04 February, 2022

ICG’s November webinar discussed Mobility, Stability & Support for your ERP System. You can view the full recording by visiting ICG’s Presentations page. Or, we’ve recapped the webinar here:

The ICG team opened the webinar by reiterating that there is no end of life for either Fourth Shift or Visual. And that ICG will continue to support and innovate for both products.

Mobility & Stability 
It is critical for your ERP to be accessible anywhere and at any time. It must be easy to manage. Also, it must be the same solution no matter where you are working. And it must offer the same level of performance.

In terms of stability, it’s vital that you have redundancies in place. You are only as good as the last backup you can restore. In addition, we recommend Data Guard 365 for proactive virus and malware prevention and mitigation. We also recommend Mimecast for email security. And we recommend having a robust disaster recovery process in place. ICG has the expertise to manage all the elements of your technology environment.

Support
ICG’s decades of experience mean we have a number of automated processes in place. Therefore, we can jump into things before they become problems. In other words, our support isn’t manual or event-driven, but proactive.

We offer Managed Services, that can be tailored to IT, ERP, or both. We focus on customer need. And we don’t take an all-or-nothing approach. Managed Services “your way” optimally supports your business needs and goals.

ERP Managed Services
We often see that customers are only using a fraction of  their ERP functionality. Also, your in-house IT is almost certainly not an ERP expert. ICG goes in, take a look at business processes, and make unbiased  recommendations.

Customers are sometimes confused as to how our support differs from anything they may receive from Infor.

Infor offers patches and bug fixes, new releases, break / fix solutions, limited training, and offshore support. What you don’t get are all the things that ICG offers:

Product usage advice
General recommendations
Business consulting and tech consulting recommendations
Functional support
Nightly monitoring
Patching and Windows / SQL support
Remote desktop systems, VMware Horizon, and Citrix support
US-based support
.

With ICG, your ERP is managed and hosted in a fully supported environment. Anywhere access is provided by a dedicated VPN connection. In addition, we provide:

Complete system documentation
Remote-managed ERP that remains local to your IT platform
Monitoring of all backups, database-related tasks, error logs, and end-user management
Performance monitoring tools
Support for companion products
EDI technical systems management
.

IT Managed Services
IT Managed Services also has a data center only option, or fully managed services. Fully managed expands support to include end-user devices typically not associated with servers.

Data center support:

NOC
SOC
Help desk
Firewall
Virtualization
Storage
Routers
Active directory
Backup and disaster recovery
.

Requirements
In order to sign on to managed services, we have just a few requirements to make implementation as seamless as possible. For ERP Managed Services, you must be current on Infor Maintenance & Support. That way you have the latest (or access to the latest) version or patches. We require secure remote access to your network and ERP-associated servers. We also strongly recommend redundant internet access.

For both ERP and IT Managed Services, there is a minimum two year time commitment. The cost is based on number of services, licenses, devices, and complexity of platform. Our sales team would be happy to walk through your technology needs and goals and determine next steps. Please give us a call today!