturing capacity. Capacity planning and production scheduling are prime areas where we help our manufacturing customers. Improving the use of available capacity often transcends ERP software, as having the proper infrastructure in place ensures proper measurements can be taken, and accurate data collected—and that there is a mechanism to balance manufacturing throughput in its truest form.

This isn’t just about functionality

If you are in the market for a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, don’t just focus on the software’s functionality. Limiting your search criteria to just the ERP is like shopping for a new house and not factoring in the location. Not paying attention to, or discounting the importance of other critical factors can narrow your choices, but increase your chance of being unhappy with what you ultimately choose – whether that’s a nice house in a bad location or new ERP that isn’t working for your company. The good news is this can be avoided. In the case of ERP, it comes down to closely evaluating the ERP implementation consultants you’ll be working with just as much as evaluating the ERP itself.

There aren’t only 3…

Listing all the benefits of VISUAL ERP would be a book, not a blog post. But you didn’t come here to read a book, so I’ve chosen what I think are the most significant benefits that manufacturing companies will get out of using VISUAL ERP.

Some background before we begin

I work with companies that are in all stages of their ERP journey. Some companies are looking to purchase and implement their first ERP system; they are typically trying to understand what ERP can do, how to evaluate vendors, and dreaming of the “to be” state they are trying to attain. On the other end of the spectrum are companies that have been running ERP for 25 years and longer. These clients are always trying to improve what they have and make themselves a better company. Whether your company is at the same stage as the former, the latter, or is somewhere in between, there is one fundamental truth you need to keep in mind: an ERP system is only as good as the data that is put in it. Let’s get a little background on the types of data an ERP needs before we get in to the importance of the data itself.

Video transcript

Hi, I'm Jack Shannon. Are you thinking you're not getting as much out of your ERP as you should be? Perhaps you've even thought about reimplementing. Well, let's talk about that.

Having interoperability is critical and Infor APIs allow for this

Infor is somewhat different than other ERP providers in that it tries to provide as complete a solution as possible with Infor supported, developed, and enhanced applications. Other ERP systems often rely on third-party applications using point interfaces or APIs. An API, short for application programming interface, basically allows for different software applications to work together by virtue of pushing and receiving data between each other. The ability to leverage APIs is important because it provides the ability to use other, third-party systems to exchange data and communicate with the host ERP system in order to build out business functionality.

What is VISUAL Time and Attendance (VTA)?

VTA is exactly what it sounds like: it is a time and attendance solution for your employees. A lot of VISUAL customers use the labor barcoding or new Shop Floor Mobile applications to track the time of employees doing direct work on jobs. VTA allows you to do the same, plus much, much more!