I attended NetSuite’s global conference this year (disclosure – NetSuite contributed to my T&E to attend) and it has been interesting to reflect on a company that is unabashedly growing up. Having been at all of the previous global NetSuite events, it was impressive to see attendance grow to some 5000 people, to hear the conversations ramp up a notch and to see the increasing professionalism with which the event was run. Having had a few days to digest the announcements, here follows an assessment of what we saw through this pundits lens.

Launch of NetSuite for Manufacturing

Some three years ago NetSuite launched a manufacturing solution off the back of a partnership with Rootstock – for whatever reason, be it technical or business-related, that deal never really bore fruit. Instead NetSuite went back to the drawing board and decided to build its own solution. This is actually a better approach for a manufacturing solution since building off one common architecture and data type increases both the flexibility and the ease of use than by kludging together different solutions to create some kind of Frankensteinien combination. CEO Zach Nelson was very quick to point out that in the same time as SAP saw core licensing business reduce, the past four quarters saw NetSuite manufacturing sector bookings grow 60% – of course given the relative sizes of their business this is less impressive than it sounds, but for a company focusing heavily on growth, it’s something to crow about.

After announcing the solutions, Nelson told the audience about the partnership between NetSuite and Autodesk to integrate Autodesk’s 3d design and product lifecycle management (PLM) tools alongside the NetSuite ERP. The demo showcased a fictitious BBQ manufacturer and retailer, and showed how design, product feedback, customer input and financial aspects of a combined manufacturing/sales organization can be run on the products. While the demo was relatively slick, there didn’t seem to me to be a huge amount of true integration. NetSuite describes the partnership as:

a bi-directional integration of cloud-based ERP with cloud-based PLM, giving manufacturers a single, closed-loop solution to accelerate product design and development, reduce risk of errors and delays, streamline supply network collaboration, and gain critical real-time visibility into pricing, scheduling, capacity and profitability

There’s certainly some truth in that – but I suspect the number of customers who actually consider the design part of manufacturing as needing to be deeply integrated into their ERP solution is limited. There is also obviously some tension with regards existing product breadth from the two partners – as an example the functionality around requests for quotes, and important area for outsourced manufacturing businesses, exists in both Autodesk and NetSuite. Alongside the partnership with Autodesk, NetSuite rolled out some extended functionality that will appeal to manufacturing customers including availability to promise (ATP), standard cost, work-in-process (WIP), and routings.

Manufacturing is a massive area of opportunity and the complexities involved in a manufacturing business lend themselves well to the sort of broad, flexible and robust solution that NetSuite has created – the increasing velocity of the creation of new nimble manufacturing businesses (for example GoPro, the Pebble Watch and Jawbone) who aren’t constrained by existing thoughts around what a MRP system should look like plays very well into this new strategy for NetSuite

Omni-Channel Wins

One of the other areas Nelson focused on in his keynote was retail. Unsurprising since it was at this event last year that the company rolled out SuiteCommerce, a solution set designed to manage the complexities of omni-channel retail. NetSuite rolled out the CIO of Williams-Sonoma who has only just finished rolling out NetSuite to run four individual brands retail an e-commerce operations. The move to NetSuite was prompted by Williams-Sonoma’s first foray outside of the US, in this case building out an Australian business. The company wanted a solution that would scale geographically across markets and would let them roll out the stores as quickly as possible. The roll out took only three months, something Nelson is justifiably proud of given the massive timescale more generally seen with these sorts of projects.

The breadth of use of NetSuite by Williams-Sonoma was somewhat glossed over at the event – currently it’s in place for the Australian operations only. Having said that, in follow up sessions with the NetSuite executives in charge of retail, I did get the distinct impression that this is a relationship that is likely to grow stronger – Williams-Sonoma was very impressed by the speed at which the implementation of NetSuite occurred, perhaps especially so given their experience with existing large ERP solutions.

In a deep-dive analyst session around retail I stated my impression that, while the retail solution looks really powerful, it doesn’t really leverage the cutting edge approaches that we’re seeing in the marketplace – I mentioned such things as location based shopping and special offers as two areas where there is a massive amount of innovation. NetSuite doesn’t seem to be weaving this narrative into its approach towards retails. My impression is that there is a couple of reasons for this. Firstly the company has only just started down the retail route and is running fast to try and innovate quickly. Secondly however and more importantly, NetSuite is delivering a solution that its customers, generally larger retail operations, are asking for. These companies seem not to be aware of the impending tide of disruption that the social/local/mobile trend will have upon their business. NetSuite needs to start telling this more aspirational story or else it risks losing relevance in the future.

