New feature - French Language in Megaventory

We are extremely happy to announce to our French speaking users that megaventory has been 100% localized to support the French language! Here is a screen-shot of the 'On-hand Inventory and Alerts' page in French:

French version of the 'On-hand Inventory and Alerts' page

Major localization improvements will follow for the rest of the supported languages (Arabic, Italian, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese) which are still in -beta- testing. The target is to remove the -beta- tag from all supported languages in the next 3 months.

Market research: erpnext.com - The open source ERP

This is the last on this series of posts reviewing the best and most popular online ERP vendors for our imaginary MegaComp company of 9 employees and 4 locations. So, last but not least, it’s erpnext.com.
 


Features: Quite feature-rich itself, erpnext offers a lot of services a business may need and it is clear the focus is on the business instead of a particular set of functions - we're not sure whether that lack of 'doing one thing well' is a good thing though. In particular, they can help with accounting, sales and purchases and inventory management but also throw equal weight on human resources, project management, even manufacturing. They also offer a bit or CRM focusing on after-sales and of course business analytics and reporting. A wide range of functions to be sure.

Data visualisation & export: erpnext is quite versatile when it comes to manipulating data in order to extract some conclusions regarding your business - it essentially allows you to create SQL queries just by filling in appropriate fields allowing for considerably detailed reports. Data are then exportable in CSV and HTM format - nice and simple with no frills. Employees are then left to their own devices to create a graph or a chart for presentation purposes - although the dashboard does offer a somewhat better visualisation.

Usability: Given the wealth of features erpnext struggles a bit to fill most of the information in a couple of drop down menus. Each menu item leads to a number of tasks an employee might need and the corresponding reports for that menu item while on the sidebar further tools provide additional functionality per menu item. That may seem concise but given the amount of menu items the information an employee has to master quickly adds up - and you’re probably better off with a seminar of sorts for a group of 9 employees to become adequately familiar with erpnext. Lack of (or minimal) on-site help (hover panels, tips, etc) does not alleviate this.



Security: erpnext is deliberately secretive regarding their security measures but we’ve seen things we like regarding the issue - such as the email informing their clients whenever engineers have to access their data and the NDA erpnext staff signs. Other than that, regular Amazon S3 multiple backups are there as expected, granulated permissions for your employees, multiple encryption layers and last but not least the fact that their entire code base is open source, in theory at least, provides an additional level of overall quality.

Data import: Although not very intuitive to find the standard data input via CSV is available with a number of parametrisations that should be able to make the first dip in erpnext easier to manage. Other than that, there are no pleasant surprises to be found here such as integration with existing platforms or other file formats - but erpnext can’t be blamed for simply following the industry standard, or can it? The fact that the platform is open source though means it is also expandable to accommodate such features if any of your employees are technically capable and can be spared to develop a plugin (or if you can afford to outsource it).


Maintenance: A number of channels exist for supporting once you’ve chosen erpnext. From phone to live chat and from community fora (both user and developer) to a manual (or should we say.. blog) there are probable ways for your employees to relatively directly address any issues that may arise. The open source community behind it is probably the best characteristic on this front and something that competitors should envy.

Miscellaneous: The open source nature of erpnext is probably the most striking feature along perhaps with the cost - see below. Although we couldn’t find any data on usage the site itself admits to ~50 companies using the platform for their operations which is nice for a start - presumably this doesn’t include independent downloads and installations.
 


Cost: The pricing is very straightforward for erpnext.com and very cheap too: at just 7 USD per user per month - that's probably the killer feature of this solution. Although to properly understand the value of the price tag you really have to take the service for a spin for some time, you’d think it’d be hard to find something cheaper in the industry. You’d be wrong but we’ll let you work out which vendor is even cheaper compared to the 63USD/month you have to pay for MegaComp...

Overall, erpnext offers a lot of bang for the buck and can be one of the best options out there provided it fits your requirements and your standards. The expandability that comes together with the openness is a huge asset as well as is the fact that you can download an install your own implementation of erpnext in an environment you fully control.

This post wraps up the series of five that presented who we believe are the main players in the SaaS ERP market: megaventory, myerp, erply, brightpearl and erpnext. Let us know in the comments, if you feel a service has been wronged or has been wrongly left out.

New Feature: Import of Bills of Materials from Excel

For those of our users who are into manufacturing and are utilizing the Works module of megaventory, we are excited to announce that we have introduced the feature to import Bills of Materials from an Excel template.

When the Data Import page loads up, the Bills of Materials icon is now visible as shown below:

The new Bill of Materials Import tool Screen

After choosing the Bill of materials option, the user gets prompted to download an excel template. This is how the simple Excel Template looks like.

