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Sage 200 Manufacturing- withdrawal of support

We have been advised today 4/11/2020 that you are withdrawing Sage 200 Manufacturing as of 1/11/2020 from sale and that it will no longer be supported from next year or later, depending on which version is in place. Instead we can migrate to Sicon Manufacturing  for a fee, albeit less 20% if we do it soon.

We are a manufacturing business and migrated from Sage 50 Accounts & Manufacturing to Sage 200c in 2019 because we were sold the idea that Sage 200c is an all in one package that is future proof, and obviously because it was very similar to Sage 50 (!) and that everything would migrate across seamlessly (!!).

Why do you appear to be abandoning Manufacturing as a supported service?

How reliable will the Sicon add-on be and will it genuinely seamlessly integrate with the core module or will we end up with a re-run of the clunky Sage 50 Manufacturing module that you also abandoned support on?

Why does Sage have to rely on bought in add-ons to make their core software better or indeed useable, in this case for manufacturing businesses?

Should we be looking to move to a non-Sage platform?   

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  • Hi Martin. I don't doubt that Sicon Manufacturing will be a good product, we have various Sicon products already to augment our Sage platform. We have no choice anyway unless it's to ditch Sage and find something else. It just would be nice to have an answer from Sage directly as to where their software development is going. You buy a core product like Manufacturing 200 expecting it to be supported going forward but instead it seems you have to buy add-ons at additional cost to make the core product useable. To revert to a cliché, you can have the car body when you buy from the main dealer but the wheels and engine are an extra add-on from somewhere else! We didn't go down the bespoke route but by the time we have finished with the add-ons the cost will be the same anyway except that you now introduce compatibility issues if each add-on  supplier does not maintain the updates consistently. GB does still make things in some quantity, much of it by small business like ours- or is Sage not bothered?

Comment
  • Hi Martin. I don't doubt that Sicon Manufacturing will be a good product, we have various Sicon products already to augment our Sage platform. We have no choice anyway unless it's to ditch Sage and find something else. It just would be nice to have an answer from Sage directly as to where their software development is going. You buy a core product like Manufacturing 200 expecting it to be supported going forward but instead it seems you have to buy add-ons at additional cost to make the core product useable. To revert to a cliché, you can have the car body when you buy from the main dealer but the wheels and engine are an extra add-on from somewhere else! We didn't go down the bespoke route but by the time we have finished with the add-ons the cost will be the same anyway except that you now introduce compatibility issues if each add-on  supplier does not maintain the updates consistently. GB does still make things in some quantity, much of it by small business like ours- or is Sage not bothered?

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