This is the 6th blog in the six-part blog series for the Macola 10.4 release:

1. 10.4 Overview
2. Workspaces 2.0
3. Financial Consolidation & Accounting
4. Automated Workflows
5. Business Intelligence & Forecasting
6. CRM

To recap, the 10.4 release provides enhancements and new functionalities that continue Macola 10’s promise of new core business functions, streamlined activity and process management, and create a more robust—and a more personalized—user experience.

In all, Macola 10.4 boasts 51 new features that empower you to collect more meaningful data, provide more powerful business intelligence with greater actionable insights and enable decision making to reduce expenses, improve efficiencies and increase profits. But let’s get back to CRM...

Survey Says…

We just conducted a webinar with the same title as this blog post ─ “5 Reasons to Use Automated Workflows in Your ERP Solution” ─ and in this webinar, we asked our attendees this question: “What would be the most valuable benefit of automated workflows for your business?" We found the results to be fascinating…

If you enter vendor invoices into Macola on a regular basis, you should be using the A/P Voucher workbench customization. It will improve the efficiency of entering vendor invoice data, simplify three-way matching, link A/P invoice documents, provide better traceability on the purchase to pay process, and automate the G/L matching process of PO receiving transactions to linked, posted A/P vouchers.

We are happy to announce that the Exact Macola 10 mobile app is now available for Android!

The intuitive interface means app users can access contacts and accounts, place customer orders, check inventory, run reports, access documents and more all from their Android mobile device. Taking your business mobile means meeting the demands of customers better and faster.

If you are:

Selling in the field...you can enter a quote or an order immediately

Working in the warehouse...you can quickly check the inventory levels on an item

Visiting a customer...you can easily find other customers nearby to visit

Away from your laptop...you can constantly check your company status via your Workspaces

Please note that this article assumes a working knowledge of creating custom SSRS workspaces.

In this tech tip we will look at how to configure a custom workspace to be able to launch into the customer card. We will also show a sample of how to get the correct unique identifier when pulling back office data but wanting to launch the web-based card.

In this example we will pull data from our back office database and join it to the front office database to get the correct ID number of the customer so that we can launch the customer card from our custom workspace.

Frost & Sullivan is a private consultancy firm with more than 50 years of experience partnering with Global 1000 companies. The organization has a global team of analysts and consultants who are continuously researching a wide range of markets across multiple sectors and geographies. As part of this ongoing research, they identify companies that maintain consistently high standards for product or service quality and innovation.

Exact Macola 10 was selected as the 2015 North American ERP for Food & Beverage Product Leadership Award recipient based on Frost & Sullivan’s findings. Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has developed a product with innovative features and functionality, gaining rapid acceptance in the market. The award recognizes the quality of the solution and the customer value enhancements it enables.

There are a number of tools available in Exact Macola 10 to help you get the data you need out of the system. You can utilize the hundreds of out of the box reports, design custom reports in Crystal and SSRS, or use the Workspaces as a powerful reporting tool.

But what if you just want simple list type reports that are configured to return what you specifically want to see? Then the Template functionality is exactly what you need!

In this example we will turn a search on Help Desk requests (a workflow that we have configured in our Exact Macola 10 environment to track when employees need IT assistance) into a one-click report.

DLL Inc., a family owned manufacturing firm specializing in mechanical contactors, switches and relays recently needed a multi-pronged solution to meet their business needs. They began the RFP process and an employee who had previously worked at Exact encouraged them to consider Exact Macola software.

Harvest Ventures was contacted and asked to respond to their lengthy RFP process. The RFP was written in French and Harvest was able to translate all the documents and show an understanding of the needs DLL had. Their main priorities were production, mainly the processes for manufacturing, MRP, procurement and quality control. The challenges DLL faced meant they needed lot traceability throughout the whole process but most importantly from manufacturing through to the customers. DLL needed to be able to consolidate their historical data from their old system and merge it with Exact Macola and they needed the solution to validate all of the files.

In the previous tech tip we showed you how to setup a document type to store engineering drawings. Today we will explain how to link that specific document to a workspace.

RF Technologies is a leader in RF safety and security solutions within the healthcare, education, and hospitality marketplaces with over 10,000 installations nationwide. Their products protect the safety of residents, patients, staff, students, and guests every day. RF Technologies has been with Exact Macola since 1991, utilizing Exact Macola Progression.

Exact Macola Solution Provider, The Donas Group, started working with RF Technologies in 2014 to provide support and get their current software working properly in their environment. RF is growing rapidly and realized that they needed to streamline their current processes as well as address problems they were experiencing with all of the changes that had been made to their system over the years. The Donas Group met with their staff to discuss the new functionalities and cost savings that upgrading to Exact Macola 10 could make for their organizational growth. During the demo of Exact Macola 10, the team at RF Technologies was thoroughly impressed with the new solution, especially with the workflow and project management functionality. They also saw value in automating many of their labor-intensive manual processes.