Aptean Made2Manage ERP vs. Infor VISUAL

It is good in manufacturing. It helps with planning and scheduling. Also, employees can clock on and off jobs simply to see what each job actually entails in regards to time, quantity and dollars. Shipping and receiving also utilize multiple functions inside of M2M heavily. I think it is less suited for anything outside of manufacturing.

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

• Order tracking
• Customer database
• Report printing

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Their support has drastically gone downhill over the last few years. For the amount of money paid for the support of their product, there should be no outsourced tech support, however, they have started doing that lately.
• The development team has no idea how to test a product or release patches in an effective manner. Our last major upgrade was not until the 12th revision of the software and there were still major flaws on the financial end. When I called them about it, they stated that they knew of the issue but had no plans for a fix until the next version release.
• There has been more than one occasion where I have informed them of a way to resolve an issue that should've already know about.

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

I am not in the decision making group any more for this product. When I was, I along with many other managers, voted to go with a competitive product software vs re-subscribing to Aptean for this product. We were convinced by certain parties at our work that the new product was head and shoulders above the old product. While they freshened up a few things and there was an increase in some functionality areas, it was still tired.

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.

This software is not user-friendly nor easy to train on. I train people for various departments and had argued for the company to go with another company. I was not alone. When the time came for us to do an upgrade (necessitated by the advent of Windows 10 compatibility issues), a number of managers at our organization wanted to seek out other vendors due to the difficulty in training people to use the software. Then have to deal with so many of the user issues and lack of functionality created by the need for using an outside software programmer to bring in software that interpreted what M2M was doing and then translate it back into the program so that we had an end-user solution. This software should be robust enough to do it all. It is not. I hate to be so negative about it but anyone that has spent as many years using this software as I have should find something good to say about the platform and I struggle to do that. I had asked for the warranty section that would tie into the return authorization process. I was told it would happen. It didn't. Bad karma.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I go back to the warranty segment of the program to help track expenses that were generated by returns and zero-dollar sales orders to resolve customer issues. I feel like I was lied to by the company. They said they would have it in there on the new release. They told the purchasing manager it would be on the new release. The purchasing manager assured me it would be on there. They even showed 'warranty loading' on the screen when you signed in. However, there was no additional component of the return material authorization process for warranty adaptation. I even challenged our upload team about it and they had no answer. It does a few functions well but in my personal experience, buy something else.

Incentivized

As we have seen the live environment and the use cases where we implement.

Incentivized

The actual implementation was no worse or better than other software updates. There were days of pain and additional training helped overcome a lot of the learning curve associated with that. However, that training came from our own internal staff vs anyone from Aptean.

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 haven't compared any yet but hopefully, we will in the next couple years so we can put a figure on what it will cost us to move away from Made2Manage.

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

• I came on board after M2M was implemented so I'm not sure how it has changed from previous software. However, I do know it has the ability to grow with the company.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized