New ERP Platform

[T Shirt Farmer]

My shop has been working as a beta for a cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning application helping them on the user experience side, the application is becoming a usable and stable tool that will benefit a lot of shops. For the last 3 weeks we are now paperless in the front offices and have the ability to be paperless in production once we develop a inventory/staging system which will require bar coding cartons and stagingn them in marked parking spaces. We have a large flat screen in production showing orders in Que for the day, week or month screen print and embroidery, we have assorted workflows based on 10-7-5-3 or 1 day lead times and soon will automatically move due dates out if customer delays in responding to confirming order or art .  Orders and mock ups are emailed to client the electronically approved/declined with instruction messages, production work orders, images and machine notes are viewed on tablet or large screen. Every completed action in processing automatically alerts all assigned to project an time stamps everything.  Still has a months of work to go before I say is ready to release but we are nailing it right now and is changing my business, will soon change my profit margins and make my crew so much more independent in there task.

I will update and share as we make steeps towards a really stellar platform.

Have a Great day!
Robert

[blue moon]

My shop has been working as a beta for a cloud based Enterprise Resource Planning application helping them on the user experience side, the application is becoming a usable and stable tool that will benefit a lot of shops. For the last 3 weeks we are now paperless in the front offices and have the ability to be paperless in production once we develop a inventory/staging system which will require bar coding cartons and stagingn them in marked parking spaces. We have a large flat screen in production showing orders in Que for the day, week or month screen print and embroidery, we have assorted workflows based on 10-7-5-3 or 1 day lead times and soon will automatically move due dates out if customer delays in responding to confirming order or art .  Orders and mock ups are emailed to client the electronically approved/declined with instruction messages, production work orders, images and machine notes are viewed on tablet or large screen. Every completed action in processing automatically alerts all assigned to project an time stamps everything.  Still has a months of work to go before I say is ready to release but we are nailing it right now and is changing my business, will soon change my profit margins and make my crew so much more independent in there task.

I will update and share as we make steeps towards a really stellar platform.

Have a Great day!
Robert

hey Robert,

that sounds very interesting! Can you share any more information on who's developing it, what's the database it is using, what are the projected pricing plans and finally will it also replace quickbooks for accounting?

thanx,

pierre

[T Shirt Farmer]

Lid is on pretty tight for now, I want these guys to come out of the box  with a product that is dialed in for our industry not a hacked up reworked POS. I can share expected cost are going to range from $60-$90 for the first seat and $20-$40 for additional users depending on how robust you want your platform.

[blue moon]

Lid is on pretty tight for now, I want these guys to come out of the box  with a product that is dialed in for our industry not a hacked up reworked POS. I can share expected cost are going to range from $60-$90 for the first seat and $20-$40 for additional users depending on how robust you want your platform.

Thanx!

any screenshots you can post? just so we get a feel for the interface . . . Pricing seems very reasonable, almost cheap.

pierre

[ebscreen]

any screenshots you can post?

This!

What's the DB backend?

As much as I love Filemaker, particularly how we can script it for all Adobe products, I wish we had gone
with something more robust, particularly for client interaction via a web page. Right now it's all email.

[T Shirt Farmer]

Give me a couple weeks and I will update, I can say I truly think you will be amazed... we are picking up so much efficiency in our shop just because we are communicating through the platform instead interrupting other team mates with questions etc.

Pierre, All data is created and kept in cloud until invoicing it then gets pushed to QB, now I only have 2 employees accessing QB instead of 8 which ensures much cleaner reports when reconciling quarter end reports.

[brandon]

This... this sounds really nice. Please post updates. Thank you!

[blue moon]

Give me a couple weeks and I will update, I can say I truly think you will be amazed... we are picking up so much efficiency in our shop just because we are communicating through the platform instead interrupting other team mates with questions etc.

Pierre, All data is created and kept in cloud until invoicing it then gets pushed to QB, now I only have 2 employees accessing QB instead of 8 which ensures much cleaner reports when reconciling quarter end reports.

sorry to hear that, anything requiring Quickbooks is not in our future. . . Nothing wrong with QB, but the whole syncing and not being able to get proper information out of it is not going to work long term.

pierre

[ZooCity]

Keep us posted Robert!  Eric and I had begun the work to dev our own but of course, we're busy printing.   But the need for a robust system for our industry is just glaring.  Nothing out there is truly suitable imho.   I would be happy to evaluate their system here if they need more feedback.  I have the brain for this kind of stuff and would give an honest evaluation for an 11 employee shop. 

