Out of the box your ERP solution should contain a vast range of best practice features and functions. This then forms the basis upon which your consultant can build your perfect-fit ERP solution. Read on to find out more about Intact’s approach to marrying best practice to those unique ways of working that help your business drive a competitive advantage.
QuickStart is Intact iQ’s ERP Implementation basecamp. All Intact consultants enter into an ERP project implementing the QuickStart database as their first step in the ERP Implementation project (and QuickStart is the solution that would have been demonstrated to your team during the sales process). It has been designed to provide your business with the best out-of-the-box starting point for your project. QuickStart has been crafted from our 28 years industry and software experience and contains a vast range of features and functions that have been implemented in businesses just like yours. This is the vantage point upon which your consultant can build upon to implement your tailored solution.
Intact iQ QuickStart – The Nuts & Bolts
User Interface – The QuickStart user interface is streamlined and optimised to ensure your users can intuitively navigate your Intact iQ system at Go Live. To facilitate this each screen in Intact iQ is constantly reviewed. The related user journey alongside our best practice models are factored in here to ensure the user interface (i.e. screen design) is continually optimised. This adds incredible value in facilitating maximum efficiency for each user of the system. The aim is to ensure each member of your team has immediate access to all the information, commands and features they require for their specific role.
Process Standardisation – We know your industry and whilst every business has individual ways of working, many are shared. These shared ways of working, for example a common sales order process, are factored into QuickStart. We do this so you benefit from this process being catered for from day 1 but of equal importance is that how this process has been factored into QuickStart is aligned to industry best practice. As you work with your consultant to review your processes aligned to these industry best practice workflows you may uncover huge gains for your business.
It’s important to remember though that none of this is set in stone. It’s a solid starting point that can be tweaked or amended based on individual requirements. For example, there may be a part of your sales order process that differs to the norm but adds value to your business. Factoring these unique ways of working into Intact iQ is where the solution excels. All QuickStart does is afford our consultants more time to accommodate the unique nature of your business and align it to industry best practice to get it operating optimally.
Pre-configured Reports – From the vast range of reports requested over the years there are a number that are standard and have now been optimised and are supplied as standard with Intact iQ QuickStart. These reports are supported with rich graphical representation of your data in the form of charts, dashboards etc. If these reports need to be amended to take in or remove additional factors that is easily done by the consultant working on your project. It simply gives him/her a head start as opposed to designing all the reports required for your business from scratch.
Intact iQ QuickStart is a living breathing entity with suggestions for improvements and refinements continuously gathered from our sales, consultancy, support, and development team. They are fed into our sprint process with an updated version of QuickStart deployed monthly across the team. This ensures emerging trends, improved ways of working and new features are captured and fed into our solution early. For our customers they have the reassurance that their project is being implemented using not only a modern ERP solution but also a configuration that is tried and tested yet contemporary.
‘Best practice for a business should never be dictated by a software company. Many businesses grow and succeed because they have a unique or familiar way of working. We encourage that ethos and have built software to support it at all levels.’
Justin Lawless, CEO, Intact
Intact iQ QuickStart is the cornerstone of your ERP solution but often it’s what our consultants build on top of this foundation that will set you apart and help your business thrive. Intact iQ was designed to facilitate those unique elements of your business that add value to your business. Every business has some, or often, multiple unique ways of working. During the business process review with your Intact project team we will challenge these unique processes to ensure they add value but those that do can now be accommodated in your ERP solution. Many customers pre-Intact iQ were managing these unique processes outside their old ERP system because it simply couldn’t bend to accommodate them or the development cost was too prohibitive. This is an antiquated approach leading to information silos and resulting inefficiencies. At Intact our experience led us to create an ERP solution that facilitated advanced levels of code free customisation. This allows our team to quickly and cost effectively create a personalised solution that matches how you want your business to operate.
Creating a personalised ERP solution can seem daunting to some of our prospective customers.
All valid question and happily the answers are no, no, no and no! The reason why is that we use our Solution Architect facility in Intact iQ to create, document and test all the various elements required for your ERP solution. This ensures you retain 100% visibility of the ERP solution that is being created for your business. We document each build element of your solution so your current and future team, and our support team, have full visibility of why the element was built, how it was built and the output from user acceptance testing.
The key thing to remember is that our approach is not ‘customisation for customisation sake’; it’s about customising the Intact iQ solution to turn it into your Intact iQ solution; an ERP solution that will enable your business to maximise efficiencies, boost productivity and realise its goals. We do this together; working to your project objectives and taking the outputs from your business process review to create a future-proofed, perfect-fit ERP solution that will enhance your competitive advantage.
‘With our customers, we’ve found that they all have important intricacies to their business that cookie-cutter software systems simply can’t support. Some businesses try to resolve this issue through the use of multiple software solutions to manage various, niche elements of the business. However, the disparate nature of such an operation will create silos, reduce data accuracy and increase duplication. As our Intact iQ solution was built to support unique ways of working, scale and change, our customers are working with a unified platform that provides them with a digital fabric that extends right across their entire business. This provides a level of control and a continuous flow information, in real-time, across their business that often enables them to enhance their operation by the margins necessary to outpace their competition.’
Justin Lawless, Intact CEO
We wish you the very best in your future ERP implementation and we hope Intact will be your chosen partner on your journey to get your business operating at it’s best.