For Exact Online, logistic functionality (purchase, sales and inventory handling) is on its way and we will incorporate a number of indicators that will be displayed to you first thing in the morning. Indicators that allow you to be in control of operations (pending stock revaluations, number of lines in backorder, number of planned receipts today, age of inventory) or performance indicators based on periodic information (inventory turnover ratio, supplier order cycle time, supplier’s performance).

This all sounds very nice (and I feel it actually is) but what we truly would like to hear is whether this is really what you would like to see first thing in the morning? Will it help you to be better in control? Do you know a logistic indicator that definitely needs to be present and is not mentioned above? If so, then please respond with the most important indicator to be in better logistic control.

SOI is used by our customers for about a year now. During this year we got a lot of positive feedback and some points of attention. We got a couple of requests to boost performance; the time to save an email or document to Synergy enterprise. In some environments this took too long and we decided to make this a focus area.

Lost couple of weeks we investigated the process of saving a document and booked some great results. In all situations we achieve a good performance boost, in some situations even up to 150%. If we compare the overall performance of Synergy Office Integration with its predecessor (Synergy office Add in), saving a document takes about 20% time less.

The performance boost is available as of product update 242. If you already run product update 242, please update to latest 242 version available.

For more information about SOI or to view a demo video, see the blog: Integration of Exact Synergy Enterprise with MS Outlook and other MS Office applications

It is important for you to know what kind of information is exchanged by the ESI Tool. When you use the ESI Tool no company sensitive information will be transferred. Only technical information like usage statistics, logged errors, numbers of records per table, database size and settings will be exchanged. When using the ESI Tool you can see exactly what information is send to us in the CSV file that is placed on your desktop or via menupath ‘Logs, View CSV file’.

Personally, I am very happy to see that a lot of our customers have already used the ESI tool. As of today, the Exact System Information Tool is even extended with the option to receive an automated improvement report per e-mail.

If you specify your e-mail address before pressing the ‘Start Analysis button’, the Exact System Information will analyze your SQL Server and Exact databases. When the analysis is completed you will receive the improvement report within 10 minutes. The report is divided in 2 sections:

1. Server improvements.
The server improvements section is related to your SQL server configurations and answers questions like: Have you installed the latest Service packs? Can you make changes in your SQL Server configuration to make use of all available memory? Etcetera.
 
2. Database improvements.
The database improvements section is related to the database itself and gives advice about new available product updates, clean up of historical journal records, clean up of voided entry record, background jobs, clean up of temporary tables etcetera.

If you have already used the Exact System Information tool in the past, the tool will update itself when you start it up again.

Enjoy using the Exact System Information tool. If you have suggestions for improvements please let me know, as we do not only want to improve our software solutions but also the Exact System Information Tool itself.

Photo credit: cliff1066tm

If you are a user of the E-Report module in Exact Globe, you are for sure going to benefit from Crystal Reports XI. This is our new reporting engine for Exact Globe E-Report, offering easier report design, simplified report maintenance and expanded data access. Every customer with an active maintenance agreement for E-Report will receive a DVD with the Crystal Reports XI software. Important: For E-Report users it is mandatory to install Crystal Reports XI together with product update 395.

Electronic Invoicing is a hot topic at the moment: it saves you the costs and efforts of printing and sending physical invoices, it saves your customers the costs of entering invoices in their bookkeeping systems and without using paper, ink and transportation services it also saves the environment. Product update 395 offers customers in the Netherlands and Belgium the opportunity to send invoices electronically. Electronic Invoicing currently supports exchanging invoices between Exact solutions and during this introduction period the use of this new service is free.

Under the hood, we have also done quite some efforts to improve the performance of Exact Globe. The degree of improvement you will notice is influenced by a lot of factors in your hardware and software. We are however proud to let you know that we received very positive feedback during the controlled release phase from both our partners and customers.
 
More information about product update 395 can be found in the release notes. Please let us know your experiences with product update 395.

One of Exact’s largest Globe customers in terms of number of users (>200), transactions and database size has been running live with product update 395 for a few weeks and we asked them for their feedback on the performance. Here’s the result they gave us:

• Performance improvement General ledger card: 100% (twice as fast)
• Performance of the opening balance calculation in the bank journal: 100%
• Performance improvement debtor/creditor card: 100%
• Performance improvement stock positions overview: 100%
• Performance improvement in logistics in general: 100%
• Overall performance improvement: 70%

Especially the last percentage is encouraging because it shows users notice an overall improvement of the system’s responsiveness. We’re very interested in more feedback on customer’s experiences with 395 and are gathering that continuously. If you have any experiences with 395 or feedback on this topic, feel free to comment.

