Sage Manufacturing comprises a series of integrated modules aimed at small and medium size businesses, covering the following areas of functionality:

• Bill of Materials
• Estimating
• Planning - MPS and MRP
• Works Order Processing
• Graphical Planner

The product comes in two flavours – Sage 50 Manufacturing starting at £2250 (RRP) and Sage 200 Manufacturing from £5000 (RRP), integrating with Sage 50 Accounts Professional and Sage 200 Suite respectively.

From the user’s point of view, the programs look very similar – but there are some important functionality differences which are discussed later on these pages.

Broadly speaking, Sage 50 is aimed at businesses which have a turnover of up to £5m whilst Sage 200 targets companies turning over £1m to £20m. However, the decision of which manufacturing offering is suitable is likely to be less concerned with turnover and more about functionality – that is making sure the system will actually do what you want it to. That applies both to the manufacturing package and its related accounts program. There are many companies turning over more than £5m for whom Sage50 will be perfectly suitable, conversely there are lots of companies with revenue of less than £5m who need the higher level of functionality provided by S200. It sounds obvious, but so many companies fail to make a list of their basic requirements and check that the software they are considering fulfils those requirements. They assume that all manufacturing software is pretty much the same – it isn’t!

As well as functionality you should also take into account the number of concurrent users – that is the number of people who will need to be logged into the system at any one time. Unfortunately there are no fixed rules here – a lot will depend on the type of user. An order entry clerk or stock controller is likely to make much heavier use of the system than a Managing Director who just needs to make a few enquiries throughout the day. But they each count as a user. Of course ‘heavy’ users will have a much greater effect on performance than occasional users. Suffice to say that Sage 200 is much more scaleable. As a rule of thumb, Sage 200 allows up to 50 concurrent users, whilst in practical terms 10 users is the limit for Sage 50 – remember though that these are not hard and fast rules.

For a description of each of the modules please select from the options in the left sidebar.