Deacom Essentials: Features and Functionality

Deacom Essentials includes the following base functionality:

• Accounting and finance
• AI Assistant
• Document generation and storage
• Form layouts
• Formulation and bill of materials (BOM)
• Inventory
• Label generation
• Mobile applications
• Production data
• Purchasing
• Reporting
• Sales

Deacom Essentials À La Carte Features

Additional functionality is available through Deacom Essentials à la carte features:

• AI Invoicing
• Business intelligence and dashboards
• Catch weight
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Direct Store Delivery (DSD)
• Ecommerce
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
• Environmental reporting
• Maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO)
• Material requirements planning (MRP)
• Point of sale (POS)
• Product configurator
• Production routings
• Quality control
• R&D and project management
• Scheduling
• Serialization, traceability, and lot tracking
• Warehousing and scanning

Accounting and Finance

Deacom Essentials provides real-time financial postings and access to financial results. Users can drill down from accounting summaries and reports to transaction-level detail with audit-trail information.

Accounting functions include accounts receivable, accounts payable, labour tracking, inventory control, and job costing, all of which flow directly into the general ledger. Businesses can create custom financial statements, view financial data for selected time periods, and process transactions in multiple currencies.

Additional capabilities include bank integration for bank reconciliation, ACH, and Positive Pay; journal-entry management; budgeting and sales forecasting; comparison of budgets and forecasts against actual results; progress billing for large projects; and sales commission plans based on customer, product, position, and facility.

AI Assistant

The AI Assistant provides in-the-moment, on-screen support. Users can ask how to set up a field, access instant definitions and help, and see field meanings directly within the system.

AI Invoicing

AI Invoicing uses built-in AI to extract invoice data, perform line-level matching, and identify discrepancies. Users can upload an individual invoice or a folder of invoices and validate invoices against purchase orders, receipts, and line-item totals.

The feature can identify mismatched quantities and prices between invoices and purchase orders. With the 100% match option enabled, invoices can be posted autonomously to the general ledger.

Business Intelligence and Dashboards

Business intelligence and dashboards provide access to real-time financial results and transaction-level drill-down with audit-trail detail. The platform supports a configurable chart-of-account structure for reporting by profit centre, division, location, or other business entities.

Catch Weight

Catch weight functionality captures actual inventory weights through scale connections, including case, tote, and drum weights. Users can view full lots according to the actual weight of each unit, establish minimum and maximum weight thresholds, and manage pricing and costing using actual weights.

The platform can create product labels with GS1-128 and 2D barcodes, including information such as product number, catch weight, serial number, and expiry date. Barcode scanning supports catch-weight inventory movement, while real-time variance reporting helps identify giveaway.

Customer Relationship Management

Deacom Essentials CRM supports customer and prospect activity management with follow-up tracking. Users can manage workflows, tasks, opportunities, accounts, and multiple contacts associated with an account.

The system supports assigned tasks for activities and opportunities, marketing campaigns through contact groups, and remote CRM access through iOS and Android mobile applications.

Direct Store Delivery

Direct Store Delivery enables distributors to manage direct sales from mobile warehouses to customers. The application can be used on Apple and Android devices and supports full functionality without connectivity.

Users can create and manage routes, start and end routes from one interface, review and edit order details, apply real-time order changes, issue credits or additional sales, print customised receipts to wireless mobile printers, accept customer signatures, and capture delivery photos.

Other capabilities include barcode and shipping-label scanning, promotional-code management, route-location information through Google Maps, customer-order creation, and payment collection in the field.

Document Generation and Storage

Document generation enables users to identify required documents and templates through document groups and to design document templates without limitations. The system can automatically create the documents and labels required for a customer at shipment based on the customer’s document group.

For customers requiring Certificates of Analysis, the platform can include test results for raw materials used during manufacturing. Reports can pull data directly from Deacom ERP to avoid dual entry and support process control.