Excel Template for Importing Bills of Materials

Just fill in the data and you're good to go!

Note that the Bill of Materials import tool may be used both for inserting new Bills of Materials and for updating existing Bills of Materials. However, a BOM update is possible when certain conditions are met; for example, when no Work Order exists for the Finished Good SKU of which we intend to update its BOM.

So here you go! We hope you will enjoy the new feature and please do send us your feedback and suggestions if you think there is room for improvement.

Market research: brightpearl.com - All round SaaS ERP

Brightpearl is an online ERP and inventory management provider (among many other things as we'll see in this post) which could cover the needs of a small or medium business, much like MegaComp. It’s the fourth we present in this series of posts after megaventory, erply and myerp.

Features: Brightpearl will be able to cover a wide range of functionality for MegaComp and to varying degrees. Accounting, contacts and customer support (all falling under a broad CRM suite of products), inventory management, point of sale (POS), quotes and invoicing all are included in the offering. At the same time reporting is provided for all those features and to top it all off, if MegaComp has been left without an e-shop (or needs to update to a more modern or quick and dirty solution) Brightpearl can even provide a e-commerce solution. That has considerable customization capabilities which however are no match for its other operations.

Data visualisation & export: In terms of reporting and presenting the data, Brightpearl despite its heavy feature set is simply decent with definite room for improvement. In fact, data visualization is a point most providers we’ve used are found to be lacking. The majority of online ERP providers simply dumps the information in a printout without putting the effort to create something more pleasant or exciting - and Brightpearl is no exception. To be fair, that is a minor point given the rest of the features and as long as the basic export capability (CSV, PDF, print) is there, we shouldn’t complain.


Usability: The very large number of features, modules and sub-modules in Brightpearl makes for a daunting task to organize its capabilities in a way that makes sense. And although the team has put in a brave effort a by-product of trying to do everything is that your MegaComp employees will have to spend some time to learn the service and get basic stuff done. To Brightpear's defense, they have all the nice ideas (help tips while working, quick tutorials when first logging in and clever color coding) but the sheer amount of information to be processed can be overwhelming.

Security: Brightpearl is built on Amazon Web Services - something which alone provides a minimum of security and quality in its services. The usual characteristics apply: SSL encrypted connection, a dedicated database per client and each accessible through certain IP addresses. User permissions are granulated enough for each employee to only have access to what they need to know and backups take place nightly - but only go back 7 days.


Data import: Importing your information from one or more established platforms is something that is lacking in Brightpearl, contrary to what you’d expect from such a complete service. They do offer the usual methods though (CVS, VCF, Outlook) and then some (Sage, MYOB). The strongest feature of Brightpearl when it comes to importing though is that once you have imported your products they are also easily available in the integrated e-commerce platform it offers.

Maintenance: A number of ways to solve your problems exist - a dedicated support portal, video tutorials, a telephone line and a blog are all channels of keeping in touch with their customers. Furthermore, they offer consulting and training courses for those inclined and we have to admit we were pleasantly surprised with their followup call when we signed up for a trial account. Their email ‘course’ they send on regular intervals once you’ve signed up is also helpful.


Miscellaneous: A number of other complementary issues are there to make the experience better, such as integration with Mailchimp for your email campaigns, a POS solution if your business requires it and an API for more advanced users of Brightpearl and even SMS messaging.

Cost: Pricing is somewhat complicated - as you’d expect from so many features - but if you want inventory management for MegaComp, and five of terminals (Brightpearl charges for concurrent users not just for separate accounts) the price tag will be 199 USD per month plus 120 USD if you want them to do your e-commerce. Not a small amount of money for a beginning company - but there's always the alternative of packages without inventory management starting from USD 59 per month. Also, this whole pricing per concurrent users is confusing and does not help to minimize costs as we believe it's impractical for employees to have to cooperate to minimize concurrency - MegaComp will have to buy all white collar staff an account.


Brightpearl is an important player in the industry and a solution to consider. Special attention should also be given to whether the many features it offers are all necessary (as they increase complexity, extend and steepen the learning curve) and whether the corresponding cost makes sense. A company realistically expecting to rapidly grow will probably need the power but for a smaller shop with linear expected growth it’s probably an overkill.

Market research: myerp.com - the innovative SaaS ERP

Next on our series of review posts for online ERP providers for small and medium businesses is myERP.com - always with an eye to cover the needs of your fictional MegaComp and of course we'll be reviewing myERP with our usual set of ERP selection criteria.