Look for part two of this review next week.

Essentially the crux of the announcement is that NetSuite and eWinery Solutions are partnering in an effort to deliver an end to end business solution for wine industry companies. VinSuite aims to be the first truly integrated cloud application that runs the end-to-end business of wine – including in person, telesales, B2B and B2C selling of the product. eWinery is well established in this sector – they were founded in 2003, and they recently merged with Napa Valley POS, a company delivering POS software targeted to the wine industry. Between them they provide services to over 550 clients both, with more than 75% of all wine produced and sold in the US being produced by companies who use eWinery Solutions-Napa Valley POS software

It has to be pointed out that the announcement is one that talks about a product that is yet to come and, as such, runs the risk of being seen to be simply vaporware – but as a case study in how vertically specific back office and commerce solutions can be built – it’s one to explore.

The rationale for the combined product, to be called VinSuite, is logical. Like other industries in traditional sectors, wineries traditionally use multiple disparate systems – this causes slippage as data gets misplaced between systems and, if nothing else, is a sure fire way to reduce the efficiencies at which a wine operation works. Given the hyper-competitive nature of the wine industry, and the fact that Old World wine producers are increasingly engaged in a battle royale with producers from the new world – and it makes sense that a solution that ties together the different parts of the operation makes sense.

VinSuite will, once it is built, run a number of different business operations for wine operations – from tasting room point-of-sale (POS) systems, wine club membership and program management, to allocations of inventories, order management, customer relationship management, and omnichannel sales including tasting room, telesales, B2B and B2C eCommerce and global expansion. VinSuite, to be built atop the SuiteCloud development platform, will combine the power of NetSuite’s ERP, CRM, and eCommerce alongside eWinery’s vertical domain knowledge.

I spoke to Ron Scharman from eWinery solutions about the partnership – he assured me that a product is currently being built and will be available, at least in beta, at NetSuite’s SuiteWorld event in May. Plans are to launch the product in the first quarter of 2014. I suggested to Scharman that wine businesses need a solution that actually spans the entire process from growing to manufacturing to sales. He let me know that the company is actually close to signing an agreement with a cloud based winemaking software solution which will then be integrated into VinSuite – that starts to sound compelling as it truly allows a small-scale producer to cover off their end-to-end requirements from within one product suite.

The promise of this solution sounds really compelling. It does trouble me a little that the companies are announcing the product when it is still little more than a partnership agreement. While it may be de rigeur for software companies to announce partnerships only to have them fade into the ether – in the cloudy world it’s about delivering real solutions of value to customers. VinSuite should be able to do that but I’d rather have seen at least a beta product alongside this announcement. In response to this criticism Scharman said that they really wanted to come out early and inform the market of their intentions. I guess we’ll see in a few months whether the market was justified in sitting up and taking notice of the announcement.

The thinking within enterprises is that there are traditionally two ways that customers can interact with an organization – the first is via a forum while the second is via an enterprise portal tool. These two approaches have some limitations however, forum tools tend to be very siloed and have no real hooks into backend enterprise systems and business processes. Enterprise portals on the other hand have great visibility over backend system but tend to fall short when it comes to building out deep engagement with external parties.

Chatter SalesforceCommunities aims to combine the benefits of these two approaches by taking Chatter, which already has strong hooks into the salesforce core platform and individual product lines, and creating verticalized communities around a particular area of the business. I spent time with Dave King and Doug Bewsher from the Salesforce Chatter team having a run down on what communities will mean for enterprises.

The product is in limited pilot and is slated for general release in the middle of 2013. No pricing has been set at this stage.

MyPOV

The modern trend towards loosely couple enterprise systems does more than simply making back office processes easier, it also allows for customers to engage with the organization directly around transactions. If I buy a pair of shoes for example, I’d much rather engage on an online forum that has visibility over the actual sales transaction. By tying business process and workflow to external communities, salesforce makes a compelling bid for end-to-end engagement.

Key is also to make the barriers to entry for an organization as low as possible – organizations want community sites that keep the corporate branding with a high degree of fidelity and in this case salesforce has borrowed functionality from it’s own site.com content management system creation offering to allow broad customization and quick setup.

