Jitterbit Vinyl Reviews

We use VINYL for more purposes than I can count. If I were to distill it down to our guiding principles, Vinyl is utilized to fill in our gaps, whether it be from processes, systems, integration, or governance.

It has allowed us to implement processes and governance where we previously had none. It also has allowed us to peel away from large, enterprise products that dictate specific ways of doing things; ways that might not match the business need/process in place.

VINYL's flexibility: We have been able to leverage the platform to rapidly build custom solutions, and tailor-make them to our needs. To date, the speed of app creation and extensibility of the product have allowed us to solve critical business problems in a timely manner.

From a front-end perspective, the apps which we have built are intuitive to use.

The ease of use for individuals to self-serve could be improved. The solution is no-code, but there is still a decent learning curve associated with the product and some app design principles necessary before people can self-serve.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

The cloud nature of the application and the licensing model have allowed us to role out new apps to an increasing number of users without any issues.

The support is quite good through the professional services.

While this tool was in-house before I started, but a typical application build takes a matter of weeks. 

Our company uses agile methodologies to quickly prototype, build, test, and deploy our solutions.

We have been leveraging Zudy Professional Services, which consistently delivers above expectations.

I was not involved in the pricing and licensing.

We use it quite extensively within the teams that I support. There are already initiatives underway to expand to additional business units/domains.

The product can do almost whatever you need it to do. However, the "how" to do this can be challenging. Leveraging Zudy Professional Services has allowed us to get more bang for our buck using this product.

Our primary use case is for accessing data from a database.

It makes things more modular. We're able to get information from our data that we were not able to before. We can get the data faster and aggregate more easily ways and in more visible ways.

All the features are pretty valuable. One that stands out is the cross-platform integration, which helps us access the data we need to see.

It's pretty easy to learn. Sometimes the terminology can be a little tricky to get around, but it's just queries with no code so once you get the hang of it, it's pretty simple. It's extremely easy to use in getting into the IDE and then back down to your applications, and getting from your applications to your pages, and navigating through all your tables. That's very simple and pretty intuitive.

They have business objects which are essentially queries or tables. To learn the structure of their software is a little tricky at first. You have tables and sitting on top of them you have data objects which are required in order to use your application which sits on top of them. To understand how those flow between each other, and the terminology that's used between them, can be difficult.

It took about a month to get everything straight in my head. You could probably do it faster. What took so long was having not having an application to develop. If you don't have an application to develop and play with, you don't really know what you're playing with. If you had an app to make, that time could be cut to three weeks.

Also, when you are trying to delete certain columns or delete or drop tables, sometimes it will throw an error and it will force you to hunt down every location where those things are being referenced. You have to delete them from the very end and work your way backward. That can get frustrating. It would be easier, when you're deleting that table, if it would concatenate all the way down. I know that's almost an industry standard when you're dealing with tables, but it could be better.

At times, when you're in an application, and you use a "back" arrow, it's limited in what it can do. I know you can have certain pages sent back to other pages, but sometimes to set all that up is a little annoying. I'm not exactly sure how I would improve that, but you can get lost once you start clicking through tabs. You end up backing up through the same pages, back and forth, and it can be frustrating.

There are a lot of almost "hidden" features captured in these Edge Case settings. That's an example of the terminology being a little bit tricky. In those settings might be exactly what you need, but the terminology that they use is not very clear. If you want a scroll bar at the bottom, instead of having it select rows to show, you have to select Disable Panel Location Service, which doesn't sound at all like what it's supposed to do. It's little things like that. Naming conventions could be changed a little bit.

It's pretty stable. It just sits on top of your stuff and it does a good job of maintaining the connection between the two. I've never had an issue where it breaks or the connection is lost for some reason. When you're working between two different systems it's tricky but that's not really a VINYL issue, it's just hard to get two machines to talk to each other sometimes.

It's pretty scalable. We're using it across a lot of different departments and it's pretty easy to throw up a new app and start working. When we add data in it very easily handles that, and we have some very large tables. It does a good job of getting information from those tables and using the information. There have been a couple of times when it timed-out but that has mostly been due to the fact that there is so much data in there. I wouldn't expect any query to be able to handle it very quickly.

Zudy's technical support staff are great. I ask them questions all the time and they are very responsive and thorough. In most cases, they get back to us in a couple of hours, if that. It depends on how busy they are and on the question. Sometimes there are questions that require more research or maybe a phone call, rather than email. Those take longer to hash out, but they're very responsive.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but to my understanding, it took a little bit to get started. Once they got the ball rolling, it was pretty quick. It was just a matter of trying to connect to our many databases and get them set up in a way that's usable, because there are a lot of edge cases on our end. But once you developed those it was super-easy to do the rest from there.

