I must add my 2 cents to this MV migration thing. One of my main clients just finished a year-long conversion from Results to Great Plains. GP is basically QuickBooks on steroids compared to Results. Nice screens and lots of helper screens. But basically a mis-match on fields and functionality. (Results is akin to SHIMS and PRIMAC)
Every system has an AR/AP/GL and Payroll modules so let's call that a draw. The generic GP Order Entry module is just a step above a shopping cart. It has a good pricing module although a little too complicated. What it lacks was the fields and processes to enable a large degree of sales analysis. In my travels through all of my MV clients, this is an incredible module that's installed in Results and other sales-oriented systems. Many, many, companies and departments like to look in the rear view mirror to see where they're going. This was terribly missing. The transaction data was there but there were no analytical tools except their pathetic report writer. Crystal Reports was promoted as a magic pill to instantly produce the 60-80 sales analysis reports and downloads that my client's existing MV system already had tested and installed. This proved to be quite a beast to tame as some GP 'experts' in CR took far to long just to produce the first simple sales analysis report. FRX was brought in for the budget side and that appeared to be a little better. But 4 months after the switch was thrown, they still haven't been able to print a balance sheet. The inventory is a mess, orders fall through the cracks, there's around $25,000 missing from a daily cash edit-list where they used to have a $0.00 (zero) discrepancy. The president and his controller (the migration project manager) are the only 2 happy campers. The worker bees and their department managers give me a 'what happened to our nice system' look when i visit them in these last few weeks. The bottom line is twofold. First, they didn't review the sophistication of their existing MV system. Like many, they observed the green screens and instantly condemned it to being DOS-like and an easy replacable target. Second, they didn't match the desired features from the old to the new system, thus, many features were lost. I've spoken a few phrases regarding this migration to GP. My favorite is READY, FIRE, AIM. I have another client considering GP from Results and hopefully I can prevent a similar disaster. That phrase is "Nothing is completely useless, it can always serve as a bad example". Will this company go 'belly up'? They're pretty cash heavy so they probably can patch the damage with incorporating more GP integrators. It just saddens me that they're spending so much and being so far from breaking even. Plus, I will eventually lose this client as the president loves Microsoft and the entire policy of this company is his dictate, so there's no going back. my 2 cents. ------- u2-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.u2ug.org/listinfo/u2-users
