McGuffie Brunton to set agenda for SMEs at CIM 2001

Star of SME enterprise software (ERP) reseller McGuffie Brunton’s stand at the CIM Show is to be its new software component architecture for the Impact Encore ERP system. The firm – which will also be launching Impact Encore at Version 5.1 with XML for data and transaction storage, retrieval and viewing – says it’s the future for easy integration of best of breed applications with Impact to manage supply chains and so forth. Dubbed E.net Solutions, it’s based on Microsoft’s COM (Component Object Model) technology, and provides standard, easy accessibility to the ERP business logic. Essentially, it delivers Impact Encore’s functionality as ‘objects’ of COM code, so that users can access these via scripting languages, like Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or Active Server Pages (ASP). McGuffie says it means SMEs can integrate any COM enabled best-of-breed applications, such as CRM (customer relationship management), with Impact Encore. Similarly, they can get mobile user connectivity; and Internet applications can also be developed, using the COM components, to deliver web-based applications, like direct links into real time, browser-based sales order processing. In fact, there’s more to it. E.net Solutions also offers a major step forward in enabling cost effective business to business electronic trading through its Document Flow Manager. This sees incoming documents, like sales orders, and routes them to the appropriate COM component, using XML as the standard data format. Jeremy Hart, McGuffie Brunton’s e-commerce director, says it solves a big problem in today’s e-business era. “Integration is now at the heart of application-to-application interoperability, e-commerce sites and effective business-to-business trading [but] it’s always been a major challenge – which has become much more complicated as customers increasingly look to pick and choose the most appropriate technology product that will add value to their ERP solution.” “With the introduction of component-based architecture through E.net solutions, we now have the tools to solve many of the existing integration problems. “This will enable us to deliver much greater system functionality from the integration of a wide range of applications with Encore, and enable companies to reduce costs and become more efficient without much of the ‘integration’ pain that previously had to be overcome.”