I haven't gone, but I know that Zudy offers free training in Boston for this solution, which I think is excellent. Maybe that's just part of their way of getting their name out there. I am planning to go in the future. I imagine it's a great resource as well, on top of the manuals or the tech support or the "how to's" that they provide.

There wasn't a third-party consultant involved. Someone from Zudy was directly involved in helping us set up.

There is definitely ROI. It allows us higher visibility into our data, which allows us to data-check faster, and validate data that we had not been able to validate, prior. It has definitely saved us money. On a day-to-day level, people are able to do their work more efficiently and that's going to save them time, which is going to save money.

We did not evaluate other options for the purposes we intend to use VINYL for. 

Initially, make sure you have a good structure for your database. It's not necessary, but it makes the integration a little easier. Once you have that, the best way to learn is just to play with it. Build a simple app. Work on building your tables. It's good to have a goal in mind. You focus on making that app, a very simple one, but one that is also working well. Once you get that working, within a couple of weeks you'll be a pro and you can be running through apps and developing on some level.

Beyond that, it's just fine-tuning those skills and learning what other features VINYL offers.

We have five people using it. Only I am really developing on it. Perhaps there's one other person developing on it. The goal is to have the majority of people using it in some capacity to replace all of their miscellaneous spreadsheets and to replace a lot of the interfaces that they're using. We want to make everything more consistent and centralized around one application that everyone can use.

In terms of maintenance, it takes two or three people: one on their end to make sure they're okay if something happens; one on our end to make sure our systems are okay, and one person to develop. There isn't much day-to-day maintenance.

I don't really have much to compare it to. This is the first time I've used a no-code solution like this. But in my experience, I'd say it's a nine out of ten. It doesn't get a ten because there are some features that seem to be "hidden" behind the terminology. The more you play with it you learn it but sometimes those features are not very up-front. It's not until you dig through the user manual that you get to understand what those features are about.

We use VINYL when none of our other systems solves the business need that's being asked for. We've used it for a lot of different things. We've got an event management application, we have a compliance tracker, previously we used it for a work-request application. We use it for custom-reporting, and we've also been using it as a way to bring together a couple different systems which we call our "Customer 360," where we can go and get an idea of a customer and all their related entities.

Since we're still primarily on an AS/400-based system, any client-facing output has some limitations using output from that system. What has been a great process-improvement and improvement in business communications - giving us really good client-facing communication - is having our Zudy applications take information from our AS/400, consume that information, and make it look nice. It turns it into something that we're happy to send out to our customers, something that's a lot more contemporary. It enables us to use a little bit more graphic design and it looks new and fresh.

One of the troubles we have sometimes is the amount of data we're processing within the applications. That can really add a lot of "laggy-ness." That's an ongoing struggle we're going to have while we use it. It doesn't happen for all our applications, only some of them that are heavy on the reporting. 

And where we can get a more contemporary client-facing output and PDF version, it's still somewhat limited as to what we can do with those templates.

We don't really have any crashes, so that's always good. You can get an error if you're trying to do too much at once, before the system can catch up. That's understandable. 

If we do find anything that turns out to be a real error, it's super-quick to go in and figure out what the error is. You make a pretty simple change to correct it. The different layers within the platform for each application are pretty linear. You've got the same three layers: the cosmetic layer, the business-rules, and your data layer. It's always going to be somewhere in one of those layers that you find the issue or figure out where you need to make a change. You're not having to really go anywhere else to do that. It's pretty centralized.

The greater the amount of data we're trying to use, the more bogged down the applications will get. It does reach a point where it's very noticeable how slow the application is moving because of the amount of data it's trying to use.

For example, sometimes it can be five minutes to refresh an application that's only producing some 75 PDFs. That seems a little slow. We've got another application that's producing about 230 reports - they're all pretty similar - and that can take upwards of ten to 15 minutes to process. One of the reports we have to access, it's our own fault that it takes so long to process because we've got so many data fields that we're aggregating together. But in general, the more data you're working with the slower it goes.

We haven't really needed tech support. Because the maintenance is so small, when something goes wrong we've got our contracted developers who usually jump on it right away. They can find and fix the problem that same day.

