On March 24th, 2010 at 11:00AM EST VEITS Group will be hosting a free SAP Business One web demo.  Simply sign up below and you will be registered for the web demonstration.  The demo will be an excellent opportunity for you to view the ins and outs of SAP Business One.  We’ll take you through Accounting & Financials, Customer Relationship Management, Operations & Distribution, and Administration & Reporting.  A major reason we decided to partner with SAP was the affordability and predictability that SAP Business One lends to small- and medium-sized businesses.

Click HERE to Sign Up for the SAP Business One Web Demo!

Here is a list of the critical small print –not always mentioned by the Infor support representative:

1. You should apply APARS to a Test Environment instead of applying this directly to live.
2. If this includes any form object updates, and if you have any custom forms, you should assume that you need to run FormSync.  Otherwise – your custom forms may not continue to work.  Even if the forms seem to work, your custom forms will not have any of the fixes in the APAR if you didn’t run FormSync.
3. If this APAR includes any class (.cls) files, you need to have a test utility server.  If you try to apply this to test databases, but you don’t have a separate test utility server – you could break your live SyteLine.
4. If this APAR includes any report (.rpt) files, you need to have a test Taskman server (usually part of your test utility server.)  Otherwise – if you try to apply this to your test environment, you will overwrite your live reports.
5. If you or your business partner have modified Infor stored procedures or IDOs, you may lose your changes.
6. If you have business partner add on products – you may need the corresponding fix from the business partner.  You need to have any corresponding fixes applied before running FormSync on the test environment.

Remember – there is no uninstall for an APAR.  It is much safer to assume the worst than to try to deal with the consequences of applying a large APAR directly to your live environment.

Does anyone have any horror stories of what happened when they applied an APAR without reading the small print?

Recently I was asked to do a small personalization to a new customer’s Order Shipping form.  I quickly realized that not only did the customer have eight separate development forms databases, but most of the copies of their Order Shipping form had minor differences, so the development would need to be manually redone at each site.  A project that we anticipated to take about four hours, had the sudden potential of being a 16-20 hour project of tedious repetition.

Upon this realization, we had a discussion with the customer and realized that they had not understood the implication of having multiple forms databases.  Not only that, they had been trying to enforce that all 8 of their sites had the same modifications.  It was determined that a number of changes had been made by other vendors at a substantial cost to the customer in the past.  My recommendation was that we should eliminate this from happening again if possible.  With a little testing, I was able to setup a single forms database that was to be used by all sites.  This eliminated huge amounts of unnecessary overhead for future projects, including eliminating the overhead for the original Order Shipping modification.  Typically this is not the case. Once the decision has been made you have to live with it.

In addition to the costs involved in maintaining or creating modifications across multiple forms databases, upgrade costs grow for each additional forms database as well.  At each APAR, Service Pack, or major upgrade – FormSync session needs to be run for each forms database.  After FormSync is run, testing needs to be repeated for each forms database.

VEITS Group Recommendation:
Start with one forms database.  You can always add another forms database later if a business need arises that dictates this.   If a unique business need does arise that leads you to believe a second forms database may be required, consider other options.  For example – if the modification for one of your sites consists of new forms or new reports, can you manage this in other sites by simply not giving those users permission to that form/report/or button.  Another great option is to have your code check the site before continuing.   Just be sure you weigh the cost of this minor complexity against the additional cost at every future modification and every future upgrade before blindly opting to add another forms database.

This simple recommendation could save you thousands of dollars over the years. For those of you with one forms database – what other ways have you used to manage multiple business site needs with a shared forms database?  For those of you with multiple forms databases – do you agree?  How would you advise a new SyteLine customer?

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The first criteria of course is – age of the hardware. This is the most important one.  If your hardware has been in place for 5 years or longer then it is definitely a good time to consider upgrading.  Since your Syteline ERP software is the central nervous system of your business, you cannot afford to let it go down even for a few hours.  In our experience, timing the upgrade to hardware purchase cycle is the best.  You can prepare the new hardware with latest upgraded version and test and pilot and make that production server when the time is right.

The second criteria are – features and benefits. If there are compelling benefits to migrating to newer version, which can streamline your business and you can show ROI from it, then it becomes an excellent reason to upgrade. A quick read on what’s new and improved in newer version should help in this decision.

The third criteria are – fixes to critical issues are available in newer version. Sometimes you cannot get a fix for a critical issue in the present version you are on, so in that case you have to invariably upgrade to resolve your problems.  This again depends on how critical the issue is and if you can or cannot live with it.

The fourth criteria are – staying current. It is not a bad idea to stay perhaps one to two revisions behind, but anything further back could jeopardize your support for the software.  Besides, if you have been paying maintenance over the years, you should take advantage of newer versions every 4 to 5 years.

The fifth criteria – budget. If you don’t have the necessary IT infrastructure, or the skill set, then it becomes necessary to upgrade the infrastructure and outsource the effort.  A budget is required for this.

Finally – what other initiatives you have going on in the company. If there are some critical deadlines or projects in the works, you may not want the distraction of an upgrade.

Looking to upgrade your SyteLine ERP, but don’t think it’s in your budget?  Click HERE to check out our VEITS Fast Track SyteLine Upgrade approach. With the VEITS Fast Track Upgrade approach, we use our unique methodology to provide a quicker, less costly SyteLine upgrade without the distractions.

The pricing options above is exclusive to VEITS Group and our prepackaged SAP Business One Editions – created specifically for companies like yours! The prepackaged editions available right now are the Standard Edition, Manufacturing Edition, and the Professional Services Edition.  We offer other available options for SAP Business One that may fit your special business needs as well.  All editions include price of system, implementation costs, and first year support & maintenance costs!

Click HERE for more information regarding our SAP Business One Editions.

The problem with this is that if Infor ever adds a report to this form as part of an upgrade – you are most likely going to have a conflict that FormSync will not be able to resolve.  Here’s what will happen – when FormSync compares the changes made to the custom form to the changes made to the Infor new version of the form it will find two new variables that have the same name, but different values.  FormSync will force you to choose between Infor’s variable or your variable.  Either way – you’ll be left with a report button that simply won’t work as designed.

Here’s what we recommend to get around this – prefix your BGTaskName and BGTaskParm variables with your customer prefix that you use for your other custom objects.  Instead of ‘BGTaskName’, use ‘ABC_BGTaskName’ and instead of ‘BGTaskParm’ use ‘ABC_BGTaskParm’.  These will be obvious to anyone who has done these types of customizations in SyteLine, so you won’t have lost the advantages of following the convention, but you will avoid the conflict if you and Infor use the same variable name during upgrade.

But really, what are the odds, you might ask?  Well, if you have seen demonstrations of SL8 ( SyteLine 8 ) – Infor has added report buttons to most of the maintenance forms.  If you also have custom report buttons on these forms, the chances are high that there will be a conflict during upgrade.  With this simple tweak of the naming convention, you can easily avoid this conflict.