IT Management Comprehension

I am in the IT department of my company. As such, I almost never have any reason to use VISUAL for anything that I do. In fact, my only normal interaction with VISUAL is as a response to my coworkers' issues. And in that case, the inforxtreme knowledge base is often a pretty good place to find solutions.

Recently, we have determined that we need to start keeping our VISUAL products up-to-date. Since I was not involved in the purchasing process and I am not involved in the daily use of the software, I do not know what VISUAL products that I even need to investigate updating. I do not know what we purchased because that happened with our previous IT guys and I am not entirely sure how our system is setup because outside people were brought in for that. All I do have is information about how to setup our system and instructions for updating our software that apply to all situations and that assume that I do know my particular setup.

With all of that in mind: Is there a way that I can determine from Infor what software I should focus on? Is there a place that talks about the different ways that our software can be setup so that I can determine what approach is best for us? And are there any online resources where an outsider can get up to speed on maintaining this system quickly and easily?

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Comments

unknown

1. You should look at what version of Visual you are running. You will find this in the Help/About of the main Visual menu. If you are 6.5.4 or lower seriously consider upgrading to the current 7.1.1.
2. You need to look at the extreme upgrade to Visual that is planned for late 2013/early 2014. Version 8.0. They will go to a completely new interface. The platform will be the Mongoose development environment. The GUI will be separated from the transactional DB to allow vastly increased use of the information without bogging or breaking the DB. This is know as ION. SalesForce will be linked to Visual so that reps can place orders in the ERP from SalesForce, and also "see their stuff" that is in Visual from SalesForce. This is know as InForce. It is likely that macros will no longer be used, they will be replaced by the ability to customize Visual via the Mongoose environment.
3. You need to assess if you are primarly project-based or not. If you are a project-based company and need formal project management features, you should look into Visual's Project A&D (Aerospace & Defense) version.
4. If you run CAD, you should look at linking CAD to ERP. QBuild has this awesome CADLink that let you see both ways (to the CAD system and the ERP system when transferring data. Look at Infor's PLM8 (though our engineering dept found Solidwork's EPDM preferable). Visual has a CADLink product also.
5. Are you guys running a Configurator? Do you need one? experlogix.com/.../infor_visual_erp.php
5. You can find Visual documentation here www.inforxtreme.com/.../DocLink.aspx
6. Overall, I'd suggest you take get a list of the standard and optional modules available for Visual, compare with what you have, talk over your business's needs with company execs to find out what they need to achieve business objectives, and move forward with upgrades as needed. Bottom line I would recommend at this stage, if you are somewhat unfamiliar with Visual and need to check out upgrades, would be to focus on Visual Mongoose 8.0/ION/Inforce, plan to implement that, rather than learn and upgrade to a version which will soon be old hat.

unknown

Another suggestion I would give is to turn to your local user groups and network with peers. You can learn a lot from attending a meeting and hearing what other IT managers are doing. Feel free to contact me at jsnoeyink@metalcompinc.com and I can help direct you to Regoinal User Groups near you. Or, if you will be at Inforum next month we will have info on VEGUG and the new User Group website.

unknown

Although I appreciate the input, I feel that both of you missed the point of my question.

I think, Tom, that you thought my question was about how to adapt VISUAL to make it work better for my company.

It seems, Jason, that you thought I was asking how I can be a better at my IT job.

You both provided some great insights into the questions that you answered and for that I thank you. But my issue still exists that I am not sure how best to approach updating our VISUAL software without just taking the trial and error approach and risking bringing my company to its knees until I get it figured out.

I am looking for information that deals with VISUAL from an IT maintenance perspective, not from an end-user or purchasing perspective, which is all that I have found so far.

[Updated on 3/29/2013 8:50 AM]

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