Putting sizzle into the Rootstock ERP suite

Rootstock is a native-cloud ERP solution that’s built on the Salesforce platform. Rootstock has a fairly complete product set and is frequently sold to mid-market discrete, repetitive and other manufacturing software buyers. 

The company recently announced five new BI/Analytic/Dashboard tools called Enterprise Insights. These tools focus on:

• Sales Analytics
• Spend Analytics 
• Inventory Analytics
• Financial Analytics
• Manufacturing Analytics

These toolsets are designed to be ‘immediately consumable’ dashboard solutions. Customers will get these dashboards with pre-supplied KPIs, metrics and integration with the Rootstock applications. 

According to Rootstock:

 Rootstock Enterprise Insights delivers a powerful analytics solution for your team of functional managers and executives to visualize organization-specific KPIs and perform ad hoc analysis leading to more data-driven decision-making. The highly interactive dashboard experience includes customizable, slice-and-dice, and drill-down capabilities to navigate large datasets and glean deep insights into your business operations.

Existing Rootstock customers may have spreadsheets, custom BI environments or use third-party tools (e.g., Microsoft Power BI or Tableau). Some of these customers will likely keep those solutions or migrate to the new Rootstock solutions over time. Existing customers might find the new solutions, with all of the pre-supplied KPIs and integrations, to be a better long-term solution as it should require little maintenance and is not dependent on a technical team to keep things current. And, most importantly, existing customers that are utilizing spreadsheets will find these analytic tools to be a form factor improvement. 

I asked a Rootstock executive as to whether these tools can accept non-Rootstock data. It can. According to Rootstock:

Enterprise Insights is built on the Rootstock data foundation, which enables it to connect to products like Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, and Service Cloud. Enterprise Insights can then consolidate data from ERP, CRM, and other connected solutions. This analytics solution extracts and presents this data to provide a big-picture overview of a manufacturer’s business—as well as the ability to look at data from various organizational perspectives and in relation to other metrics.

Longer-term, it appears that Rootstock is creating a data platform that will continue exploit Salesforce’s base technology and Salesforce’s hyperscaler cloud computing resources. That data platform should be able to support other manufacturing functionality over next few years in areas like IoT analytics and ESG reporting.

Rootstock’s Stu Johnson intimated that today’s manufacturers are especially hungry for ‘signal’ data – data that suggests that some big macro events (e.g., economic shifts, changes in customer demand, global fuel price increases, etc.) are imminent. Dashboards that can highlight these potential game changing data points will be especially valuable. Rootstock may add an Enterprise Insights Dashboard in the near term.

Mid-market availability

Mid-market manufacturers (and other SMB software buyers) often have champagne tastes and beer budgets. It’s simply an economic and business reality of their world. They have much of the complexity of larger enterprises but less capital budget, IT resources, etc. 

Pre-populated tools like these appeal to this kind of buyer as they go in quick, come pre-configured and allow simple user tailoring. Adding to the appeal is that the tool is already tightly integrated with the Rootstock product line. It’s not just convenient, it is also something that takes little to nothing to implement and that’s a big buyer value for firms with low to no IT budget or headcount. 

For more on this announcement, see this YouTube video. 

Other announcements

The Rootstock ERP financial functionality is getting some upgrades. One of these enables manufacturers to craft multiple payment options for customers to help increase revenues. Some options might include support for all kinds of payments (e.g., cash, check, p-card, credit card, subscriptions, leases, etc.). 

Rootstock is also rolling out improvements in its UX via the Rootstock Lightning Toolkit. 

My take

These new tools put some sizzle in the Rootstock ERP suite. They potentially add a ton of value to the Rootstock users, too. The fact that these will simply snap-in and be immediately usable is also a big positive. In fact, it’s hard to find anything to grouse about with these enhancements.