Features: Following the very positive and minimal first impression of myERP, you can see from the main menu that it address many of the most common everyday issues of a small business. From project management/time logging to CRM and from product/service to vendor management it has split all its tasks to intuitive commands allowing easy creation and viewing of business data. myERP also allows tracking of the company’s financials as well as report creation (P&L, Ledger, Balance, etc) - although there is no manufacturing module.

Data visualisation & export: Visualisation is simple and effective: pretty much everything is either in table or form format, inviting the user to familiarize themselves quickly - also to bore themselves a bit too. Export capabilities include the usual CSV and aesthetically laid out PDF files - always a plus to grab straight from the printer without embarrassing yourself to a collaborator. Also, the myERP API is still in development at the time of writing.

Usability: The most notable feature of myERP is its minimalism and its innovative interface which on the one hand resembles the Google homepage and on the other invites you to type natural language commands. This is impressive and appealing in the beginning but at the end of the day you keep using the main menu and the search bar kind of gets in the way of navigation. Although no help tips or a tutorial is available within myERP there is a separate community site dedicated on handling issues that may arise.

Security: Although not immediately obvious (had to Google search for it) your data in myERP is as reasonably secure as you’d expect. It supports the expected encrypted user authentication and database isolation and also the databases are backed up daily in Amazon S3. In general, myERP offers the levels of security, certification and redundancy offered by Amazon and its AWS given the entire infrastructure is on Amazon.

Data import: Nothing extraordinary or innovative here but the expected method of CSV, while also Quickbooks importing is also supported. It is however worth mentioning that there is some amount of integration with Google Apps if you already keep customer and supplier data there.

Maintenance: As mentioned, there is a medium-size community built around myERP with this and a blog being the primary method of support for any issues that arise. This should be adequate given that most of the problems that one might have with a traditional ERP are handled internally in the case of the Software as a Service myERP. For all other cases, the myERP staff should be standing by.

Miscellaneous: Preset options in many of the fields indicate that myERP taps on the industry’s experience in operations and can probably save you from some trial and error if you’re not from a relevant background. Our data integrity testing was not fully successful though; the gross profit report figures were not correctly updated after the deletion of some items in a document. That can be a quite serious glitch in the system.

Cost: Being free for two users and with any additional users meaning 29 USD per month per user, it’s quite a good bargain - especially given that you can experience the full suite of features before signing up even for a trial account. For MegaComp however, a 9-employee company, that would cost 203 USD per month so it can get quite expensive as users add up. The fact however that myERP is location agnostic helps in keeping costs down.

Overall, myERP is a solution to definitely consider. With a few tens of thousands of users from a 100+ countries and USD 4M raised there is bound to be a level of quality behind it. Polished as it may be though, we find the interface too bold for our preferences and would prefer a more traditional optional alternative. Unless of course myERP is preparing a voice operated version in which case we’ll wait for that...

megaventory 2.6 upgrade (code named: Roma)

We are very happy to announce our v2.6 upgrade. This upgrade has introduced some breaking changes to the way Purchase Orders, Sales Quotes and Sales Orders are handled. We explain these changes below:

1. New interface

Since we have introduced a procedural, step-by-step, way to handle orders and quotes we needed to come up with an easy way to help users easily follow through the complicated supply chain steps of a Purchase Order, a Sales Quote and a Sales Order. Here's how the new template looks like (in this example a Purchase Order):

A Purchase Order in the new Template

Note that the text of the old status flags (In process, Invoiced, Paid, Cancelled) has now been reset to: "Custom Order Flag1, 2, 3, etc.". Users wishing to keep their old text in these flags should visit the 'Localize megaventory' page (under the admin panel), look for the 'Custom Order Flag' text and change it accordingly.

2. Multiple file/contract uploads per document

We now allow multiple file uploads per document. The upload mechanism can be found under the 'Related Contract or File' tab.

3. Partial Shipments/Partial Receipts

This feature has long being awaited by our user base and we are really excited to introduce it to megaventory. Users can now choose the quantity to receive against a Purchase Order or the quantity to ship against a Sales Order. Moreover, users can choose to ship/receive now and invoice later or even invoice partially a shipment. Here's how the interface looks:

Partial receipt of products against a Purchase Order

4. Complete History of user activity logs per document.

We now keep a complete history of logs per document so that anyone can see a detailed timeline of the actions performed.