The key however is to ensure that these communities can integrate with all the back-office system of the organization (CRM, manufacturing, ERP etc) and in this case it remains to be seen how willing organization that use other systems will be to spend time and effort integrating Chatter SalesforceCommunities with their existing software. In the absence of these integrations this is a nice product, but one which isn’t hugely different from other community tools.

• Subscription and support revenue was $61.0 million, a 27 percent increase on an annual basis
• Cash flows from operations were $15.2 million, up by 80 percent from Q2 2011

While the specific numbers themselves are of vague interest, and more so to those who hold stock in the company, what is more interesting is the trend that these numbers indicate. Especially so given the poor performance of internet stocks such as Zynga, Amazon and others. Two points to note;

Enterprise May Not Be Sexy, But it Pays

While the world gets all excited by consumer and social plays, and spends time chasing its tail investing in the next high growth gaming startup, the fact is that enterprise software continues to be the best place to make money year over year. Look at every industry – mining, airlines, banking, heck even consumer internet plays, and they all run on enterprise software. The great thing about enterprise software is that it’s directly monetizable – whereas consumer tech companies have to work out some indirect methodology to actually make some money (sponsored tweets to justify a valuation anyone), enterprise software companies have a much simpler conversation with their customers who need a service and have total realization that they’re going to pay for said service. Not sexy, but in a climate that looks set to eventually punish the highly speculative investing in non revenue generating companies, one that looks increasingly smart.

NetSuite Finds Itself

As others have mentioned, in its early days, NetSuite was a bit of a dark horse – founded by enterprise people but with a bit of an SMB focus. Recent years have seen that all change and NetSuite is now an unreservedly enterprise focused company. CEO Zach nelson spoke to this in the earnings call when he mentioned that average deal size is now over $50k in first year contract value. This is 30% more than previous years and NetSuite’s bottom line shows the benefits of selling software of this value as opposed to the $1000/month type level of other vendors. While it’s undeniable that there are more prospects looking at lower priced software – the sales cycle is protracted, the partner networks aren’t strong, and simply telling the story is harder. NetSuite’s current focus on moving up the food chain and providing highly tailored vertical solutions is a smart one and one which seems to be paying dividends.

What it Means for the Future

With NetSuite reporting such good numbers, and its success in moving up the food chain, even more credence is given to the “two-tier ERP” notion it’s been evangelizing. I’ve long said that it was only a matter of time before Oracle swoops in to acquire the company (especially so given the fact that Larry Ellison is the biggest shareholder already) and more tightly integrates it in with core Oracle offerings. The acquisition of SuccessFactors by SAP and the corresponding disruption it brings have brought both oracle and NetSuite some breathing room. I suspect however that new SAP Cloud Tzar Lars Dalgaard is working hard on a credible two tier and cloud plan and oracle and NetSuite need to plan for when this comes to fruition.

All these similarities (heck, they’re even a very similar age) makes their different perspectives on social all the more interesting. Let’s look at each one in turn.

NetSuite – Social is an Overlay

NetSuite’s approach towards social sees it consider social yet another channel alongside more traditional ones. Last year at SuiteWorld it announced SuiteSocial, an integration and partnership with Yammer but, interestingly enough, at this year’s SuiteWorld event this partnership was given almost no air time. This speaks to NetSuite’s perspective that social, is yet another channel alongside email – there was no particular mention of email at the event, and so too should social just be seen as a bucket where communications can happen.

Interestingly at SuiteWorld NetSuite announced an upcoming integration with content collaboration company Box. This integration will see content items able to be associated with particular customers or activities within NetSuite.

Salesforce – Social is a Fabric

Salesforce on the other hand has a very different perspective on social. it considers social to be a core fabric upon which an organization is built. Everything they do is an attempt to further this aim and hence we see Chatter, salesforce’s social tool, integrated into workflows across the organization. Alongside this Chatter is seen as a tool which replaces most or all other communication silos – recent announcements around real time, presence, group and individual messaging and screen sharing speak to this fact. Social is a core component rather than something bolted on.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been beating this drum for a few years now – his proclamation that the “social enterprise” is coming makes for great copy, and an exciting keynote, if nothing else. That said, at DreamForce last year the CEO of Burberry was on stage talking about how social is changing the way her organization works.

Who is Right?

It was interesting talking to NetSuite customers at SuiteWorld. I took part in a roundtable discussion with some Australian customers of NetSuite, When I asked them what their view of social was for the organization, their comments were fascinating. Peter Maccauley from Kitchenware direct told me that for his organization, social has no strong use case but that, were it to arise he’d be happy to look at what it meant for him. Vivien Power from Choice in Australia felt that social may have some validity as a channel to engage with customers, and that this was something her organization was starting to explore, but that it had no real validity as an internal tool.

