Pay Only for What You Need

Denmark-based Navision has launched Attain, an IBS (Integrated Business Solution, a variant term for ERP) package. Attain automates business processes for a range of medium-sized companies from manufacturing and construction to media, retail and wholesale services. 

It offers a feature-rich buffet of accounting, finance, SCM (supply-chain management) and CRM (customer-relationship management) tools. Each area has several modules, which are further divided into granules. The price depends on the modules or even the specific granules you choose, thereby giving a high flexibility of choice. 

Modules under SCM include Inventory, Warehouse management, Manufacturing and Capacity Requirements Planning modules. CRM tools are Sales and Receivables, Relationship management and Service management modules. Finally, there are other modules like Resources, Jobs and Human resources. The package has been localized for Indian customers, and meets statutory requirements like Sales Tax, Excise and

TDS.

The main client interface for Attain is structured in a clear manner, transparent down to the lowest level. Each module comes with a set of pre-defined report templates (400 and rising). One such template allows users to generate reports that include multiple currencies, supported by dates on which transactions were made and their respective exchange rates with respect to your default currency. 

Besides reports, another interesting granule under General Ledger is called Analysis of Dimensions. A dimension is data you can add to an entry as a flag so that the program can group entries with similar characteristics and easily retrieve these groups for analysis. For example, a single sales entry can include multi-dimensional information on which account the item sale has been posted to, where the item was sold, who sold it and what kind of customer made the proposal. By using dimensions you can analyze trends and compare various characteristics across a range of entries. With this tool, you can create statements, statistics and analysis that are customized snapshots of complete financial statements. Filters and options that alter the view and type of information help fine-tune your analysis.

Attain also implements Navision’s proprietary technology called SIFT (Sum Index Flow Technology). This is meant to speed up Online Analytical Processing. For instance, if there’s a table containing the company’s debts, SIFT would create a virtual column that sums up the concurrent flow field (fields whose content is constantly changing) entries as they are being entered. So when a user requests for the sum, the computation time is reduced drastically. 

Attain can work in standalone or client/server mode. You have a choice of its own proprietary database for the backend, or MS SQL Server 7.0 (or above). 

Price: ranges from Rs 35,000 (Basic general ledger and tax) to about Rs 35 lakh for the entire package. With the Commerce Portal and Gateway, it comes to about Rs 44 lakh. User licenses cost about Rs 55,000 per concurrent user.

Contact: Navision India, Gurgaon. Tel: 0124-6805060—68. 

Priya Ramachandra in Gurgaon