Customers participating in Sage 500 ERP Version 2013 beta testing earlier this year were unanimous in giving a thumbs up to the new Visual Process Flows feature. These graphical workflow diagrams provide a visual representation of your business processes, helping you navigate the system more easily, perform daily tasks more quickly, and serve as a nice refresher during procedures that are performed infrequently like year-end processing. Let's take a look at the new Visual Process Flows.
WHAT ARE VISUAL PROCESS FLOWS?
The newest addition to an arsenal of Sage 500 built-in self-help tools, Visual Process Flows are interactive HTML pages that not only demonstrate the steps of a process in visual terms, but also include links to the various tasks along the way. So, they can serve as both a visual diagram and a launching point for the steps and tasks in the process. The 2013 release includes a number of key pre-built processes as well as an easy to use tool that allows you to design your own custom workflows that reflect your unique processes.
IMPROVING YOUR ERP EXPERIENCE
The primary goal of the new Visual Process Flows is to allow you to quickly identify your tasks and launch screens without searching through the giant tree of menu items and icons within Sage 500. Even though you can customize the tree of icons to limit what a user can see based on his or her role, usability studies conducted by Sage revealed that customers were still spending quite a bit of time searching for the correct screen to launch for a given task. Process Flows also make it easier to visualize how individual tasks relate to the overall business process. So in this case, a picture is worth a thousand hours of productivity.
SEE IT IN ACTION
Visual Process Flows are ... well, a visual thing. So you might want to check out this Visual Process Flows overview video on YouTube to see exactly how it works. Even though the video is using Sage ERP X3 as the demo system, it's the same Visual Process Flow engine that's built in to Sage 500 ERP.
RETIRED VERSIONS REMINDER - Sage 500 ERP (formerly "MAS 500") versions 6.3 and 7.0 are now retired. Product updates (including year end) and telephone support are no longer provided by Sage. However if you're on a current maintenance plan, you still have access to the online knowledgebase with articles and support documents covering retired versions. Please don't hesitate to Contact Us if you need assistance.
GET THE WHOLE SCOOP
This post is an article that appeared in our Sage 500 ERP newsletter for Year End 2012. To see all the articles in this newsletter issue, click the thumbnail image below.
