New Generation Software Updates Financial and BI Applications

by Alex Woodie

New Generation Software understands that some companies may want to process and store their financial data on an OS/400 server, but when working with the data and building reports from it, they'd prefer a point-and-click GUI interface. That's the purpose of the vendor's Concert Series Financial Software, which features updated Accounts Payable and Human Resources modules this fall. NGS also announced a new release of its second core product, the NGS-IQ business intelligence system.

First developed in 1972, NGS's Concert Series suite of financial software has certainly seen the test of time. The integrated suite of five modules--General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Payroll, and Human Resources--features a client/server architecture and uses OS/400 batch processing power on the back end and Windows interfaces on the front end. For non-PC shops, users have the option of deploying a Concert Series Java applet from an OS/400 server to provide the user interface.

Several weeks ago NGS announced new releases of the Accounts Payable and Human Resources modules of the Concert Series. The Accounts Payable module provides cash management and reporting functionality, while the Human Resources module provides employee history, benefit tracking, and related features. These modules, like the entire suite, can be deployed as stand-alone applications or as an integrated whole, along with the series core General Ledger component and its DB2/400-to-Excel data transport utility, ConcertPro.

When it ships this fall, the new Accounts Payable module will feature several enhancements, including full support for line-item entry on invoices. Other new features include improved use of product codes, automatic support of wire transfers, allowance for line-item adjustments, support of partial and full invoice payments, and tracking of physical location addresses, the company says.

With Human Resources 2.0, also due this fall, NGS has deepened the integration between Human Resources and the Payroll Concert Series modules, and promises a complete interface between the two products in the next release. Other enhancements in Human Resources 2.0 include the reorganization of menus, enhanced inquiry access, and reinforcement of consistency in decimal use and on-screen display terminology, the company says.

Human Resources 2.0 will also feature new prebuilt analytical reports for items such as applicant tracking and license renewal dates. NGS says it has created these reports using its NGS-IQ business intelligence system. Future releases of the Human Resources application will include even more reports, such as the notification of benefits letters, the company says.

Like its financial brethren, the NGS-IQ business intelligence system--a collection of seven applications for executing queries, building data marts and data warehouses, and performing online analytical processing (OLAP) of multidimensional databases--uses Windows, Web, and OS/400 components to simplify the user experience and to make the most of each platform's strengths.

With NGS-IQ 6.3, the vendor has enhanced the integration between iSeries data and Microsoft desktop applications. For example, this release lets Microsoft Office users create and update their Excel workbooks and sheets with direct query output from their DB2/400 data to specific name ranges in their Excel sheets, NGS says. This release also supports the creation of dynamic links between Excel output and other Windows applications. This could allow a company to do some pretty neat stuff, like automatically updating Power Point charts whenever a linked Excel spreadsheet is refreshed, the vendor says.

Customers are excited about the heightened integration between NGS-IQ and Excel, says NGS marketing communications manager Mary Lynn Treadwell. "Our beta site customers are enthusiastic with the enhanced Excel output," she says. "The ability to reuse the same formatted sheet to receive new data each time they run their report and to feed data from multiple queries into the same or different sheets in the same workbook is especially useful for financial reporting."

NGS has also expanded the number of formats in which NGS-IQ reports can be generated. With this release, reports can be generated in enhanced HTML format, providing support for banners, backgrounds, cascading style sheets, and drillable hyperlinks, which, NGS says, provides a superior presentation and easy navigation, from summary to detail.

New e-mail and FTP features in this release should also make it easy to generate and distribute reports in a variety of formats, including PDF, XML, HTML, TXT, and CSV. When generating an XML file, users now have the option of automatically generating an HTML table to support the presentation and sorting of their XML output over the Web, NGS says.

There are also new deployment options with NGS-IQ 6.3. The company has taken IBM's Developer's Roadmap to heart and has used IBM's WebFacing tool to let customers use WebSphere Application Server to serve NGS-IQ screens without requiring any interactive processing on the iSeries server. Alternatively, customers may choose the older Web deployment option, which used Seagull Software's JWalk rejuvenation technology. For more information, go to www.ngsi.com.

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