I wasn't part of the initial setup so I'm not sure what steps it took to get there but I think the complexity of the setup depends on what you're using it for. We've got a lot of different data sources coming together from a lot of places, so I imagine that getting that all together was a notable effort. We definitely had to work through permissions, allowing access on our server, allowing access on their server. There is a good amount of setup. I don't know how long it took.

It was us with Zudy handling implementation of the platform.

Definitely make sure that internal staff learn how applications are built. Zudy does provide free training and I highly recommend it so that you can bring all development back in-house, be a little bit more self-sufficient with it and not reliant on Zudy. From the very beginning, learn the platform as much as possible and learn from Zudy developers that you work with.

The entire time we've had VINYL, we've had Zudy developers contracted to our company, so it's actually Zudy employees who have been doing the development. I've never actually built one of our own solutions but I did attend a Zudy training session to learn how to build solutions. Our applications are so much more advanced than what we covered in the training but I can see how it all fits together. It's like breaking apart coding and development into an ultra-configuration tool.

I wouldn't say that it's relatively simple. You do have to have a developer mindset about bringing all the pieces together. I wouldn't say someone brand new could be given this tool and build an application. You do have to have some understanding of how the different layers in the VINYL platform work together. And even then, there are just so many more advanced features that you can use that really get into how we're using it. As far as anything really basic goes, even then you would need some level of training to be able to use the tool.

In terms of how many users are currently using VINYL in our organization, most of our applications have been targeted to very niche users. Originally, it probably wasn't more than 50 or so, but we've been working on soft-releases and rollout of one of our other applications for that "Customer 360" view and, eventually, the entire company will have access to that. We have close to 400 employees.

We're an insurance company so the roles of the VINYL users are anything and everything. For our event management, there's an underwriting tool and that's used in agency relations. We've got another tool used by underwriting. That department has been the primary user. We've got an application that simplifies calculations of insurance premiums for very very specific policy types. Our underwriting compliance team use it to track their filings. We have a deductible-billing application, which is one of the ones that is consuming information and putting it into a new, modern output. That's used by our finance department. There's another agency relations application we use that tracks progress of our top agents and it tracks extra commission that we can provide to those agents. And the "Customer 360" can be used by any department, mainly our underwriting and claims departments. It really is flexible.

Maintenance is very minimal. With our live production applications, they just don't break, which is great. We love that. There's zero-to-little maintenance required.

We've got quite a few applications in production now and we've got more in development. There are a few more on the list to go into development. We've still got a sizable backlog to work through.

Overall I would rate it a seven out of ten. I love how customizable it is, how easy it is, how fast it can be. The downside is that scalability and the troubles dealing with large data sets.

I'm a back-end database developer. Our primary work is data migration. We're running between ten and 15 applications through VINYL.

Up until now we have had only certain functions supported across different databases, some 50 to 60 functions. We needed an option to create new functions. VINYL is helping us to add additional logic. It's making our work simpler at times.

VINYL works across different data sources. It is very useful to be able to map the data across different data sources and different environments. It is also very easy to develop small applications within a short span of time.

In addition, it is easy to use. It took about a week for me to analyze how VINYL performs on different applications, how the logic is written inside. Its backend is .NET.

Version 2.3 has a good UI but we want a more customizable UI. 

It has given us good performance handling APIs, handling different data sources, handling different file structures, and handling email servers. The performance depends on our servers but it's quite good.

Scalability is on the database side, so it's not a problem.

Tech support comes back to us with good ideas. Their suggestions, at times, are very helpful for us in making decisions because they have been working at Zudy for a long time. Sometimes their views are different and that is very helpful. They communicate very well with us and that is keeping us on track regarding the timeline in which we want to achieve things. We're getting good initiative from them also.

We did not have a previous solution. We were in need of a good rapid application development software which could easily be handled by two or three people in terms of maintenance. We wanted something that is easy to understand. And we also went with VINYL because it is really user-friendly.

The initial setup is okay. But we needed Zudy staff to guide us on the first setup we did. We communicate with them to help stand up servers on our side, new servers like sandboxes and the like. In such cases, we will generally get help from the Zudy team. 

Overall, the setup is 50-50, complex and straightforward. The deployment took about four hours. Implementation of VINYL depends on domain. 

The pricing is moderate. It's okay.

A full-stack developer can easily understand VINYL because it covers almost all areas of development. We can develop our own code and push it inside VINYL. If a database developer goes into VINYL, he's used to a different set of rules, a different set of charts, etc. So that is different. This tool is particularly suited for a full-stack developer.

