Slate Overview
Overview
Slate is essentially an ERP system. Encompassing aspects of the company workflow from project management, through invoicing. Though it leaves initial sales enquiry and the actual accounting to other, integrated platforms.
We've developed Slate from the ground up to fit the way Jansy works, rather than fitting Jansy to the way the software works. Being a bespoke management system, we retain full control of the system. Many other software packages claim to be flexible and customizable. However when you examine how they work, often they suffer from several issues. Performance is an issue as they could never optimize their data base access. Forms are limited in how they can be designed, as they must be dynamically constructed. Internal interactivity is limited, as the target market would lack skills to design and code it. Most importantly, when software tries to be one-size-fits-all, it's never really a good fit for anyone.
Features
Features for the User
- Company and Contact Management
- Project Management
- Versioned Asset Management
- Requests (task management)
- Time Tracking
- Orders, a central location for the sales lifecycle
- Item Tracking, including Components and Variations
- Finished Goods, including nested BOMs
- Estimate Generator
- SalesOrders
- PurchaseOrders
- Logistics Tracking
- Invoices
- AP Email Parsing
- Much, much, more
Foundational Features
Object fields are actual database columns
Many 'customizable' software packages store data in one large table. Where it's the the object, the field name, and the field value. This results in poor performance and is difficult to query against in any meaningful and complex way. While a good solution when you don't know what columns will actually be needed, we have the advantage of defining the software for ourselves. Slate can add fields to our objects as needed, and develop queries to fit specific situations.
Customizations are part of the system, not bolted on
Other ERP systems allow for custom code to be added to the system. This code is typically run outside the normal object life cycle. It will do it's thing normally and then run your code. Which leaves the question, if what normally happens is not what you want, how do you change that. Often you end up fighting the software, rather than working with it. With Slate we're developing the entire software ourselves. This gives us full control over all the code that runs. If one object or view needs to behave differently than any others, we can make that happen without fighting the system.
Slate is designed to work for us, rather than making us work for the software