Thormod Berger
At Vince, we’ve been working with companies who rely on Infor M3 for their ERP for more than 10 years, and our people have decades of collective experience working with M3 as users and as consultants.
Over the years, we’ve learned a huge amount about what people love about this powerful ERP solution…and also about the frustrations they face on a day-to-day basis.
While Infor M3 is undeniably an extremely powerful ERP solution that does so many things incredibly well, we do see certain common issues and challenges cropping up time and again across different M3 users in a range of industries. And it’s these we’re going to cover today.
Because, drawing on all our years of experience and our subject matter expertise, we recently launched Vince Live, a unified cloud solution offering M3 users the most powerful, flexible, and intuitive experience possible. At the same time, Vince Live completely eliminates all of the little niggles and stumbling blocks that regularly trip M3 users up.
So, without further ado - here are just a few of the most common Infor M3 challenges Vince Live can help you solve today.
Adding/updating purchase prices
Almost all Infor M3 customers make regular changes to purchase prices as suppliers adjust their charges throughout the year. But despite being a relatively simple change in principle, in practice, updating price lists can be extremely time-consuming in M3.
Typically, updated price sheets come in from suppliers in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, with users having to go through multiple panels to manually implement the changes.
But with Vince Live, all you have to do is select the spreadsheet containing the new prices and they will automatically update via API. It’s a seamless experience that eliminates the potential for user error, and it’s completed in just a couple of clicks, meaning a task that might have taken several hours is finished in minutes.
Calculating and updating sales prices
Sales prices are another key data point in your ERP that changes on a regular basis depending on a wide range of factors including geography, time of year, and even individual customer metrics. Handling this manually often involves a great deal of Excel wizardry and yet more panel-hopping in M3. It isn’t just time-consuming, it’s also a common hotspot for human errors.
With Vince Live, sales prices, much like purchase prices, can be updated via import directly from Excel, saving time and eliminating human errors. It’s a useful feature for pretty much every company, but for those with regularly updated customer-specific sales prices, it’s a genuine game-changer.
Maintaining Basic data
There’s no getting around it - maintaining basic data in Infor M3 is a huge task, involving opening up panels for each and every data point that needs adjusting. And as the scope of change increases, so does the complexity of the update to the point that large updates are practically impossible to implement.
But with Vince Live, maintaining basic data couldn’t be easier. Instead of navigating endless panels and hunting for the right field, Vince Live lets Infor M3 users manage their data in the simplest and most flexible way possible - using an Excel interface.
List out your M3 data based on predefined rules, verify data quality, fix errors, and make changes as necessary before importing everything back into M3.
Monitor pricing errors
It’s the nature of modern IT systems that key data like sales prices exists in many different places across multiple systems - in your ERP, on your website, in your POS system, in your campaign systems, and likely several more besides. And with each product typically having multiple different sales prices depending on which campaigns are running at what time of year, it can be incredibly difficult to ensure your prices are aligned across all your systems.
Vince Live lets you proactively monitor deviations in business-critical data like sales prices across all your systems. Set up automated alerts via email or SMS for high-impact data, and take advantage of fully customizable, visually descriptive dashboards for everything else.
Monitor basic data
It’s no secret that ERP data isn’t always as up to date as it could be. Whether it’s time-lag between internal changes and system updates or a simple case of human errors going unnoticed and propagating over time, the quality of your ERP data can’t always be relied on…
…unless, that is, you invest in Vince Live.
Nobody knows which metrics are most valuable to your business better than you do, which is why Vince Live offers you the flexibility to monitor only what’s important to you. Use field-specific monitoring that generates alerts for missing or anomalous values, and present key monitoring information in customizable dashboards that can be used both by your support teams and the business. The result is vastly improved data quality and the peace of mind to know you can rely on the information in your ERP solution.
Vince Live is simple to set up, intuitive to use, and the most flexible, powerful solution we at Vince have ever designed. It’s limitlessly scalable, always up to date, and completely secure, making use of an ION API gateway to communicate with your systems. And of course, as a cloud solution, it can be accessed from anywhere in the world on almost any device.
Feel free to contact us here if you have any questions.
