WELCOME TO PA SUNSYSTEMS NEWSLETTER

Welcome and I trust you are travelling as well as can be expected in this GFC.

I am very proud to announce Professional Advantage was awarded Gold Partner Status by Infor, plus the 2009 Infor Best Overall Partner for Australia and NZ. These awards are in recognition of our focus, expertise and performance. These awards could not be possible without the efforts of a great team at PA plus you, our wonderful customers. Thank you so much.

Since the release of SunSystems v5.4.1, we can see the huge effort that has been put into this version in terms of user interface, smooth performance and inter operability with other systems. SunSystems FMS has become increasingly popular as it combines the SunSystems that we all know with the powerful Budgeting and Forecasting module, Infor Performance Management. I believe that Budgeting and Forecasting will have become even more critical in your planning and forecasting processes due to our current economic climate. Sun v5.4.1 is available on SQL 2008 & Windows 2008.

At PA we believe the biggest impact that we offer organisations is the introduction of business processes solutions and we have seen some great examples where we have been part of the process transformation. Our solution set of choice is FlowCentric and SharePoint. Earlier this year the FlowCentric CEO, Pieter van Schalkwyk, immigrated to Australia and is now based in Sydney. Pieter shares his story and success of FlowCentric with us, which you can read in this edition of our newsletter.

Kind regards

Steve Howcroft
steve_howcroft@pa.com.au
+61 2 9919 8956

FlowCentric - www.flowcentric.com.au
FlowCentric from PA - www.pa.com.au/flowcentric

PA Wins Awards

At the recent annual Infor Pacific Partner conference held in Queenstown, New Zealand, Infor presented Professional Advantage with two awards – The 2009 Infor Gold Partner and the 2009 Overall Best Reseller Performance in the Asia Pacific Region.

The Infor Gold Partner Award acknowledges the outstanding performance of one partner in the region during the year.

“This award is a testimonial from our customers for allowing Professional Advantage to engage with them, work with them and be part of their businesses. It is a privileged position we have and I thank our customers for that honour and trust.” said Steve Howcroft, MD, when receiving the award.

The Overall Best Reseller Performance award recognises Professional Advantage’s winning performance and outstanding contribution to the Infor group.

THE STORY BEHIND THE SUCCESS OF FlowCentric

Pieter van Schalkwyk – Founder /CEO

Pieter van Schalkwyk is the founder, CEO and the chief architect of the FlowCentric BPM product. He is a graduate Mechanical Engineer and also holds a Masters degree in Information Technology. Pieter’s passion for productivity improvement around business processes saw him develop the FlowCentric business process management toolset to address the common problems with processes in organisations today. His experience in engineering, IT, ERP systems implementation and the corporate world helped him mould FlowCentric into the ideal business process management tool for mid market and large enterprises alike.

FlowCentric is a business process management (BPM) and workflow toolset that enables organisations to achieve control of their internal and external processes.
It integrates to other business systems and drives process outcomes across the enterprise. FlowCentric’s rules based process management solution ensures consistent, repeatable, auditable and transparent processes through the organisation.

FlowCentric can be deployed across multiple interfaces, including Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint and your Internet browser, allowing people to act on processes in familiar environments.

"Its ability not just to deliver digitised processes but support sustainable continuous improvements within a business is a massive factor in its attractiveness within these economic times. FlowCentric leverages existing people and systems to raise service levels and support the organisation," said Jonathan Marcer, PA’s Process Team Leader.

The FlowCentric solution recently won the Microsoft ISV/Software Solutions Competency Award for 2009 at the Microsoft Partner Programme Awards. Winning this prestigious award is recognition of the fact that the products and solutions delivered by FlowCentric can solve business challenges and consistently add value to the businesses using their systems.

A global operation, FlowCentric has over 160 clients worldwide, including South African Airways, Avis, Hitachi and Harmony Gold.