So if this is web based then the QB thing should not be too big of an issue, a couple ways to skin that cat with .csv export, api and even simple interfaces for your human bookkeeper to tick off reconciled items from the ERP system.  In our case we would want (and happily pay for) api to talk with Xero but not having it would not be a deal breaker.  If you look at the actual sales transactions for a shop like ours they are few in qty, high in volume per trans.  No biggie to manually take care of that.  Those shops with high qty, lower volume per will need sync though. 

[T Shirt Farmer]

Give me a couple weeks and I will update, I can say I truly think you will be amazed... we are picking up so much efficiency in our shop just because we are communicating through the platform instead interrupting other team mates with questions etc.

Pierre, All data is created and kept in cloud until invoicing it then gets pushed to QB, now I only have 2 employees accessing QB instead of 8 which ensures much cleaner reports when reconciling quarter end reports.

sorry to hear that, anything requiring Quickbooks is not in our future. . . Nothing wrong with QB, but the whole syncing and not being able to get proper information out of it is not going to work long term.

pierre

That was hurtle indeed ( MAJOR PAIN IN THE ASS ) Pierre but we are pushing information between the two apps rather nicely at this point.

[blue moon]

the problem is with the QB. There is a limited amount of information that you can sync and trying to do financial reporting through QB is painful if only some of the information is transferred from the ERP. Unless something changed recently and I can find out how many 2 color jobs without an ubase we printed on 2nd thrusday of every month last year, QB is a no go for us. . .

I am doing a ton of work now to compile that information and I should be able to run Crystal Reports and have it on my screen in 10 seconds rather than 4 hours.

QB does a fine job for small business, but if you really want to geek out on the financial analysis, it's not a good option.

Shopworx will let CR tap into the database and give me any report I'd like to see. So unfortunately it is looking like File Maker based solution for us.

pierre

[ZooCity]

Would QB online or whatever it's called be a better solution for syncing?  Xero, the online accounting app we use has pretty good api but not sure about QB.

[T Shirt Farmer]

the problem is with the QB. There is a limited amount of information that you can sync and trying to do financial reporting through QB is painful if only some of the information is transferred from the ERP. Unless something changed recently and I can find out how many 2 color jobs without an ubase we printed on 2nd thrusday of every month last year, QB is a no go for us. . .

I am doing a ton of work now to compile that information and I should be able to run Crystal Reports and have it on my screen in 10 seconds rather than 4 hours.

QB does a fine job for small business, but if you really want to geek out on the financial analysis, it's not a good option.

Shopworx will let CR tap into the database and give me any report I'd like to see. So unfortunately it is looking like File Maker based solution for us.

Pierre

I bet the ERP can easily slurp up and extract any configuration of qty/location/color/time frame information... I am not geeky but do need a far more robust app than most available and will not spend the money Shopworks charges and then get hit with all the maintenance cost etc. I will make arrangement for you to spend month demoing the product if you like.

[blue moon]

the problem is with the QB. There is a limited amount of information that you can sync and trying to do financial reporting through QB is painful if only some of the information is transferred from the ERP. Unless something changed recently and I can find out how many 2 color jobs without an ubase we printed on 2nd thrusday of every month last year, QB is a no go for us. . .

I am doing a ton of work now to compile that information and I should be able to run Crystal Reports and have it on my screen in 10 seconds rather than 4 hours.

QB does a fine job for small business, but if you really want to geek out on the financial analysis, it's not a good option.

Shopworx will let CR tap into the database and give me any report I'd like to see. So unfortunately it is looking like File Maker based solution for us.

Pierre

I bet the ERP can easily slurp up and extract any configuration of qty/location/color/time frame information... I am not geeky but do need a far more robust app than most available and will not spend the money Shopworks charges and then get hit with all the maintenance cost etc. I will make arrangement for you to spend month demoing the product if you like.

good point! I am so used to not having access to my database that I forgot.

Let me know once you are comfortable with it, I would like to learn more.