We recently certified Deacom Integrated Accounting and ERP Software v 10.4. Before sharing my impressions of Deacom’s product, I would like to briefly describe the certification process so you can better understand how it works. Read the rest of this entry »

Accountants and business people overall are generally aware that whatever happens in the company must be reflected in the corresponding accounting books or ledgers as accurately and as quickly as possible.

This means that accounting as a business process should be able to obtain, process, and store a significant volume of data that comes from a battery of different sources. I do not believe we need to convince anybody to use a computer-based accounting system to perform those business functions—this has been obvious for quite some time.

That being said, the next questions to ask are these: How adequately does your existing accounting software measure up to reality? And how can you improve it? Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series described Unit 4 Agresso’s (or Agresso in further text) dual product strategy following its acquisition of CODA in 2008. The post then went on to analyzing (and reinforcing if you will, given a number of previous blog entries on the same topic) the post-implementation agility capabilities of Agresso Business World (ABW) [evaluate this product].

The blog post attempted to explain how the product’s underlying VITA architecture differs from contemporary service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based architectures. Part 2 of this blog series analyzes the CODA Financials product and its underlying Link  architecture. Contrary to Agresso VITA, CODA Link (a.k.a. CODA 2link) architecture is indeed SOA-based and supports superior connectivity. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few years I have produced a number of articles and blog entries on two once-independent and occasionally competing products: Agresso Business World (ABW) and CODA Financials. Since early 2008, these two products and their related owner companies have become siblings within the Unit 4 Agresso parent.

Unit 4 Agresso is a Netherlands-based business software company that has grown since its inception in 1980 in great part via several mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The company offers a number of regional products for small and midsize enterprises (SMEs) that are deployed mainly in the Benelux region. In addition, the vendor offers local business applications that are sold in Norway, Sweden, the UK, Germany, and Spain.

However, most of Unit 4 Agresso’s revenue is still derived from the Agresso Business World (ABW) product line. ABW [evaluate this product] is a non-manufacturing enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite targeted at upper midsize service-centric enterprises, and Unit 4 Agresso acquired it in August 2000 through a merger with the former Norwegian ERP vendor Agresso.

Agresso Nowadays

Thus, for the rest of this blog post, I will use the shorter “Agresso” name to denote the entire company. Agresso completed the CODA acquisition throughout 2008, which now makes it the sixth largest mid-market ERP vendor worldwide according to IDC. In 2008, the company had about US$ 550 million in revenues and 3,500 employees, and was operating in 19 countries in 3 continents around the world. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series established that by offloading non-essential and non-value-adding routine tasks to third-party business process outsourcing (BPO) specialists, many human resource (HR) and payroll managers are now able to focus more on strategic and more important tasks of managing talent and human capital of the company. The discussion then went into the possible liberation of chief financial officers (CFOs) and controllers from their daily grind mindless chores. Read the rest of this entry »

While setting down the thoughts for my recent “SaaSy discussion” blog series To SaaS or Not: Is that a Question?, something else related to software as a service (SaaS) and on-demand applications crossed my mind. Namely, it is a fact that SaaS and business process outsourcing (BPO) providers have largely liberated human resource (HR) and payroll managers from the drudgery of performing menial and tactical administrative tasks time and again?

With these non-differentiating and non-value-adding routine tasks being offloaded to third-party specialists, HR managers can now work smarter and focus more on the strategic and more important tasks of managing the talent and human capital of the company. How about the liberation of chief financial officers (CFOs) and controllers from their daily grind of mindless chores? Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series went through the first three generations of the Microsoft Dynamics NAV product, which at the time was called Navision and was owned by the formerly independent namesake company. How has new parent Microsoft treated the product since acquiring it in 2002? Read the rest of this entry »

Every company and almost every individual holds fixed assets. Over time, these assets change in value. For example, real estate tends to increase in value, while vehicle values decrease. Read the rest of this entry »

Flexi wins again.

I recently completed a certification exercise for the Flexi Software’s FlexiFinancials package, a functionally rich accounting package that is complete in every way and geared for the banking, insurance, and financial services industries. A package that has integrated business objects with drill-down searching and with full functional and reporting capabilities.

Read the rest of this entry »

How many of you have walked into a store with the expectation that the product you purchase will probably not work? How many industries do you think can get away with product defects and incompatible components?

For almost three decades, the software industry has convinced consumers that “Bugs” (product defects) and “System Integration” (incompatible components) is a cost of doing business. Granted… enterprise software can comprise of millions of lines of code performing very complex operations. Moreover, today’s complex global economy made possible by the internet has complicated things further with businesses required to support the multiple languages, government regulations, and consumer demands of its customer base. Read the rest of this entry »