Pieter relocated with his wife and 2 sons from South Africa to Sydney in January 2009 to grow FlowCentric in Australia from the initial customer base established by Professional Advantage in the past few years. Pieter sees a great opportunity in assisting Australian businesses to bring the benefits of BPM to their organisations. “Australians are compliance-minded and understand BPM quickly. Those that are starting to embrace it can see the immediate benefits and I am excited to be part of process revolution in Australia” says Pieter.

Pieter has written 2 whitepapers, “FlowCentric Turns SharePoint from Good to Great” & “6 Hidden Truths to Lost Profit”. To download these whitepapers please click here.

New SunSystems Web Page

Professional Advantage is pleased to announce the launch of its new
and improved SunSystems web site. We have redesigned the site, at www.pa.com.au/sunsystems, to make it easier for you to find the
information you need, as quickly as possible, while still containing all the
relevant information on SunSystems products, news, support and much more.

Improving Your Business Processes Just Got Easier

FlowCentric has a new and exciting release, V4R2, including impressive enhancements on existing features, and the inclusion of several much-anticipated new features.

This feature-rich process management suite allows business users to quickly and efficiently configure and deploy processes. "This release is a major milestone.
This version includes many enhancements requested from our customer base from around the world," says Pieter Van Schalkwyk, FlowCentric CEO. "Our objective is to deliver unbelievable value to our customers by ensuring our software is relevant from a technology and functional viewpoint."

New features include a built-in Multi Language capability, version management enabling business users to compare the performance of one version of a process with a prior, and FlowCentric for SharePoint web parts. It also includes refreshed analysis and reporting. The new release allows organisations to define performance metrics, benchmark, and monitor process, activity, people and cost.

"Its ability not just to deliver digitised processes but support sustainable continuous improvements within a business is a massive factor in its attractiveness within these economic times. FlowCentric leverages existing people and systems to raise service levels and support the organisation," said Jonathan Marcer, PA’s Process Team Leader.

Reduce the time to process expenses and credit cards in your business by 90%, guarantee accuracy and visibility!

Professional Advantage has a new release of its expense and credit card management suite. These FlowCentric process-based applications are also available as part of Workflow for SunSystems and 3P for iPOS. So if you have this software there is no software cost to deploy these.

Many organisations promote the use of corporate credit cards to gain efficiency and simplify purchase and travel expenses. The reality is that credit card expense processing is for many a laborious, costly and often neglected overhead. The volume of expenses, payments and business rules which need to be processed (often manually) to complete a single statement run can be daunting.

myCreditCard is a web-based solution that delivers immediate payback in terms of time and cost of processing. It can sweep up transaction files from your bank, apply coding, and then route it through your organisation dispersing details to card holders, approvers, Finance and Administration teams while seamlessly posting to your Finance system. It also provides visibility and audit trails, checks for duplicates, identifies exceptions and escalates accordingly.

For more information on myCreditCard, please contact your account manager.

webinars

Upcoming webinar series:

Cash is King

Receiving cash is paramount in any business and the quicker that you have cash
the quicker you can invest in other projects or pay for operational activities. To effectively receive cash quicker the entire Accounts Receivable process needs to be automated, auditable, transparent and managed for each and every customer, each and every sale. Advanced Receivables from Professional Advantage incorporates the complete invoice to cash activity for your business to receive your cash sooner.

The cash is king series will incorporate invoicing, receipting, collections and workflow management to provide complete management of your Accounts Receivable function. These 30 minute sessions are designed for an insight into how these modules will manage your debt better.

learning and development

Why do so many attendees rate PA's Infor FMS SunSystems Public Training courses as #1?

• “Practical exercise, easy to follow”
• “Positive & Enthusiastic Presentation”
• “Instructor did a great job with explaining”
• “Well run classes” 
• “Gaining more knowledge”
• “Learning how to do things more efficiently”

To view the course timetable, outline & booking form visit : www.pa.com.au/suneducation

Regional training available on demand.

Free Induction Course

Did you know we run a free induction course for your staff. Please contact Cathy McMahon for details of the next course.