5. Action buttons and related inventory transaction documents

The action buttons control all the operations of the document (in this example the Purchase Order) and all these operations are now performed using web-services so as to minimize page response times. Also, every related document to the order (in our case a Purchase Order) appears under the related documents tab. Here's a screenshot displaying both these features:

Screenshot showing the Action Buttons and the Related Documents tab

6. [Sales Orders only] The 'on-hold quantity' has been replaced by the 'non-shipped quantity'

We now allow a Sales Order to be created even if there is no availability for the products included in the Sales order. All availability information becomes visible to the user at the time of adding the product to the Sales Order. This is shown in the following screenshot:

Sales Order showing the availability information per product per inventory location

Finally, due to the way Purchase and Sales orders are now handled in megaventory, all existing orders (created on or prior to Tuesday the 24th [Jan-2012]) will be:

- Set to the 'verified' status if they were in the 'open' status or

- Set to the 'closed' status if they are in the 'fully shipped' status.

If you have any more questions regarding those breaking changes, please use the support panel of the application (under the help tab) to send us your support ticket. Also, if you want to give us feedback, you may leave your comments below.

Market research: Erply.com – the feature-full SaaS ERP

Following up on the previous posts and in an effort to help people decide what is the best ERP solution for them we will be looking into other service providers in the industry. If you don't know what ERP is, you better read this thread instead and come back later.

We’ll be looking into Software-as-a-Service companies who have major offerings of ERP and operations management – perhaps complemented with a few other minor features. However, the emphasis will be on inventory and order management ERP software. ERPs that focus mostly in accounting will be excluded from this market research since these software form a category on their own.

In order to keep the comparison structured and easy to follow we’ll be following the criteria set out in the post explaining how to choose an ERP solution.

The concept of the market research it to look for a suitable platform for your MegaComp, a business with 4 locations and 9 employees in the apparel industry.

So, first on our list is ERPLY at erply.com.

Features: Simply logging into the service it’s clear that ERPLY is a feature-rich service which can cover Point of Sale (PoS), CRM, quoting, invoicing, making payments and purchases, handling inventory. Adding all these modules in a single interface surely needs a bit of effort which has not been done in ERPLY's case; the result is somewhat crammed and counter-intuitive. The capability to have an integrated POS (Point Of Sale) interface with just a click of the button is definitely a big plus for MegaComp and something we feel has been a huge driving force for ERPLY’s adoption and hype.

Data visualisation & export: Reporting is another section where it does well if you’re interested in having every possible feature available for MegaComp. However, the resulting output is -as far as we could see- entirely unstyled for our taste and simply lays out the data - one would expect something just a bit more fancy. Talking about data, the ability to import your business email in the platform makes for an important step towards integrating everything at a single point - definitely a step in the right direction.

Usability: We’ve found the interface overwhelming and hard to navigate. The design should help make sense of the numerous features but it ends up being simply like a spreadsheet with a few cells removed for clarity. On-site help and/or tutorials could have made a difference but they’re not there. On the other hand, the recently launched credit card reader for the iPad POS version takes the service and this particular user scenario to a whole new different level of quality.

Security: Security and backup is something ERPLY takes seriously by owning various servers across the world under specific protocol and surveillance. The various levels of security covering issues from credit card information storage to customer data being accessed only via ssh and https protocols are more than enough to relax even the most paranoid businessman - although there probably aren’t that many of those in the small and medium business tier (or if there are, their number is decreasing).

Data import: The data seem to be importable by the regular CSV method – although we had to verify that by a Google search instead of seeing an option somewhere on the interface. We should also mention of course that ERPLY integrates with established e-commerce platforms (e.g Magento, Opencart, etc) which makes it very appealing if you’ve already invested in them.

Maintenance: Support-wise there are adequate options in the shape of email, phone and a (rather sparsely populated) zendesk installation. As usual though, having a dedicated team protecting your data and handling all the platform maintenance issues (instead of you managing servers, software etc) removes a huge worry off your mind - especially when backed by a professional solution like erply.

Miscellaneous: We were pleasantly surprised by the fact that erply.com supports multiple languages and is partly localized to even include Greek company types in its categorization – although we’re not sure erply.com is as impressive in other languages. We bet that the extensive localization lies on the fact that ERPLY started in Estonia and the founders understand that there is a significant non-english speaking market for ERP SaaS offerings. Also, the capability to work offline is another serious plus especially if you want to take the POS module in an expo or generally in the field.

Cost: MegaComp -a 9 employee and 4 locations company- would have to pay 225USD/mo. That can be too much if the business is basically only now starting. On the other hand, the single location, 2 user version works with 50K product codes for 70USD/mo - a quite good value for money option.

In short, ERPLY is a feature-rich, very decent solution. One might say it is too rich in features and focuses less in the usability; its user interface is counter intuitive for the average employee who wants to get the job done instead of getting lost in the tool. If you are specifically looking for a POS software, then you should definitely consider it. But even if the POS is not your basic criterion, erply.com is a major player in the market and should be given serious thought.