On December 13, 2012, Sage North America announced the availability of Sage 500 ERP 2013 (formerly Sage ERP MAS 500). The product’s new features and enhancements, and new mobile and cloud services, aim to help midsize customers increase productivity, simplify processes, and reduce costs across their business.

Enterprises can now save time navigating processes with Visual Process Flows, which demonstrate the steps of a process in visual terms, while also including links to the various tasks along the way. Visual Process Flows were originally developed for the top of the range Sage ERP X3 product, but are now a common component in all Sage’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions.

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SOFTWARE SELECTIONS

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UNC Charlotte selects BRG and Syclo
Industry tags: public sector, education, facilities management
“SAP’s recent acquisition of Syclo reportedly did not play a role in the selection of Syclo or BRG for this project. UNCC was an ARCHIBUS IWMS customer that already knew BRG as an ARCHIBUS specialist. There were no real options for a mobile version of ARCHIBUS. Going with Syclo and BRG meant the university was able to leverage a leading mobile technology provider with apps ready to go rather than build a solution on its own, which would have been expensive and much riskier.”—P.J. Jakovljevic, Principal TEC Analyst

Spontech Spine Intelligence AG selects Aras
Industry tags: hi-tech, electronics
“What Workday has been to SAP and Oracle in the non-manufacturing ERP realm, Aras has lately been to the ‘Big PLM’ establishment—an opponent that will not necessarily kill the leaders, but will certainly annoy them. Reportedly, the open source PLM provider Aras has won nearly 70 new deals in 2012, many of which were PLM system replacements.

In this selection process, Agile PLM and Siemens Teamcenter were the competition, and Aras was selected due to its system’s flexibility and the high-tech electronics (HTE) expertise of Minerva Group (Aras’ reseller in the Nordics). Minerva has created an add-on solution template (other PLM companies sometimes refer to these as ‘accelerators’) for Aras Innovator, which is specifically designed for the processes in HTE.”—P.J. Jakovljevic, Principal TEC Analyst

• Minerva’s approach to managing electronic and high-tech products [PDF download]
• TEC Blog post (June 5): CAD-centric PLM, ERP-centric PLM, and Organic PLM: What’s Right for You?

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Part 1 of this series analyzed the transformative events during the last few years at Sage Group, Plc (LSE: SGE) and its Sage North America subsidiary. These changes have led to the company’s analyst day held in Boston in February 2011, where Sage took a giant leap towards clarifying its position in the market.

The analyst day started with Sage Group’s CEO Guy Berruyer’s and outgoing Sage North America’s CEO Sue Swenson’s reports on their respective company’s current state of affairs. As the summary of both leaders’ presentations, Sage remains passionate about its customers and has been expanding connected (cloud-based software) services and online solutions to provide choices. Read the rest of this entry »