These comments speak to the reality for enterprises, a reality that is strongly influencing NetSuite view around social. Despite assertion of the rise of the social enterprise – the fact is that social as an internal tool is at best only being used by a very small proportion of workers within an organization – more often it’s not being used at all. Benioff has always been ahead of the curve and the social enterprise message is another example of this.

However what is important here isn’t where we are today, rather it’s an analysis of how enterprises are changing and what that means for these vendors in the medium term. I believe that we are seeing the convergence of a number of different trends, all of which will impact upon enterprises’ adoption of social;

• The move to workers bringing their own device
• The rise of social media in the home, and the fact that most employees will be using social media outside of work
• The move to ubiquitous data access – fuelled by mobile devices and an expectation of full time immersion
• Economic drivers which force organizations to be more flexible, nimble and proactive

Put all this together and the net result is, I believe, an environment that is ripe for the uptake of social media within enterprise. That being the case I believe adoption will be far faster than anticipated and alongside that there will be an expectation from organizations that social media is embedded across all the systems and processes the organization uses. while NetSuite’s perspective makes sense for the here and now, it seems to me that salesforce is best positioned for this coming flood of engagement.

[multi book accounting is] for multinational businesses whose operations have to report under varying accounting rules. The underlying set of figures is the same, but the reporting rules about how to present the results can vary from one country to another. Keeping a separate set of books for each accounting regime avoids messy manual corrections and updates.

Essentially it’s a further nod by NetSuite to the notion of two tier ERP, the idea that organizations can continue to use their existing ERP systems at a corporate level, but enable individual business units to innovate with secondary solutions. It’s a smart idea and one which is a natural fit for NetSuite that had traditionally had a hard time selling into the largest corporates who were generally seen as invested in one or other of the large ERP vendors. At the event NetSuite was keen to tell attendees about the case studies of large corporates who have moved to NetSuite for individual business units, all tied to traditional ERP solutions at the corporate level.

It seems to me that the move to two tier ERP closely mimics the approach towards cloud computing in other parts of businesses. I’ve long admitted that, while cloud is a compelling proposition for organizations, the chances of seeing solutions that have been running on mainframes for the past few decades being migrated to cloud is remote at best. There’s a surprisingly high number of mission critical applications running on very old hardware. This stuff is unlikely to move but rather organizations are using cloud for greenfields opportunities and workloads.

For the same reason the largest organizations that are running their corporate ERP on SAP, Oracle or whomever are very unlikely to change anything at this level – what they will begin to do however is to look at their systems their existing, or new, business units use, and make some buying decisions there that take into account the flexibility, agility and other benefits that cloud solutions bring. This is a compelling message but one which has only really started to be told. I was interested to read an analysis by Ray Wang over at Constellation Group in which over Nearly half of respondents claimed they were considering a two tier ERP strategy. While this leaves a huge number of organizations not considering the approach, when you consider the relative nascence of the entire two-tier notion, the number considering a move is testimony to its value – especially for an organization with business units who are in highly competitive and changeable situations.

In his report Wang made some recommendations for organizations looking at a two-tier strategy;

• Multi-multi-multi. Organizations in global environments require multi-lingual, multi-currency, and multi-org capabilities. Last-mile solutions should be delivered at the local level.
• Local accounting standards support at the sub level. Sub-level support should include roll-up to the appropriate currency at a global level to reduce the number of country specific instances.
• Industry specific and last-mile solutions. Consider the cost of configuration in the Tier 1 system versus the Tier 2 system to meet business requirements. Many Tier 2 systems enable cost effective two-tier deployments.

All of which closely align with what NetSuite is offering – the ability to be multi-currency out of the bag, the ability to support local financial year-ends and the ability to be highly industry specific all play directly to NetSuite’s core competencies and not those of the large vendors. Which brings us to one of my key medium-term predictions – that of an outright acquisition of NetSuite by Oracle. First a little context here – Larry Ellison is already a major shareholder in the company, owning more than 50% of it. Bear in mind that Ellison’s presence (if not in person) was all over the SuiteWorld event – from his picture on the keynote slide decks, to the private analyst soiree that we enjoyed at one of Ellison’s homes. When he wants to flick the switch on this deal – Ellison has every ability to do so.

