The Sage Partner Summit is one of the most anticipated events on the Sage calendar. Sage hosts an annual gathering designed exclusively for global Sage partners to share innovative updates and intuitive solutions that tackle key customer issues and to give partners insight into Sage’s channel strategy and future roadmap.

This year’s summit took place between the 7th and 10th of June 2022 in Dallas, Texas, USA. After the impressive virtual Summit in 2021, the Inixion team was looking forward to witnessing some key advancements in the Sage X3 space.

As all Sage’s efforts are focused on customer satisfaction, they hope to build an ecosystem that thrives and benefits all the stakeholders. Based on the same thought, this year’s Summit is aimed at three main pillars: Build – Connect – Deliver.

Below are some key highlights from this year’s summit from our Inixion trio in attendance this year – Ian Bromley – Managing Director, Greg Hackney – Sales Director and David Spindler – Senior Consultant and Product Manager.

The three main pillars of the Sage Partner Summit, 2022 – ‘Build – Connect – Deliver’

The theme of this year’s Summit was Build – Connect – Deliver. That theme applied to both Sage’s relationship with its partners, as well as its vision for Sage X3 and therefore our customers.


Build

Build is all about promoting customer value. Sage recognises that it’s their partners who build close relationships with their customers. Empowering Sage Partners to build their business will enable them to deliver solutions that help customers grow their business.

Connect
Connect is about making the most of the summit to build new connections with peers and partners to draw insights.

The Inixion team was excited to connect with Sage experts to learn about the new features and technologies that are being built into Sage X3. These innovative features enable the Sage X3 ecosystem to grow and in turn, help us to offer our customers a range of complementary solutions that extend the functionality of Sage X3.

Inixion works with customers across all five continents, so connecting with partners around the world is invaluable for us to deliver a Sage X3 solution that works seamlessly for our customers both globally and locally. Also, being a Sage UK partner and a Sage USA Platinum partner, we took the opportunity to meet with both the Sage UK and Sage US teams to discuss strategy and direction.

Deliver

Deliver is all about strengthening customers and clients to build their businesses. To empower its partners, Sage is committed to delivering tools to enable partners to provide results to their customers, which includes a robust Sage X3 roadmap.

New branding for Sage

Sage recently launched their new brand through social media and TV ads. The rebrand goes hand in hand with a renewed focus on customers, as well as Sage’s vision:

“We build every experience with human insight and ingenuity; giving people building a business the confidence to flow.”

Sage X3 product updates

Sage Partner Summit EntranceAs Sage X3 specialists, we were delighted to see a renewed focus on strengthening and marketing the Sage X3 product in both the UK and USA.

‘Connection’ is a massive topic, as businesses nowadays do not opt for the ‘One Size Fits All’ system but want an ERP solution that will integrate with other business-critical systems and still use Sage X3 as a ‘single version of the truth’. To that end, integrations and extensibility have now been made so much easier through a new API along with improvements to the user interface. An example is a new suite of mobile automation applications which allow, for example, warehouse and manufacturing transactions to be performed from a handheld device running a chrome browser.

Another ‘Connect’ theme, or in this case more of a ‘Deploy’ theme, is that customers still have a choice of how to deploy the Sage X3 solution, from traditional on-premises, through to customer-hosted cloud or Sage Cloud. This allows customers to deploy Sage X3 in the most suitable way for them.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to improve corrective actions

Sage plans to start bringing the power of AI and ML into Sage X3. This will be manifested by checking for transactions that fall outside of the normal business process, whether that is mis-postings into the general ledger or purchases that exceed normal quantities or values. These exceptions can then be highlighted to the user who can then investigate and take corrective action.

Seamless upgrading will reduce the number of man-days of testing

Sage continues to strive to make the maintenance and upgradeability of Sage X3 as simple as possible. This includes the continued simplification of the upgrade packages, and the planned ability to generate customisations as “Delta” patches to be applied alongside the core. To assist with the upgrade process additional functionality is being added to the Automated Test Platform (ATP), allowing businesses to test their business logic on a patched system before releasing the patch to the production environment. This automated testing would greatly reduce the number of man-days of testing that users may have to perform and allows for consistent and repeatable testing.

Green manufacturing to minimise waste and encourage re-use

There was an emphasis on “green” manufacturing as well, aimed at encouraging system implementers to guide their customers through a process of re-use rather than encouraging waste. The term “Environmental Social Governance” (ESG) was introduced to be used as a method of quantifying a business’ green credentials. Plans are underway with the use of the digital network and blockchain technology to be able to give the end consumer visibility of the full supply chain of the product that they are buying.

To discuss what these updates mean for your organisation and to ensure you capitalise on the latest Sage X3 innovations, please speak to a member of our team.