Document storage allows users to attach files to transactions or master data, control access through security settings, and manage documents from within the ERP system. Supported document types include batch tickets, pick lists, Certificates of Analysis, inventory count sheets, invoices, bills of lading, nutritional-fact labels, 1099 forms, barcode and lot labels, safety data sheets, dangerous-goods declarations, and packing lists.

Users can assign version numbers to document templates, store final batch tickets electronically, and restrict edits to active or validated batch tickets.

Ecommerce

Deacom Essentials integrates with EvolutionX ecommerce. The integration supports online-store creation and management, product catalogues, inventory, pricing, customer accounts, preferences, self-service options, marketing campaigns, promotions, loyalty programmes, and synchronisation between ecommerce and ERP data.

Electronic Data Interchange

EDI functionality supports both ANSI ASC X12 and EDIFACT standards. Businesses can configure EDI according to their own processing rules, work with any value-added network, and use document-formatting options based on industry, trading partner, and network requirements.

Environmental Reporting

Environmental reporting supports the creation of regulatory documents using real-time Deacom ERP data. The platform can calculate hazardous-material information, collect data, and support SARA reporting requirements.

It can automatically create Safety Data Sheets based on the actual ingredients used in each formulation, deliver compliance data to online SDS forms and GHS labels, and generate Certificates of Analysis on demand at the time of shipment.

Form Layouts

Form layouts can be customised by user or group to provide consistency, reduce clutter, and reduce data-entry errors. Businesses can create multiple layouts for the same form, such as a quick-entry view and a detailed-entry view, and users can switch between them.

Users can reorder and group tabs and sections, control field visibility, make fields required, and make sensitive fields read-only or masked.

Formulation and Bill of Materials

Formulation and BOM functionality allows formula changes to immediately affect inventory, production requirements, and planning. Formulas can be established once and scaled for different batch or package sizes.

Businesses can scale formulas according to label claims and unit-of-measure requirements. Development can be completed in lab-only status using configurable calculations and user-defined fields. The platform also supports fast production-cost quoting based on materials, labour, burden, and other costs.

Inventory Management

Deacom Essentials supports perpetual inventory costing using FIFO or standard cost. It tracks lots across inventory transactions and enables reporting on where lots were used.

Businesses can manage item locations and location types across multiple facilities, establish facility-specific inventory rules, manage expiry dates, retain permanent item history, and use alphanumeric part numbers.

The platform supports catch-weight items, inventory rollback to a selected date, multiple warehouses, item costing across facilities, MRP-driven purchasing and job creation, forecasts based on historical or manual data, multi-level BOMs, work-in-progress visibility, and user-defined fields for GHS/SDS compliance, supplemental facts, nutrition facts, and guaranteed analysis.

Label Generation

Label generation supports templates based on transaction types and item requirements. Businesses can store customer-specific label rules in item-customer part cross references and automatically generate and print labels using GS1-128 and 2D barcodes.

The platform can store regulatory data and generate GHS labels.

Maintenance, Repair, and Operations

MRO functionality supports preventive-maintenance scheduling to help avoid equipment failures and improve machine productivity. Maintenance schedules can be coordinated with production schedules.

Users can generate requisitions and purchase orders using minimum stock levels and MRP, create and track on-demand maintenance requests, assign tasks to worker groups or individuals, and build reports on machine life and maintenance costs across facilities.

The system can also track machine-asset depreciation and attach ISO 9000 and OSHA maintenance documents to machines.

Material Requirements Planning

MRP calculates demand using scheduled sales orders, production jobs, forecasts, and safety stock. It can be run globally or for an individual facility.

Users can select multiple vendors and parts, create purchase orders based on available pricing, create and schedule production jobs according to production capability, compare forecasts with actual sales, and manage facility-specific inventory-planning settings.

Vendor-part records can include lead times, minimum purchase quantities, vendor part numbers and descriptions, and pricing information.

Mobile Applications

Deacom Mobile provides access to configurable reports and pre-filters across supported platforms. Users can review custom-formatted management reports, drill down from summary reports to source transactions, and use the same security parameters as the main ERP application.