As I suggested to a number of people I spoke with at SuiteWorld – if Oracle was to acquire NetSuite today, it would just annoy people – NetSuite customers would be anxious about the impacts that would have on their new, flexible approach towards ERP while Oracle customers wouldn’t see any validity in the deal since two-tier is a foreign concept to them. But the world is changing, as two-tier becomes the accepted norm, both Oracle and NetSuite customers and stakeholders will understand the great fit here and the deal will look natural to the majority. An acquisition in the medium term is a natural fit, and if it happens, then next time I have diner at Ellison’s house, he might just be there in person.

• SuiteCommerce Experience – The SuiteCommerce Experience is the page serving and development framework that enables companies to deliver rich user experiences, regardless of touchpoint
• SuiteCommerce Services –The SuiteCommerce Platform includes a new group of services called SuiteCommerce Services that expose NetSuite’s back-end commerce functionality and data as services to the SuiteCommerce Experience and any other commerce front-end application
• NetSuite Commerce Platform –The NetSuite Commerce Platform provides the core native business processing capabilities to run commerce operations

So in effect it is an aggregation of front end delivery, back end enablement and a flexible platform fabric running between the two. The bringing together of customer facing and backend functionalities is important as it opens up for a number of functional possibilities – want to tie customer history to purchasing options? This is the way to do it. Want to allow a host of end point devices to talk to the core business software? You need integration to power it. As Denis Pombriant pointed out in his post;

The Internet of things will be much bigger than the Internet of people and the Internet of things will be a major acquisition portal for business and consumers as well as a major user of automated commerce technologies.  Commerce solutions that make it easier for people to buy and receive products through efficient channels is a great first step.

MyPOV

I’ve long talked of the value that organizations can leverage by using one system that ties together disparate parts of the business. SuiteCommerce is a good example of this and importantly ties ERP, often thought of as the central system for a business, to what is actually the systems of note – customer interactions and the buying experience. In his keynote, NetSuite Zach Nelson told the audience that NetSuite is the fifth largest E-Commerce system on the web – that is, only four other organizations (among them e-commerce monsters Amazon and Ebay) have interactions with higher numbers of e-commerce transactions. That being the case, by closing the loop between customer and core systems – NetSuite is uniquely placed to provide a higher value offering to e-tailers. The other e-commerce sites can’t do it because, outside of integrations, they don’t have visibility over the financial aspects of the system. The other financial providers meanwhile haven’t provided compelling e-commerce solutions and hence also have to rely on integrations with the e-commerce providers. NetSuite is betting that large e-tail operations will prefer a suite solution rather than bolting together separate best of breed solutions.

Of course it’s not quite as simple as that. In order for SuiteCommerce to succeed, the e-commerce solutions needs to be as flexible as the best e-commerce solutions in the marketplace. That’s a difficult ask for a company that is primarily focused on back-end systems. While there is no denying that NetSuite is a robust ERP solution – one only needs to look at their user experience to see that they’re not an organization that is laser focused on UI or UX – both aspects that are critical once the customer has to interact with the system.

It is also going to be interesting to see how NetSuite handles the challenges of scaling hi throughput e-commerce needs. SuiteCommerce is currently being trialed by around ten NetSuite customers and Nelson told us that they’re limiting its rollout to only 100 customers this year. That’s something of a worry as it suggests that either NetSuite is worried about scale impacts of adding more users, or else that the solution isn’t actually yet ready for prime time.

At the event I spoke with Peter Maccauley from Kitchenware Direct, a kitchenware e-tailer from Australia. They told me that SuiteCommerce absolutely solves a pain point that they have and that they’re keen to sign up to it as soon as possible – the risk for NetSuite is that retailers like Maccauley get sick of waiting for a less rapid roll out and go looking elsewhere for solutions. At the moment they’re unlikely to find anything as compelling as SuiteCommerce – the challenge for NetSuite now is to ensure that customers have access to it as soon as possible.

A recent blog post from Neil Ballard was a really interesting glimpse at the differences in the way traditional vendors and startups view competition. It was especially interesting for me since I have done a bit of consulting with large organizations, and have often been surprised at just how worried they are by the tiniest of competitors. I’ve also been amazed at just how that worry often leaves them incapable of responding.

