The aim of E-Risk management is to improve your decision-making and the management of your business relationships at both local and international levels. With this tool, the finance and procurement departments in your company can retrieve comprehensive business and financial information to enable more intelligent credit and purchasing decisions. The sales and marketing departments can also create new accounts based on D&B information, thereby initiating customer life cycles with correct and complete information. They can also optimize their marketing efforts through an increased understanding of customer at both local and international levels.

All information retrieved from D&B is stored directly in your Exact administration. It is linked to the account via the D&B® D-U-N-S® (Data Universal Numbering System) number, which is a unique, nine-digit identification number for each physical location of a business worldwide. This allows you to share the information within your company, perform analyses or trigger events based on key performance indicators, for example by using E-Report or Exact Event Manager.

With E-Risk Management you can reduce bad debts, discover sales opportunities, and generally avoid wasting time and money on business activities based on incorrect account data. You also benefit from having a structured electronic data instead of hard copy documents.

All it takes to get started is a D&B user ID and password from your local D&B office (www.dnb.com) and the module E-Risk Management.

This functionality is available as per product update 394 of Exact Globe. Product update 242 for Exact Synergy Enterprise will also introduce an integration with D&B services.

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112 Reference Customers of the application vendors COA Solutions, Epicor, Exact, Infor, Lawson, Microsoft, Oracle, Sage Group, SAP and Unit4Agresso gave answers to 27 specific questions in four sections which covered

• Experience with Implementing and using the core financial management applications
• Experience in wording with the vendor, and their service and support capabilities
• How well the applications had supported change in their business
• Value for money and cost of ownership

The rating results

Overall, the interviewed Reference Customers have been very satisfied with the application in use. Just over 80% of the respondents were either positive or strong positive and none was strong negative.

(For the interpretation of the rating please see the explanation at the very end of this article)

Only vendors that fulfil the following 6 inclusion & exclusion criteria have been rated:

1. Provide a suite of financial management applications that includes (at least) GL, AP, AR and FA.
2. Provide financial management applications that are suitable for any organization regardless of industry.
3. Target their financial applications at midsize and/or large organizations.
4. Have at least 100 live users that have bought & implemented the application
5. Generated at least $25 million in revenue
6. Live customers in more than one of the regions North America, South America, EMEA, APAC

What Gartner says about Exact

“Exact has several SMB accounting offerings that are sold on a local, country-specific basis, along with ERP solutions for midsize companies, such as Exact Macola ES and Exact Globe. However, the primary midmarket financial management applications are part of the Exact Globe ERP suite. These are suitable for midsize organizations, but they also have strong international capabilities.”

SaaS Insights:
Gartner also surveyed several new Software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors (CGI, Deltek, Intacct, NetSuite, Twinfield and Workday). There is no information or evaluation on Exact Online in this report by Gartner.

Although none of these vendors met the inclusion criteria for this MarketScope, Gartner anticipates that they will start gaining more market shares as their solutions mature and gain a wider customer base during the next two to five years.

Gartner confirms that midsize companies are starting to deploy SaaS based core financial applications, but still sees companies having concerns about security and integration with on-premises applications.

Nevertheless, the SaaS vendors will not disrupt this market in the next five years because the existing solutions are so well-established and functionally mature.

MarketScope Rating Framework