Sage ERP Accpac 6.0 Quote to Orders

Sage ERP Accpac and SageCRM have a very tight integration. But the current generation of Accpac is a Windows desktop application and SageCRM is a Web Browser based application. SageCRM will display a fair amount of Accpac data in its web pages, but at some point you drill down into the Accpac application and an Accpac screen will be run. This causes a disconnect for the customer as they switch from the SageCRM Web application to the Accpac Desktop application. There are also performance problems with this context switch and some installation difficulties getting the “Web” based version of the current Accpac installed and configured properly since it uses ActiveX controls.

Now as Sage ERP Accpac transforms itself into a true zero-client Ajax HTML/Javascript Browser based application (with no ActiveX controls), we want that to leverage this new technology to improve our SageCRM integration. For Accpac 6.0 we will start that process by offering native Web based versions of our Quote and Orders screens that will run natively inside SageCRM. These screens will be styled like all the other CRM screens and customers shouldn’t be able to tell the difference whether they are working with one of these Accpac screens or any of the regular CRM screens.

The styling and screen aren’t fully developed yet, but below is an early prototype of the start of a Quote screen running as part of the CRM web page.

The key points are that the screen lives inside CRM, it does not pop out of the application and when it’s finished it will be styled to look like all the other screens.

This way a sales person running SageCRM, won’t know he’s running multiple Sage applications as he manages his contacts, leads and opportunities as well as entering quotes and orders. To him it is all one application.

There is a fair bit of extra work going on behind the scenes to ensure that the workflow is continuous, data is automatically transferred from one step to the next (like opportunity to quote to order), and data is automatically synchronized in both directions with Accpac. If some one edits an Order in Accpac, then the opportunity and other data is kept in sync in CRM. We are also smoothing out some of the supporting workflows, like how a lead is promoted to a customer.

There are a couple of other screens like an Order Summary screen that are being added to our SageCRM integration using the new Web Based UI framework. But many of the other screen like if you drill down into A/R or PJC will still result in the VB screen being run in 6.0. We will be looking to fix up these in Sage ERP Accpac 6.1.

Hopefully this is a step to making the End-to-End application experience much more seamless for customers. Combining this with the SData initiative, we should start seeing much closer integrations between Sage products as they incorporate all these new and exciting technologies.