We have some 1,000 users of VINYL. The deployment took just one person within our company. Two people are enough for maintenance of the solution. For us, it is maintained by our solution architect and senior solution architect.

Our future plan is to enhance more applications inside VINYL. The current applications that we are taking care of have some bugs that we're looking into, to make sure everything looks good. VINYL is helping to implement the process quickly.

I would rate VINYL at seven out of ten. We still need some more improvements inside, as I mentioned, such as the UI. In coming versions, I'm sure this product will rock. It's continuing to develop and mature.

We are using it for headcount, some dashboarding, and centralized reporting for various departments.

In one group, we created an application which helps provide insight into profitability per salesperson. For each of their orders/customers, where is the best profitability? Where are the low margins? This has been transformative.

It is flexible and versatile. You can connect to multiple data sources or databases concurrently, which is very useful. You don't have to extract and load or build a data warehouse, if you don't want to. You can attach to databases live and pull data live wherever it is. It can be in the cloud, on-premise, or on a subsidiary's premise. You can get at them all. You're not just stuck with doing redundant copies of data.

We find it is easy to learn and use, and the user interface is easy to pick up. We have trained some of our own people to be able to do apps with VINYL. Therefore, we can turn things around quickly.

Once or twice, when a new version of VINYL comes out, it has had a negative impact on a feature. However, we do everything in a test environment. Unless we miss something in test, we don't go live with it if it isn't perfect. Zudy hasn't had too many stumbles along the way, but there have been a couple times, and it's been minor.

I haven't seen any limitations to the scalability, and we have demanded a lot.

Everyone at my current location has access to the product via the Intranet, about a few hundred people.

We find the team members who work with us from Zudy catch on to business issues and processes quickly. They make good suggestions and are excellent listeners, which distinguishes them from more than 90 percent of the rest of the consultants and service providers out there. These people listen and do what you ask them to do. It's truly a distinguishing characteristic.

I was looking for a tool with which I could easy build dashboards from multiple sources which didn't necessarily go together. It didn't make sense to build a single data warehouse out of information which was quite disparate. So, I found a viable solution in VINYL.

The initial setup was straightforward.

The implementation team was a combination of Zudy's and our technical teams.

I have two Zudy staff full-time onsite for deployment and maintenance, plus my own team.

Pricing and licensing are expensive.

I did evaluate other competitors.

Consider Zudy, at least when you are getting started, because their people listen and deliver what you ask them to do.

We love the tool. I like it enough to introduce it to another division of the company. 

They have added some security features at our specific request. We are told that other customers are very receptive to those security features.

We have had minimal problems with the product and a high degree of success with their consultants, service providers, and technical support people. In addition, the success that we have experienced with recommendations that we've suggested to improve the product. They are easy and fantastic to do business with. They don't have to be micromanaged.

We are using it for workflow management and transportation.

The most valuable features are its flexibility and rapid development. We need to be able to find stuff quickly and produce solutions to our users. We are a quickly changing, rapidly integrating company. Therefore, this solution allows us to keep pushing forward and ensures our continuous improvement.

On the development side, we would like to see continued improvement on the visibility of the subqueries, as we are building applications. E.g., I would like to have more visualization in the back-end of the data objects and how they are interrelated.

The interface has had a lot of changes to it. It is better than it was before. However, with the subqueries in particular, this has been the most difficult part of the interface.

I would like them to build out more tools for communication, particularly the ability to do a multinode panel via email.

We have had no performance issues with it.

It is very scalable from its licensing to design. We have not had any performance issues when scaling.

I do think we may need to consider using a different server, but I don't think that is anything against Zudy.

We have not had to use their technical support. 

We have spoken with their consultants and developers though, who have been responsive and know what they are doing. Early on, we requested things to be added to the firmware, and it was added in a week or two.

They have some online training material. They have courses that they do in person. They also make stuff available online. I have had some white papers provided to me by the consultants, which were understandable and clear.

It mostly replaced Excel, Access, and emails. Access 365 was not doing as much as it had in previous versions.

Our CEO had a relationship with someone at Zudy, so we tested the product and saw it as an early opportunity. It fit with our requirements and we were trying to move on from Microsoft Access.

The initial setup was straightforward. The data connections simply pull in data, and it took five minutes to start building an app.

It's easy to understand the basics and learn from other examples. However, it takes a bit of experience to know everything that it's capable of doing.

It was a slow roll out. VINYL was the cause of it.

We have probably been using it in production for a year, but have had no issues in product. 

