In use across many areas of an organization—from the CEO’s office to the stock control room—Sage Line 500 unifies manufacturing, finance and CRM processes. This section details the business and technical benefits ZAP delivers to such organizations through the enhanced collection, organization and visualization of Sage Line 500 data.
ZAP improves the financial and operational performance of businesses using Sage’s long-standing ERP package, Line 500, by speeding up and simplifying the collection, organization and analysis of ERP and related data. A data-driven business makes confident decisions quickly, based on truth, and ZAP facilitates this by automating the collection and integration of data from Line 500 and other applications and data sources, to provide a business-wide view of all performance and activity. The ability to integrate hitherto-inaccessible or siloed data further strengthens business decision making, by unlocking previously hidden insight. Operational and financial insight, self-service reporting, secure data exploration and visualization is delivered—on any device—via personalized dashboards specifically aligned to Line 500 user roles. Conscious of short- and long-term IT overheads, ZAP is rapid to deploy and simple to administer. TCO is reduced and ROI is delivered immediately thanks to pre-packaged components, automation and ‘out-of-the-box’ capabilities which reduce setup and maintenance costs. ZAP aligns to the service-oriented roles of Line 500 users, and the software’s four key modules of contract management, project ledger, resource ledger and project billing. It handles all data types and can extract, for example, metadata and multi-company and multi-lingual captions. It can handle automatic analytical dimension configurations, statistical groups and automatic captions for local menus. And it can detect and handle customizations, miscellaneous tables and currency conversions. Security and data governance are integral to ZAP for Sage Line 500, with dashboard-based and dashboard-integrated permission setting, access regulation, usage monitoring and auditing. ZAP for Sage Line 500 has also been built with potential migration to Sage X3 in mind: it is possible to retain historic Sage Line 500 data in SDMA and access it for reporting purposes once using Sage X3, removing a significant headache from the migration process.
As leading analyst firm IDC explains in the IDC Market Note, ZAP: Improving Time to Insight for Midsize Firms (doc #EMEA43048517, SEPTEMBER 2017):
Line 500-based businesses become information-empowered with ZAP thanks to six key facets: hybrid scalability, automated data integration, pre-set flexible data models, built-in governance, analytics and visualizations.
Hybrid scalability ZAP can, in whole or in part, be deployed either in the cloud, on-premise or as a hybrid combination of the two. Its architecture is specifically designed to flex and scale as both the volume of users and the volume of data in an organisation increases over time. Private or public cloud deployments can be set up on either AWS or Azure. And a data gateway provides straightforward, optimized access to on-premise data sources via the cloud or across existing networks and firewalls.
Automated data integration Connection to—and the collection of—ERP data within Line 500 data is automated with ZAP. Out-of-the-box connection to other cloud and on-premise data sources is provided, too. All data collected is integrated quickly and simply in a secure, highly governed central hub of business-wide insight. Further data sources can be added at any time in the future.
Pre-set, flexible data models ZAP has a pre-packaged Line 500 data model that delivers immediate reporting across all areas of the application. A user-friendly modeling interface with a drag-and-drop UX allows data to be customized to meet even the most demanding reporting requirements. IT overheads become lessened as users of all levels of expertise can prepare data for reporting in a secure accurate and governed way. Technical effort is further reduced by ZAP’s data warehouse and semantic layer automation, which remove the need for a manual data warehouse project.
Built-in governance Data governance is at the heart of ZAP. Our systems have strong, comprehensive system administration and data governance tools built-in. Enterprise-class security controls set permissions, regulate access and protect data at any level of granularity. ROI is maximised as usage can be both monitored and audited via specific dashboards, which keeps performance optimized and costs minimized. TCO is controlled as upgrade life-cycles can be actively managed via a pre-packaged tool set to ensure consistency of data and business continuity at every turn.
Analytics and visualizations Self-service reporting is delivered via both enterprise-class analytics and data visualization tools. Our responsive, touch-friendly user interface—for ready-to-use, role-based dashboards—adapts to any device, which ramps up user adoption across the business. Easy-to-adapt, dynamic analytics systems enable drill-down data discovery and information sharing, while powerful data modeling capabilities are accessed via an intuitive, user-friendly UI. Data can be safely and securely customized to meet any reporting demand, with no specific requirements for high-level technical expertise.
