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Ferguson
12-15-2005, 12:41 PM
We are a small business that fulfills orders for other companies. Our primary clients are in the perfume business selling to high end Dept stores (EDI) as well as small Boutiques. A fundamental requirement of the perfume business is to provide "collateral" materials (at no charge), which help to sell the product in the stores. Collateral orders account for about 40% of our overall orders. I believe a workable solution for both collateral orders and Boutique orders is to create a B2B website to allow the orders to be communicated and tracked electronically.

We MUST upgrade/change systems used to process orders and provide information. We are considering Everest, Mas90 and PeachTree 2006 Premium.

Preliminary talks with Everest yield a $35K initial estimate which doesn't sit well since we won't use many of the advanced features.

Important to us:

Generate Picking Ticket, Packing Slip (for all orders) & Invoice (for all non-EDI, non-COD and non-collateral orders)

Multi-location communication of information (90% of data is entered in 1 location), while the cash receipts are entered in another location. 2 other sales offices need to view info.

Customs Invoice for Canadian/Puerto Rico and Bahamas shipments (about 5% of business), which is different from regular invoice, in that we much show a value for all collateral material. Currently we go back and remove the value when sending the invoice to the customer.

EDI interface (Electronic Data Interchange) is required for Department store transactions. We have a 3rd party system in place that is working well. Need to incorporate it into our solution.

Tie into UPS worldship program (so customers get notification of shipment or at least have visibility to tracking #. UPS makes up about 40% of our orders (balance ship via LTL carriers).

Product/Inventory management

Web order communication (without reentering) WITH EMAIL NOTIFICATION TO key people for review/approval. We have no Website currently, so a product that had a built-in web site creator would be advantageous. Website would be B2B without payment processing, therefore would be very basic/functional. Website would not be used to draw in sales, simply to process existing customers. It would need to be password protected in order to prevent the "public at large" from entering, since these products will never be sold direct.

Basic Sales Reporting

There will be 3 users in our facility, a 4th part-time access (Cash Application) and reporting for Accounting purposes and 2 more with read-only access.

Not important to us:
Serialized inventory
Credit Card Internet Approval/Processing
Human Resource Management
Sophisticated Website

DOES ANYBODY HAVE RECENT EXPERIENCE WITH EVEREST, Mas90 or Peach Tree 2006 OR HAVE A SIMILAR BUSINESS, USING ANOTHER DISTRIBUTION SOFTWARE??? HELP!!!! fergusonedison@gmail.com

furniture guy
12-17-2005, 09:25 AM
Hello:
I have no experience with Everest, but I heard it expensive. As for the other two: I don't like Peachtree at all. I have used it on and off for 20 years (It seems every company I get involved with has it so I immediately get rid of it, it is so cumbersome to use) MAS90 is okay, but very expensive to deploy - figure twice the software cost which gets you to the $35K you said...The big problem with their solution is that it isn't all theirs: CRM is goldmine or ACT, e-commerce is someone else. When you spend that much, it should be an all in one.
A personally like Quickbooks Enterprise edition. They just came out with a new version. As for the e-commerce component, in the QB website, look under solution partners for IA Instant Host from IA Modules. Their software has a two way link to QB and a web store and add-on module for allowing customers, sales reps and remote offices to access the database over the internet. The 5 user cost is about $4500 (QB=3000+IA Link=500+IA SAM=995) plus $100/mo hosting fee. This is way less expensive than most other solutions out there...and it may do the job really well.