Disclaimer: Any of the performance results indicated are the result for this  customer’s situation. There is no guarantee that similar results can be realized on a different database using another client, server and network configuration.

In an earlier post on my personal blog, I wrote about improving the performance of Exact Globe. A discussion was initiated in the Exact Globe user group on LinkedIn, resulting in a few webinars with customers, implementation partners and contacts at Exact resellers to exchange our thoughts on the topic. In this post I want to give a first update on what has been going on since then, what the outcome is and how organizations and the people that use Exact Globe, could benefit from all this.

The approach taken by Exact’s product organization to improve the performance and scalability of Exact Globe has been divided into 3 parts:

1. Reduce the number of records in the main transaction tables. More specifically, do a clean-up of MRP records that are generated during logistic, project or production processes.
2. Introduce tables that capture financial balances. So we’re removing the need to retrieve totals by doing a sum across all records in Exact Globe’s financial transaction table (a.k.a. GBKMUT)
3. Build an archiving function that enable organizations to remove all transactions related to old financial years

So what can you expect in the next product update of Exact Globe?

We’re currently in the final stages of the development of product update 395. Topic 1) and 2) will be a part of that product update; topic 3) is still under analysis. A little more detail on the improvements we made:

1) Reduce the number of records in the main transaction tables

Logistic processes in Exact Globe generate MRP planning records. Examples of logistic processes are sales orders, blanket sales orders, return to merchant authorization (RMA) orders, purchase orders, blanket purchase orders, return to vendor (RTV) orders, interbranch transfers and quotations.

Over the years, as customers’ databases become larger and filled with logistic transactions, the database actions on these MRP records becomes slower. Purpose of the adjustments that have been made in product update 395, is to improve the performance of logistic and MRP related data, by removing obsolete MRP records from the Exact Globe database.

After the completion of the logistic processes over a certain period of time, the historical records (i.e. the completed sales or purchase orders) might be obsolete and no longer required. In order to delete these obsolete logistic and MRP planning records (and hence improve the performance of the administration), a tool dedicated for this function is available as per product update 395.

Functionally, this is done via a wizard that will explain the user about the consequences and what pre-conditions have been set. Reason for setting some preconditions and limitations, is that we didn’t want to build solutions for every possible scenario and thereby delay delivery for the majority of our customers. We expect to get quite a bit of customer feedback and we intend to take that into consideration in next iterations of the cleanup application. That’s why you’ll see that i.e. the clean-up will not work in combination with production orders. See the screenshot below for an impression of how it looks like:

2)      Introduce tables that capture financial balances.

In order to speed up the retrieval of transactions totals, new tables have been introduced to capture

a)      Total actual financial transactions per ledger

b)      Cash/bank balance

c)       Actual  stock per item

d)      Total accounts receivable per debtor

e)      Total accounts payable per supplier

Applications that benefit from these improvements are AR/AP/GL cards, cash/bank entry (where cash/bank balance is retrieved in the header) and viewing your stock positions report.

These tables are populated by making use of SQL triggers. This means that consistency and correctness of the values in the table, is ensured on a database level  outside of the Exact Globe applications. In order to keep the size of these new balance tables small and fast, a background process (a SQL agent task) will be automatically enabled on your SQL server and scheduled to compress the records in these new tables every night at 2am.

We’ve also implemented a fallback scenario J. Just in case anything would go wrong, the administrator can simply disable the use of these balance tables and Exact Globe will retrieve financial totals in the same way as it does in 394 and before.

A nice side-effect of having these balance tables is that organizations who have their own customized reports that show any of the 5 totals listed above, can rebuild these reports on the new tables, making retrieval of the report faster.

Interested?

In a next blogpost I will go into some more detail about the balance tables concept and the performance results we’ve seen in our labs.  Meanwhile, in case you’re interested to be an early adaptor of these improvements and give feedback to Exact, please contact your local Exact office to participate in the Controlled release of 395. We expect this controlled release to start mid September.