To complement Macola 10, we partner with best-in-class third party providers to offer add-on solutions that integrate with Macola 10. Today, we are pleased to feature a guest blog post from one of our technology solution partners, BirdDog, which offers eCommerce and POS solutions that integrate with Macola 10.

Imagine a company that prints out a couple invoices, snail-mailing one copy to their customer and saving another copy in a filing cabinet. Imagine that company printing out sales orders, purchase orders and anything pertaining to a job or project, and then filing them in paper folders or job jackets. Imagine a paper folder following the job, being routed to different departments for review and for physical signatures. A printed-out pertinent email is stuffed into the folder. Imagine, in the end, that this mass paper trail fills several filing cabinets, then is archived annually to a warehouse or to an offsite storage facility, and eventually, one day, is shredded. Does that company sound like yours?

QuickBooks and other similar accounting software programs are commonly utilized by small and medium-sized manufacturers and distributors – particularly start-ups – and can often be found paired with Microsoft Excel to manage manufacturing accounting transactions.

As many businesses that begin with QuickBooks and Excel-based accounting systems learn, once a business has some experience behind it, this is no longer the ideal solution for their needs. Growing companies find that utilizing QuickBooks along with other disparate software solutions can slow their business down, creating lots of room for error as they often involve manual duplication and transfer of data from one system to another. For those companies that yearn for the ability to view and automate transactions in real time, across multiple systems and locations, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are key.

Quick - what's the most valuable non-product component of your business? While answers such as employees, sales and marketing might spring to mind – and certainly can be correct – the truth is that data is an often-overlooked top driver of your business.

It helps you intelligently allocate resources, expand your reach with a much smaller degree of risk and make important decisions based on real-time facts. If utilized efficiently, data can become a powerful and important tool for the growth of your business. The methods of collecting and sharing this valuable data are equally as important.

Why Pen and Paper Should be Written Off

It was 1994. The internet was barely emerging. PCs were heavy, expensive and unreliable. A tablet had 100 pages of yellow, lined paper, and you used a ballpoint pen – not a stylus or your finger – to write. It was also the dawn of effective packaged software.

During the 1980s, companies began adopting Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems. Most available systems at the time were bare bones, so companies often customized them heavily or wrote their own. They used 80-column punch cards for data entry, and users often got reports several days later. As we approached 1990, cathode ray tube monitors became common – immense objects with tiny screens that glowed with green or yellow characters. Users had to memorize now-arcane commands and navigate primitive menus to use business software.

Many small to mid-sized manufacturers believe that they can do without an ERP system. They believe that their operation is simple enough that they can control it with a few spreadsheets. Often, this is simply not the case. Here are 10 of the most compelling reasons to implement an ERP system.

For many years, Windows XP was the go-to operating system for businesses, families and individuals who wanted something stable and easy to work with. In addition to the standard home edition, the “Enterprise Edition” was released, specifically for use by businesses of all sizes. Additionally, since it was such a popular version of the OS, many software designers made certain to include Windows XP functionality with each new release.

However, April 2014 marked the “end of life” for Windows XP. If your business still uses XP, here’s what it could mean for you: