ZAP
ZAP Outfitting Sage X3 with Cutting Edge Business Intelligence

ZAP originated as a consultancy, but the company quickly became known for its wide range of business intelligence solutions for a variety of platforms. One of their latest partnerships is to empower Sage, one of the largest ERP vendors in the world. Sage services many small to mid-size businesses in need of business process management software.

The collaboration sprung from a clear need to simplify and unify business intelligence solutions such that companies can draw together data collected from a variety of platforms and derive meaningful analysis from these data sets. The problem with how most companies pursue business intelligence, explained President and CEO of ZAP, Garth D. Laird, is that their solution is to “go out there and build it again and again. Hiring a team to build a software solution tailored to your company can take many months and is very costly and has no guarantee of any success”. What sets ZAP’s business intelligence solution apart is that they offer repeatable models that can be sold to a customer out of the box. In other words, businesses can skip the costly building process and use a safe, risk-free vendor supported solution for creating integrated analytical outcomes. As Laird explains, “Not only can ZAP integrates our product into Sage X3 (to be known as Sage Data Management and Analytics) , we can also offer customers the ability to integrate other data sources into our data models, this allowing the business to have insights like never before.

Their integration and collaboration with Sage is hugely beneficial to both companies and their respective markets, because it allows the use of a single platform to manage business functions, then collect, analyze, and present data through the platform. As Sage has older legacy ERP solutions still in use today, ZAP provides a way to integrate with them and migrate data over to the new platform at little risk to customers. This solution is ideal because reduces the risk and time it takes to move to a new ERP like Sage X3.

Not only do we integrate our product directly into Sage X3, we can also offer customers the ability to integrate other data sources into our data models so that they can enjoy a trusted analytical solution from their vendor and manage their entire business

A case that clearly illustrates their success involves a global customer who runs Sage X3 for two businesses on Oracle, two more businesses on SQL Server, another on Dynamics NAV, and a handful of other businesses with legacy ERPs. The challenge was getting data from all those companies to the parent company so that its management team could evaluate all the information across the business.

Rather than spend months or years even – on building a way to connect all these platforms, this client put ZAP’s solution in action through Sage X3. Five of their companies are already connected, and they’re getting a multitude of new data and insights.

As ZAP is rolled out globally to Sage X3 customers, Laird and his team are already looking toward future developments. In three to six months, they’re rolling out a hybrid-BI solution that will allow companies to keep ERPs on their premises, but do all their business information management on the cloud. It’s just one of many steps ZAP is taking to make data management easier, less risky, and more efficient. Additionally, they are building migration models to Sage legacy ERP’s that will benefit Sage customers immensely.