Your Sage 100 system is a reliable ERP that has taken your business this far – but if you are one of many in the manufacturing industry that is still relying on an on-premise application hosted in a local server, then you have probably already felt the pain of its age. The transition from functional to inadequate often happens gradually, making it difficult to pinpoint when your legacy software has become a bottleneck rather than an enabler, but all technology has a shelf life.
However, that does not mean you have to migrate to a full SaaS (Software as a Service) ERP to take advantage of the cloud, yet. Hosting your Sage 100 environment with a trusted service provider, like SWK Technologies, lets you gain all the benefits while retaining the same business management and accounting software your company still relies on to track reporting, orders, scheduling, materials, inventory, etc.
Continue reading below to discover the biggest signs you are outgrowing your legacy Sage ERP as a manufacturer, and how migrating Sage 100 to cloud-hosted environment will help solve them:
1. System Performance Degrades with Growth
You may notice that once you hit over 30 concurrent users in your ERP that performance begins to slow down, creating bottlenecks during your peak production periods. The underlying issue stems from hardware limitations inherent in on-premise deployments, which can – and often will – cause degradation as your bandwidth becomes stretched to a breaking point when it can no longer handle the volume. Local server resources cannot scale cost-effectively with demand, forcing you into expensive upgrade cycles that only provide relief in the interim until you reach the next ceiling.
Hosting Sage 100 in the cloud lets you offload this burden and capture a more flexible way to tailor system performance around your real capacity demands. Leveraging your service provider’s remote data center, you can scale up or down as you need to, as long as they have the capability and resources to deliver. You can also take advantage of a hybrid environment that allows you to continue using existing server hardware while turning your partner for added bandwidth when you require it.
2. Integration Failures Create Data Silos
The realities of modern manufacturing and distribution chains in an increasingly digital world necessitate having a technology stack of multiple applications to fill the different needs your business requires, automating reporting and allowing you to keep track of everything from raw materials purchased to shipped end products or parts. However, not every system “plays well” with others, and more often than not few do out-of-the-box, requiring manual work to capture and enter data from the disparate silos or in building connectors between them. The challenge is that all of these approaches can quickly become very inefficient for on-premise applications if you are not careful, or gradually more and more costly as gaps form between your teams and business units.
Leveraging the cloud provides opportunities to address this challenge when you work with a knowledgeable partner such as SWK Technologies, delivering the resources and expertise needed to tailor your Sage 100 environment for a more seamlessly connected experience. Hosting your IT infrastructure along with your ERP with IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) lets you create a unified ecosystem between each application and middleware program, letting SWK’s experts manage the integrations on the back end.
3. Lacking Remote Access to Your ERP
Legacy applications were not designed for mobile connectivity, limiting your options for integrating modern technology systems with Sage 100 on-premise and for empowering your team to capture better efficiency at different operational stages. Remote access is possible with the right workarounds, but the extra security configurations required alone will become a chore to handle in-house and will stretch your IT department’s resources and bandwidth. If you have employees working in multiple locations or need to exchange data with partners seamlessly for EDI, etc., then your options are limited.
A tailored hosted environment allows your service provider to build out more reliable, effective and secure remote connections that ensure continued access to data and functions from your ERP. Your partner will be able to optimize your system for mobile capabilities and functionality, or provide virtualized solutions that let you engage with your accounting and business management software as if it was on your desktop from a smartphone or tablet computer.
4. IT Maintenance Consumes Too Much
On-premise Sage 100 implementations require dedicated IT resources to maintain servers, manage system updates and handle hardware replacements that occur with increasing frequency as equipment ages. Annual upgrades become major projects requiring extensive planning, testing and downtime coordination with production schedules. Hardware failures will also create immediate crises requiring emergency vendor support and expedited equipment replacement.
Hosting your ERP in the cloud removes the burden of constant IT maintenance for onsite servers, letting you pass this responsibility onto your service partner. Your provider will maintain your hosted software environment on their end with their modern equipment, handling updates and other routine work in the background and without disrupting your production schedules.
5. You Lose Data with Every Disruption
Manufacturing environments face numerous disruption risks that can compromise on-premise data integrity, from power outages and equipment failures to natural disasters and cybersecurity incidents. Backing up your files is the best way to ensure your operations can be restored, but these need to be done frequently enough that you will not lose information if something unforeseen happens at the worst moment. The time gap between the last successful backup and the failure point creates a window where recent transactions disappear, requiring manual reconstruction of your work orders, inventory movements, bills of materials, etc.
If you are using Sage 100 on-premise, then you have probably relied on backing up files locally or in one other place – which can easily become a recipe for disaster if there is a local disaster that affects the same or both locations. Thankfully, leveraging cloud backups provides an effective way to mitigate this through frequency and redundancy.
Transform Your Manufacturing Operations with Sage 100 Hosting
The convergence of performance limitations, integration challenges and data vulnerability in your on-premise ERP means you are ready for cloud migration. Let SWK Technologies help you start your journey to a more scalable, flexible and efficient way to manage your critical business applications, and empower you to get the most out of your software investment.
Contact SWK here to learn more about migrating Sage 100 to the cloud with our Secure Cloud Hosting services, and discover how to maximize your value return from your ERP.