NAMTEK Consulting Services provides professional IT services for small and mid-sized manufacturers to enhance inventory management and streamline the entire ecommerce process from the web front-end to the back-end ERP solution.
Pierre Namroud, CEO, and his team used to spend a lot of time building software. After each consultation with their clients, they would create a custom-designed solution that addressed the client’s specific challenge. Next client, next solution. And so on.
The main reason Mr. Namroud was able to offer every client an individual solution was due to his use of a code-free metadata-based application development platform in which the difficult connectivity is done behind the scenes.
After 12 years of offering customized solutions, Mr. Namroud started to see customization requests repeating themselves, simply in different combinations. In addition, an increasing number of his clients were moving parts of their operations to the cloud in a quest to reduce costs. Mr. Namroud did not want his product to be a casualty of this evolution, so he started to look for solutions that would allow him to quickly and easily create a single product offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) option for existing and new clients.
Fortunately, the solution was right in front of him – the application platform he’d been using to develop his custom-built solutions had also evolved to support the SaaS model.
“We’re a small business. Because our platform vendor continuously enhances its capabilities to meet the needs of partners like us, it was very easy for us to merge every version and feature set together into a single product. Not only was the merging critical, but it gave us the capability to deploy the same code to a cloud-based product. That was the big challenge – and the big ‘Wow!’”
“Now we have a complete and comprehensive ERP system. Our clients can choose to run it on-premise or in the cloud under the SaaS model. By creating a SaaS option, we eliminated the need for hardware investment by our customers,” Mr. Namroud said. “They pay per use and don’t have to keep investing in any architecture, infrastructure, or servers. This would not have been possible without our application development platform vendor who has the vision and the follow through to make their product truly future-proof.”
Namtek’s ERP wizard 2.0 includes accounting, AR, AP, general ledger, financial statements, report writing, sales, sales and distribution cycle forecasting. It also includes built-in collaboration tools including email notifications, reminders, memos, attachment and scheduling capabilities to make it as useful as possible and employs an easy-to-use graphic user interface with “Windows-like” screens for ease of use and adoption.
Another of NAMTEK’s unique solutions is an electronic data interchange (EDI) module, which allows manufacturers to easily send, receive, and process orders between their companies and major retailers, such as Wal-Mart. The EDI solution leverages the application platform vendor’s integration platform, running on the same technology stack with certified adapters to leading enterprise systems to automate EDI messaging by connecting SAP, Oracle and other ERP systems directly to NAMTEK’s solution. The EDI code is transformed via XML to enable Namtek users to understand what they see on the screen and empower manufacturers to save significantly by no longer having to employ and pay special providers for this service.
Mobility is NAMTEK’s next step.
“We already have mobile apps based on the Windows platform. We’re deciding which business processes to mobilize to further enhance our clients’ business operations and profitability and doing some proof of concepts to move to iOS/Android platforms. We’re certainly going to stick with the same vendor for our mobility offerings. Their application platform was advanced technology at the time we started with them all those many years ago, and it’s evolved to meet our market and client needs today, by growing into an end-to-end multi-channel enterprise mobility solution,” concluded Mr. Namroud.
By combining its cloud-based solution and the vast possibilities brought by enhancing its clients’ experiences with enterprise mobility, NAMTEK continues to guide its clients toward ongoing improvement of their business operations.
By Glenn Johnson, Senior President at Magic Software Enterprises