We have seen a 30 percent decrease in time for some of our workflows.

As far as connectivity and ease of use, nobody else was doing anything better.

We're a tour company and we have a schedule of several hundred tour managers who are managing all the tours that we operate. All of their schedules for the year are put in here. We also manage all of their quality surveys. We ask for quality surveys and we get those back. They're not stored here, but they're reported out here. We also manage any guest comments in here. And the big one is reconciling all the tour funds. That's not active yet, but it's being tested right now, and that will go active and live in November. So, there's a lot that's happening with this.

To me, the most important piece is going to be the funding, the reconciliation, because right now it's a very manual process, and this will automate it. It's going to make it a lot more streamlined. It's going to be a lot quicker for people to process it and, therefore, get money back. It's efficient and I like that. They'll be able to just take a snapshot of the receipt and upload it into the system, and then it just all gets submitted. It's cleaner and it will be a lot smoother process.

Zudy has created a platform that will make us much more efficient, with everything in one place. It's a much better way of reporting out. It leaves less room for any human error. I think it will be great. The piece that I'm talking about, specifically, is the funding reconciliation, but in general, all of the other things that they've done so far have been super helpful.

The way that they've done some of the reports, they've created really great data dumps. If I want to see a snapshot of something for a given timeframe, I can download it. From that download, I can create further analysis or do my own thing with it, which is really helpful. I'm even able to go back several years and get data. So when I'm doing a comparison of year over year, I am able to do it just from what they have done, what they have created for us.

In terms of it being easy to learn, it's logical so it makes sense of things. The steps are pretty logical and the display is very user-friendly. A "pencil" means "write," i.e. that you are able to write. So it's clear. It's not ambiguous, what you can and what you can't do on it. 

In the beginning, we were working with it while it was still being tweaked. So sometimes things weren't working 100 percent, or they were working but, because they were being tested behind the scenes, some things were kind of funky. But, just a quick email to them saying, "Is this correct?" would usually have a really logical answer, and then it would be fixed.

It's pretty much a stable product. I haven't seen many issues with it. I do know that there have been some smaller issues with some new people that are also starting to work on it, and their name being in the system, but I haven't been involved in that part of it.

So far, so good. I haven't seen anything that it hasn't been able to handle, but the real test will happen in November when we have several hundred people on it, adding their funds and trying to process or submit their funds.

I can tell you that I really appreciate Martin and Grant, the two guys who have been helping us in developing this. They have been really outstanding. You ask for something, you ask for a specific design, that you want to see something, and they get it. They just give you what you need. It's been really great. It's been a great pleasure working with them.

Whenever I have a request such as, "It would be great to have this," I've been able to send an email to Martin. He has come back and said, "Yeah, we could do that." And, he just does it. There's really not much room for improvement for me, because I feel that is great: To be able to ask for something, and then he immediately just gets it to us. That's been quite helpful.

Their overall support is a ten out of ten. They have been very supportive. If you ask them for something, and they're able to deliver, they do. And if they can't deliver, they just are straightforward and tell you that they can't do that.

I came into the project after it had already started, so I only got, if not end result, the "first draft." It was pretty clear. There were some things that we suggested be changed and they were super helpful about that.

Have meetings with the developers, and make sure that you're clear on exactly what you need before you start to have them develop it. Be really clear.

I would give VINYL an eight out of ten, and I would say that it's great. The eight is because it's pretty user-friendly, it's clean, and it's reliable. I don't know if there are other things out there that are better than this, but for what we have needed so far, based on what I've seen so far, this is pretty helpful.

We use it mainly for financial reporting. It helps us see our net margins in detail, net margin by customer, by category. It allows us to see our sales in more detail, and same-day versus a couple weeks after month-end closes, for example. But we mainly use it for financial purposes.

It has been very beneficial. We have quite a few people using it who would always rely on the finance team to merge Excel spreadsheets, merge data from multiple sources, and then provide a final report to them for whatever turnaround period was required. But now they're able to just go to the website and see what they need right away. If it's data they want to download instead of just seeing it in a final report, they can do that.

Overall, "numbers on demand" has been a really big change for us. VINYL has been able to pull information from a couple of sources, and stuff that would end up just being in giant Excel spreadsheets otherwise, we're able to have it available immediately.

It's also helped the accounting department, specifically, for our month-ends. We still have to validate all our numbers manually, but we compare our numbers now to VINYL and make sure all our manual calculations are in line with VINYL. It's helped with a lot of troubleshooting.

