Infor VISUAL vs. Munis

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

Munis is great for any sort of data keeping and accounting work. There are features of Munis that I am still not familiar with even after 6 years of use. Munis would not be very good for a point of sale sort of operation like a retail store because it just simply is not set up for that sort of operation.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Munis has multiple different sections that each pertain to different areas of our office. For example, there is a section in Munis that is for listing. This area supports all of the information that our county (or any other county) would need to enter to properly tax Business or Personal Property. There are similar sections for collections, vehicles, etc.
• Munis has so many features. Munis can be set up to maintain foreclosures, garnishments, attachments, and/or executions within its collections sections.
• Munis has so many features but they all work together which is great because you can see almost everything within the main bill inquiry area instead of having to flip back and forth between areas of the software.
• Munis also has a finance side which is great because we are able to submit our collections reports to our finance department and they too can use finance to handle that side of the business.
• Munis is highly customizable due to the amount of features it has.

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

• Room for improvement for the Building Dept. software. Could not get it to work so we ended up getting rid of it and going back to our old system.
• The payroll side could use more fine tuning. You have to manipulate some things to get them to work properly.

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

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

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

Incentivized

• Streamlines some accounting processes (e.g. purchase orders)
• Provides department heads with current up-to-date budget information
• Web-based makes it easy to access from anywhere

Incentivized