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

The original version of Visual Manufacturing (Lilly Software) was intended for mechanical manufacturing. It was adapted at our facility (we were not the first) to accomodate electronic manufacturing. For electronic manufacturing process control it is not ideal when referencing in-line or custom processes used to build product. For material control it is excellent unless a modification to a standard product is required (and we did this on 60% of product going out the door). The co-product feature that removes material from an assembly requires the creator of the work order to calculate the percentage of cost the removed items are from the completed product. On the business operations side regional tax reports were difficult to extract and an external module to go into the data base and extract that had to be created. The system itself was stable for the most part. Occasional "data collisions" corrupted transactions at times. The accounting procedures in place found them by the end of the month .where they were corrected. For a small business with less formal processes Infor Visual can be used with little training for the operators. If the processes need a higher level of accountability and control the processes can be formalized with workflow scripts to ensure that higher level of control.

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

• Part/BOM libraries
• Traceability from customer order to work order
• Job status representation

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

• At times a "shadow part" is necessary in the manufacturing process. This shadow part does not require an inventory transaction but is made a as a separate process - sometimes out of sequence to the general process flow. Infor Visual ver 6.3.5 does not have that capability.
• When generating forms for business and manufacturing operations Infor Visual ver 6.3.5 has a limited number of options. To change or add forms requires an unsupported editor. When the stock and custom options are depleted an outside programming module is required as well as programmers to develop the forms.
• While free software upgrades to the main operations modules have been part of the maintenance agreement. One upgrade required database and hardware support not justifiable for the current business model. The system was frozen at the current version at that time.
• There is no easy way to differentiate between engineering documentation and production documentation.

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

• Good Billing provided
• Easy to implement and use
• scales vertical and horizontal

Incentivized