I hope you all are enjoying the start to a great summer.

It's been about 6 weeks since Insights and I hope you enjoyed Insights as much as I did. As always it is great to reconnect with old friends, meet new friends, and network with as many people as possible. Insights is a great yearly platform to keep in touch with Eclipse, friends, and upcoming offerings. Thank you to all who stopped by the booth and congratulations to drawing winners. Also thanks to all who stopped me and other board members to discuss issues that are important to you and your company. All of this feedback is very important and helps set the stage for our meetings with Epicor.

Hopefully you were able to attend the UFO breakout session to get an update on what YOUR users group is working on. We had the largest turnout that I can remember in quite a few years and it was great to see that many people in the audience. I wish we could have had more time for Q&A, but feel we used our time wisely. We will try to get a longer session at next year's conference.

We are listening!!

We had quite a lot of feedback regarding Insights, the conference layouts, and Las Vegas as a conference host city. Between surveys and the web conference call we have a great collection of information. We have shared this with Kevin Roach and other Epicor executives to improve future conferences.

The full UFO board had a meeting Sunday before Insights to help us prepare for Insights and further plan for the remainder of the year.

The UFO executive team also had meetings with Paul Ferrell and Kevin Roach to discuss the roadmap for Eclipse. Both meetings were very productive and both Kevin and Paul re-iterated the same message - Eclipse is not going away and continues to have development to make it an even stronger platform. I know there is noise in the industry stating the opposite, but both Kevin and Paul urged us to ignore the noise and look at the tangible investments being made to further Eclipse.

We are listening!!

Epicor announced a Linux support package and there were quite a few questions concerning exactly what it covered. We setup a web conference for our UFO members with Dan Heulitt and Paul Deluca. While Dan and Paul answered many questions and developed a better understanding of our concerns, other questions were raised and Dan/Paul are working on answering those now. We will pass along information as we get it.

As always if you have any feedback don't hesitate to contact myself, Mary Barlow, or any other UFO board member. 

You have been on Eclipse for awhile; or you went live within the past year, the adrenalin rush has subsided, and life is getting back to normal.

You're having a nice day at work, when the Owner suddenly walks in and wants to know why "your" computer allowed an item to be sold below what the company paid to purchase it. Since you are the "eclipse wizard" in your Company (or one of them), you are the default "keeper of the data", and responsible for all things gone wrong.

When you track down the reason for selling the item so low, it turns out that there was a sell matrix that had a fixed price, with no expiration date. It was created back in the days when you first went on the system, and salesmen were creating sell matrices for their customers. So you fix the offending matrix with a variable formula, and all is well in your world again. That night, while you're sleeping around 2am, your subconscious raises the possibility that there may be other fixed price sell matrixes sitting in your data file. You don't sleep too well after that, or the next night, because you know that other fixed price sell matrices may be sitting there, like time bombs waiting to go off. Fear of the unknown.

Many distributors running on Eclipse need their ERP to be able to communicate with some type of external system. However, as most Eclipse users know, it's internal data structure tends to be a bit challenging, and certainly is anything but "open."   

This is where Optimum Systems comes in. We have over 15 years of hands-on experience moving data into and out of Eclipse. Our tools have allowed many companies to successfully connect their Eclipse systems to various external databases and systems. Some of the ways our connection tools have been used are: connection to website databases, synchronization with data warehouses, CRM systems, Amazon, Trade Service and other vendor-managed databases. Normally these are configured to automatically communicate with customers, vendors or other third parties, relieving staff members from having to manually perform these tasks.  

Every Eclipse company has a unique way of operating their business, and because of this, we do not just provide "cookie-cutter" solutions and try to make them fit every situation. Rather we custom-tailor our solutions to address the exact problem or challenge that our customers need to solve, in a way that optimally meets their needs.

Solutions we offer:  

Website Integration

One of our most requested solutions is providing communication between consumer or B2B websites and Eclipse.   Our exclusive connection technology provides several advantages over other connectivity options available for Eclipse.

This enables: 

• Performance
• Flexibility
• Easy to Learn

SQL Database Syncing

One of our specialties is providing automatic syncing of Eclipse data to external SQL databases. For example we often mirror product data from either the Eclipse product file or PDW to a website database as part of our web integration projects. This enables: 

•  Customized Searching
• Real Time Syncing
• Dashboard Creation

Amazon Marketplace Web Service Integration

We can offer a fully automated solution for distributors that use Amazon Marketplace to sell their products. The result is saving companies from having to manually transfer data between the two systems. This solution enables:  

• Import customer orders from Amazon into Eclipse.
• Order Confirmations.
• Load Products Pricing and Onhands.  

Custom Enhancements  

Many of our customers have unique requirements and have asked us to develop solutions which enhance Eclipse to better support their business. These include:

• importing product information, pricing updates, customer orders, etc
• emailing price books, order acknowledgments, etc as CSV or XLS files
• custom canned reports which provide different data or formats than the canned reports Eclipse provides, or can be readily accomplished using Report Writer

Contact us at www.opti-sys.com or phone 404-386-7880