UNIT4 has successfully completed a new TEC Certification process for Agresso Business World, its global enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for people-centric businesses and organizations such as professional services, education and local government.

TEC Certification is designed to help organizations evaluate enterprise software solutions so they can make more informed buying decisions. For a product to be certified, the vendor must complete a detailed research questionnaire and deliver a formal product demonstration to show our analysts the product’s support for a specific set of real-world business processes.

UNIT4 is a business software vendor headquartered in the Netherlands with operations throughout North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Founded in 1980, the company is now among the top ten mid-market ERP vendors worldwide, and offers four primary business solution lines:  ERP, best of breed financial software (both Coda Financials and FinancialForce), plus turnkey business analytic apps. Its customer base is also impressive—the group has more than 6,000 clients with over 2 million users, and there have been more than 10,000 global deployments of UNIT4’s software applications. More background on UNIT4 is available on TEC’s IT Showcase.

Agresso Business World has strong, competitive support across all major functional areas of the TEC ERP for Services solution model. These functional areas range from portfolio and project management to back-office functionality including financials, human resources, and procurement management. The solution supports the entire end-to-end project lifecycle as diagrammed here.

Agresso ERP is designed from the ground up for organizations such as those UNIT4 calls BLINC—“Businesses Living IN Change”. The solution is built on top of the Vita Architecture which unifies the system’s data, processes, and information delivery. A change made in one area is immediately and without redundancy available across the entire system landscape via Vita architecture. This architecture enables companies to affect system changes to react to varied business changes (e.g. to re-organization, mergers and acquisitions, compliance and regulatory, financial changes, and other business changes) quickly, efficiently, and cost effectively.

A company using Agresso can affect system changes in Agresso often without the need for specially trained IT personnel. In addition to not requiring IT specialists to perform the work, the system allows these changes to be performed with minimal disruptions to a business’s operations.

In short, Agresso ERP has all the features we have come to expect in a modern ERP solution, and a unique value proposition with its easy-change Vita architectural components. The system has a very user-friendly look and feel, alerting, workflow, and an integrated reporting solution—the Agresso Report Creator (ARC). However, Agresso ERP kicks it up a notch in a number of areas including the solutions flexiforms, dynamic zoom, and in particular the user accessible workflow capabilities. A view of the workflow editor is shown here. In the Certification Report (available in a few weeks), I’ll go into more details on the system’s capabilities.

Based on the comprehensive software comparison data that TEC possesses, Agresso ERP stacks up as a highly competitive solution against other vendors in the ERP for Services area. The Agresso ERP system supports the functional areas of portfolio and project management, resource planning and scheduling, opportunity, contact, and contract management, time and expense management, budgeting, costing, and billing all in a single, integrated end-to-end solution.

You can see how Agresso ERP stacks up to the competition in much greater detail using TEC’s proprietary TEC Advisor tool now. Stay tuned for the UNIT4 Agresso Certification Report by TEC, with more on the product’s background, highlights, features and functions, and competitive strengths and weaknesses.