It has made us clean up our data too, to make sure VINYL can read it. We have to make sure we're consistent with how we input our data and categorize everything. We've been able to really expand our reporting and see net margins in so many more ways than we were able to before.

In addition, we've been using a distributor that will send us just giant spreadsheets weekly, of all the data, of all the sales, item by item. The biggest value for us has been the ability for VINYL to do massive revenue recognition for us, every day. That's been the biggest advantage for us, being able to pull this data in every day. Previously, this was something we were only doing at the end of every month.

It's customizable to whatever you might use it for, so I don't know about specific features. It's specific to our needs. But I've gone in and I've learned it myself a little bit, with their help. I've gone to some of the Zudy training for VINYL.

As far as features go, it's the ability for me to go in and see what's going on when I need to. And to be able to start to do some back-end programming of it myself. That's been nice too.

It's very user-friendly, and the front-end is exactly what we need to see, very simple. It can get more complicated too, if those are the needs.

I would love to have the home screen a little more customizable because, as we're building more and more reports, it would be nice to have more options in how they're organized on the screen.

I'm not sure if this is something they could do, but if we had it more customizable for different departments - if sales saw it one way, whereas finance had something different than sales - that would be helpful. We also have a few companies within Elite Group that are using it so more customization could be nice.

It's never been down. The only time we've had issues is if we change something, and then it messes something up in the back-end. But that's always been our fault. Generally, VINYL has really helped us to find our own user errors. We've found more of our own problems than we've ever found with VINYL.

We have three years of data in there. It has handled it well. All our limitations, as far as data is concerned, have been related to the file size. We export things from VINYL into Excel and Excel has a maximum. We can't go over 500,000 lines. I don't think any of our scalability issues have stemmed from VINYL itself.

We keep adding companies to it, and that's been no problem but we're not a huge company. We haven't had any problems with scalability. It's not a problem to add users. It's really quick. That's never caused a problem.

I deal with a lot of people at VINYL. We have our consultants, a couple guys at VINYL, and we talk once a week. If there are any issues I go directly to them. There's also a trainer I've been in contact with when it was less specific to our use of VINYL and just a general VINYL question. 

Everyone has been extremely helpful and friendly. We've never had a problem with them fixing what needs to be fixed. They know what's priority. They know our Friday management report is the most important thing for us and, whatever we do - any changes we make to VINYL - we have to make sure the Friday management report goes out smoothly and as expected.

Before VINYL, it was very manual for us. Zudy is the first tool where we really tried to bring together these two data sources. We went to Zudy VINYL to merge Accpac and our distributor data. It was the first tool we really found. We needed something that could be extremely customizable.

I was involved in getting it to go live. We had a lot of logic to build into it, and that's when I was brought on, to find ways to work with them, to figure out how to go from what's in our system to what the actual correct numbers should be.

It was easy to learn to use. What they present is final. You don't have that many ways to use it. It's not like a major ERP system where you have all these options, all these different menus that you can go through. What's presented on the screen is a report. For me, it's pretty intuitive if I want to change the date range, if I want to change what customer I'm looking at. I don't think anyone else has mentioned to me not finding it intuitive or finding issues with the navigation. It's a pretty straightforward tool, so I find it quite easy to work with.

It's valuable for all of us, in terms of our time. It has saved us time.

Discuss your needs with them, make sure they understand the end goal. Then they can customize it to your needs. With us, we kept changing what we wanted, how to use it, so we had to keep going back to the drawing board. But they're extremely willing to find a way to make what you want, as long as they know what you want.

There is some patience required in getting it set up because it's different for everyone. Everyone uses it differently, so you do have to be patient with the initial setup process. When I was brought on it was because we had to find a way to go from our system, take our numbers, and figure out what it was we wanted to see on the screen, and how we could get them from our system into VINYL. We don't really do inventory the normal way with our company, so we had to find a way to get inventory displayed through VINYL.

Be patient and communicate, explain what your needs are, and figure out where the data come from in your system to be able to project it into VINYL. The way we use it is so heavy on finance. We need our numbers to be precise. Everything comes down to precision and numbers for us. We're able to get that and it's helped us for sure.

I really like VINYL. I would rate it a nine out of ten. I see the advantage of it and I also see so many ways we could use it more here. I want to keep pushing for us to use it in more ways because I can see how it can be so beneficial if we start pulling in other systems.

The fun part is, the messier it feels for us, the more excited they sound at wanting to solve the problem.