Infor VISUAL vs. Oracle PeopleSoft ERP

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

Well suited for established, large organizations with a large user base and the ability to devote significant resources to design and implementation of a vetted, long-term solution for business processing. Not well suited for very small businesses or businesses whose business processes are changing continuously. Changing PeopleSoft for business process changes/modifications requires significant time and resources due to the design, testing, and implementation tasks involved

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• PeopleSoft has great development tools to help support the application. The application designer is a robust tool that provides the PeopleSoft Developer a powerful user interface to help support the PeopleSoft Financials application.
• PeopleSoft Financials delivers robust financial reporting capabilities. With the use of nVision, queries, BI Publisher, and trees the Finance team can create all their reporting needs in an automated fashion.
• PeopleSoft Financials has streamlined interfaces from the subsystems to the General Ledger. There is drill back capabilities from GL to the various subsystems to perform streamlined account reconciliations.

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

• Inability to view the results of multiple queries at once in the Query Viewer.
• Although there is excellent integration with Oracle's other products, there is an unacceptable amount of support for other third party vendors.
• Personalization Feature for a Quick-Access Menu. Due to the abundance of features in PeopleSoft SCM, it sometimes takes a while to find that one option as there are so many others in the same menu. It would be nice for a user to be able to drag and drop some options they use frequently into a Quick-Access menu.

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.

PRISM is a great tool to track and watch numerous financial documents. I would like to see more of an integration platform that would control tracking for specific project details. There is currently only a little section for job notes which I would like to see improve. I think navigation could be improved, but isn't the worst compared to some platforms I have worked with as it provides a tree like structure on the backend which helps synchronize information together for fiscal financials.

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

Incentivized

The usability is very outdated In my opinion. The screens resemble those of Windows 3.1. Too many clicks and drop-downs or clicks to go to a new screen. The business logic also appears dated and requires an update. Overall, it does not have a pleasing User Interface and should be refreshed, or a new interface should be built from the ground up.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I can't give them a perfect rating because it does often take a long time and usually more [expensive] to resolve trying issues that cannot be solved by our in-house team. PeopleSoft is complicated, and the mix and match of user-created and stock modules cause problems very often. These usually require more customization to completely fix, requiring more money spent with

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 recommend that everyone pay special attention to developing a solid testing and training plan if you are even thinking of implementing PeopleSoft. Be ready to obtain good trainers and developers, otherwise, your journey can be unnecessarily painful and much more expensive. Try to stay with an implementation partner who really has your needs at heart, and actually takes the time to understand your organization!

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 is pretty much in line with PeopleSoft Financials because it gives seamless integration between Financials and HCM. Also, when you have both the softwares on same technology, it is very cost effective. One of the reason for selecting PeopleSoft Financials and HCM are their capability to customize the business process. We have gone so far that we have built the bolt-on solutions.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Positive tracking of ledger information for all areas of the organization. Our organization has multiple business units that require the accurate and complete tracking of transactions and budgetary history going back multiple years, which PeopleSoft Financials has done
• Ability to connect with external vendors easily and to export any and all file types and connect to service operations/web services as well as accept and process transactions from external systems has brought a positive impact
• PeopleSoft provides the framework to reconcile transactions across the organization and within different business units to provide transparency and transactional history for metrics and data analysis

Incentivized