This post relates to the former Variatec Variadd Project Addon - see our previous announcement on our acquisition of Variatec Project.
Integrated Applications has now been supporting and improving IA-Project for SAP Business One for the last six months and we feel it’s about time we shared some of the improvements we’ve made to this comprehensive project costing software.
Initial feedback from SAP partners made it clear there were several issues with the previous version that needed attention, and we’ve worked hard over the last few months to address these. Many small corrections have been made throughout the application, but the department planning board has received significant work that resulted in a huge performance increase. In one case the load time for the planning board was reduced from over three minutes to a couple of seconds.
Any faults within the software are now automatically logged to our cloud-based exception reporting system, giving us immediate notification that a problem has occurred and the nature of it. This will mean that in some cases end-users won’t need to supply any technical information such as log files when reporting a problem, and we can get a better understanding of where any remaining reliability problems may originate from.
We’ve also started making improvements to the software based on user feedback. The areas that saw significant improvement were sales tab synchronisation and timesheets. Improvements include:
- When ticking the "Enable Synchronisation" option on the project sales tab, the user is prompted if they want to retain the current mark-up percentages (for unchanged materials and hours) or load the default percentages from item master data.
- When updating project materials from linked marketing documents such as a purchase order, it’s now possible to update the corresponding values on the project sales tab using the established mark-up percentages.
- Notes against individual timesheet entries can still be viewed even after the timesheet it posted and locked.
- Some time-consuming processes now update the status bar so it’s clear that progress is being made.
Improvements for partners include:
- Installers do additional checks on the installation environment to spot common problems.
Finally, we now have generally available as a self-hosted option, a web-based TMC (time and material cost) web application. This allows field service engineers to record time and progress on projects from a desktop, tablet or mobile. It features a slick, mobile responsive interface that can cater for multi-company scenarios.