Vault with INFOR Visual ERP.

[Lance127]

I was wondering if anyone uses these products together and if so do they share data back and forth.

[Anonymous]

We have visual as well and are in the process of figuring out the samething.

[Lance127]

I contact Visual directly and got a response that they were looking into it. Other than that I haven't found anything.

[Greatwhitenorth]

Did you ever get an answer on this?

TIA

[Ktomberlin]

Has anyone found out any information on the communication of Vault Pro to Info Visual? Has anyone done any API work to have Vault Pro push/pull data to Infor Visual? Thanks

[ryan]

Can it be done? Absolutely

Does anything exist out of the box ready-to-go?  Not that I am aware of and very unlikely (this is because integration requirements can vary greatly)

The Vault API is very feature-rich, I can say that confidently as we have built many customer-specifics toolsets.   Infor advertises an "API Toolkit"; however, the documentation is not public that I'm aware of, or at least, not that I can find but the brief description from their website sounds promising.  My guess then is that the SDK is only available after you have bought the product.  I've had a couple customers in years gone by ask about integration with Visual Manufacturing but its never gotten past the preliminary discussion so I can't speak at all to the documentation or capabilities of their developer toolkits.  This would be something to ask your Infor rep about.

Speaking generally, when customers want to integrate with ERP, they are *usually* wanting to send the BOM to ERP.   This can definately be done, both as an ad-hoc (manual click of a button), or preferablly, by having it happen "behind-the-scenes" using the Event-based API functionality of Vault (e.g. On "Release" automatically send the BOM).  The other aspect of integration is to provide real-time visiblity to ERP from within either Inventor or Vault through custom interfaces (for example, by clicking a component in vault you can see the current quanity in stock by real-time query of ERP or you may be creating your Inventor model and want to source property information from your ERP [the powerGate demo shows this]).

At the end of the day, "integration" is almost certainly a custom programming job; either completely developed from scratch or using a 3rd party middleware like powerGate or Jitterbit.  Vault Pro customers can sometimes be misled by the marketing documentation which implies an out-of-the-box integration tool - this is simply *not* the case.  It means that with Vault Pro, you have the same concept of Item records that you have in ERP and an enhanced API, but you still have to build what you need.   

[Ktomberlin]

Thank you for your reply. We are currently moving forward with an Inventor add-in purchase, but are also looking at the advantages of a direct vault connection as well.

[ryan]

Without knowing the specifics of the Inventor add-in, I would say the primary advantage you get from a vault integration is the ability to tie your integration to "events", specifically with regards to a release. Therefore, assuming you are utilizing workflow within vault, your integration can pass the BOM over to ERP as a background-function to your normal tasks of "release".

The other benefit of integration on the vault side is that if you are utilizing Item Master functionality, your BOM can now reflect more of a Manufacturing BOM vs. a purely Engineering BOM like you have in Inventor.

Ryan Small, Technical Specialist
1.877.438.2231 x110
2300 Steeles Ave West, Suite 240, Vaughan, ON L4K 5X6
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