Ballard was reflecting on the focus that Sage, a massive global company with hug momentum, gives to KashFlow a small (albeit vocal) startup targeting a sub set of the space Sage plays in. As Ballard pointed out;

Time and again, Sage employees at various events shared their fear and awe of KashFlow with me and others. A very reliable source even shared with me the tendency of Sage North America reps to bring the ‘KashFlow latest’ to meetings over a period exceeding 12 months! Incredibly, all seemed convinced that KashFlow existed purely to annihilate Sage. Like a seventies era anarcho-terrorist cell. On more than one occasion I even pleaded that KashFlow staff did not spend every waking hour plotting the downfall of Sage; they did not spend their waking hours muttering their hate and loathing like possessed madmen, complete with wide-eyes and salivating like devil-dogs! But each time it just would not be believed! This paranoia had spread and had gripped the organisation.
Why was an entire organisation of such magnitude allowed to be gripped by such terror? Why (and how) are thousands of employees of a multi-billion pound organisation all obsessed with one guy and his tiny company. I repeat, why? WTF??! This company claim to be the world’s 3rd largest ERP vendor, amongst many other things. They have fingers in plenty of pies. Why oh why?

It’s an interesting trait and one which I believe isn’t specific to Sage – in corporate rooms all across the world, highly paid strategy analysts are spending time agonizing over the impact of a tiny player in their space. That in itself is bad enough, but the flow on effects are far worse.

From my observations, it seems to me that the organizations who are most concerned by the moves of their competitors take this concern and turn it into a kind of paralysis. Large organizations are generally less nimble than startups, but when faced by perpetual fear of competition, the agility they do have can be wiped out. Ballard contrasts with with startups where;

Every single SaaS vendor with any measure of success cares little for what others are up to. Even the closest of competitors. This is a time of fundamental change in the delivery of IT services. The potential market is massive, whatever the niche. They just want to get their share and then some! There’s no time to waste worrying about others.  There’s plenty of land for everyone. Of course, common-sense means be aware of what the others are doing, but it doesn’t distract from the total confidence that is all-pervasive in a real SaaS org. Their culture is more concerned by there only being 24 hours in the day!

I’m asked on almost a daily basis what the prognosis is for large technology businesses. My answer is generally the same – the incumbent vendors have the money, the access to smart people, the patent suite, the customer base, in fact everything necessary to continue to prosper on an on-going basis. The one factor that impacts upon their ability to do so is an organizational paralysis caused primarily by fear – fear of change, fear of risk and fear of competitors. Again as Ballard points out;

Single-mindedness, focus and confidence in the mission – all traits common to successful SaaS vendors. A singular belief in what all involved are doing as a team – as a collective – is what drives those that thrive. Disrupting the old ways of doing things, yeah, but more so improving the customers lot and gaining commercial success as a by-product.

The one lesson to drive home for those of us who have the dubious honor of consulting within large technology vendors is that only by focusing on the opportunity at hand, and not at the people biting at your heels, will you continue to thrive and prosper.

Stuff like this frankly really peeves me. How long ago was it that the traditional vendors were decrying cloud as insecure, a waste of time, the same as had gone before and a bunch of other things?

And now that cloud has been proved, they’re busy being that snotty little kid in the school yard saying “we thought of it first”

SAP – you’re a great company and all but this is just wrong. NetSuite? Workday?

Sigh….

I was interested to read then that Acumaticarecently announced a fully integrated manufacturing, distribution and accounting solution. The solution, JAMS Manufacturing for Acumatica, was created by JAAS systems migrating their mid-market manufacturing suite over to Acumatica. In doing so they have created what they’re calling a fully integrated manufacturing, distribution, and accounting solution specifically targeted to mid-size manufacturing companies. The solution utilizes a common UI, integrated menus and shared database elements.

In terms of functionality, JAMS gives manufacturing companies the following abilities;

• Multiple manufacturing environments (make to stock, make to order, engineer to order, job shop)
• Management of inventories, costs and manufacturing processes
• Capture of total cost of manufacturing (material, labor, overhead and outside processes)
• Dynamic allocation of supply to customer demand
• Real-time resource allocation view
• Integrated bills of materials
• Unlimited numbers of both variable and fixed overheads
• Tracking of effective and expiration dates of componentry
• Automated purchase and production order capabilities

In terms of pricing, JAMS/Acumatica begins at $7,500 to license the manufacturing suite, with additional modules priced separately. SaaS customers can purchase a turnkey solution for $500/month (sold as an annual subscription). This is inline with Acumatica’s approach towards licensing which offers both perpetual and subscription based options.

Manufacturing functionality is an obvious extension for the new breed of cloud ERP players – it’s good to see Acumatica step up and provide for this important sector also.