Mobile users can enter orders in real time, use tools such as MRP, sales calendar, and production scheduling, add CRM information and meeting notes, follow CRM workflows and opportunities, access contacts, and create order-entry templates for large orders.

Administrators can whitelist specific devices and disable them when necessary.

Point of Sale

The POS system provides real-time updates to customer and inventory records. It uses centrally defined pricing rules and supports multiple pricing options, promotions, split payments, lot-controlled-item sales, returns, account reconciliation, and associated reporting.

POS users operate under the same security restrictions as the main ERP platform.

Product Configurator

The product configurator uses product information stored in the ERP system to help keep selections current and reduce potential errors. Configurator selections automatically flow into bills of materials, production routings, pricing, and shipping.

Businesses can define unlimited product features and options, apply deal pricing or promotional codes, manage pricing and defaults centrally, print configurations on sales forms, and generate configured bills of materials based on selected options.

Production Data and Routings

Production-data capabilities track accumulated and remaining job hours, estimated completion dates, work-centre loading, yield and material-consumption variances, and actual job costs including materials, labour, machine costs, purchases, and overhead.

Users can see live data on each worker’s current task, analyse production capacity for forecasting, and manage production routings through the Master Production Calendar.

Production routings support multi-step routing definitions, operations, work centres, labour requirements, production standards, and production rules that flow into MRP. Approved routings can be established for manufactured items, and schedules can sequence job routings based on product properties.

Purchasing

Purchasing functionality supports approval and security-based purchasing processes, purchasing analysis, and reporting. Users can optimise prices according to pricing rules and automatically create purchase orders for materials based on those prices.

The platform supports multiple vendors and pre-defined prices for the same item, automatic conversion between vendor and internal units, purchases using internal SKU or vendor part number, purchasing to multiple warehouses, and on-hand inventory visibility by warehouse.

Additional features include grouped printouts for like items and multiple sizes, automatic 1099 generation, automatic backorder generation, and a Dock Calendar for scheduling material shipping and receiving.

Quality Control and Quality Assurance

Quality-control functionality enables businesses to define quality specifications for raw materials, intermediates, work in progress, finished goods, and rework. It also supports stability testing and inbound-inspection requirements for vendor-purchased raw materials with quality holds.

Users can capture production deviations, use electronic signatures for quality-result approval and quality-hold releases, define retest requirements, manage workflows across departments, and control workflow approvals with electronic signatures.

The system supports change control for formulas and manufacturing standard operating procedures, formula revisions based on facilities, equipment, item types, or ingredients, customer-complaint and non-conforming-material documentation, production-deviation records, CAPA-related data, and electronic SOP management with version control and history.

The platform maintains 21 CFR Part 11 compliance and can generate traceability reports for raw materials and manufactured items.

R&D and Project Management

R&D and project-management functionality provides an audit trail containing dates, timestamps, and user IDs for changes and history. Businesses can identify manufacturing SOPs and manage workflows electronically with approvals and electronic signatures.

The platform supports formula calculations based on label claims and unit-of-measure conversions, quality specifications linked to items, nutritional-fact panels, label claims, regulatory documents, and approved routings associated with formulas and bills of materials.

Reporting

Deacom Essentials supports native reporting within the ERP platform and allows an unlimited number of user-defined reports by user or group. Users can create triggers that automatically send documents and emails after a system process is completed.

A single set of business-intelligence dashboards can be used within both the main ERP application and the mobile application. The platform also supports individual or consolidated financial reporting for multi-company needs and drill-down from report values to supporting transactions.

Sales

Sales transactions post in real time to the general ledger and accounts receivable. The platform can import orders through integrated EDI, configure customer-specific items through a visual feature tree, and make orders immediately available in inventory and MRP reporting.

Users can calculate available-to-sell quantities during order entry, calculate, collect, and pay sales and use taxes across multiple tax regions, and establish deal pricing by customer, salesperson, product, product group, cost-plus, list-minus, and other methods.

Sales capabilities include analysis, reporting, commission calculations, custom packing lists, bills of lading, pick lists, invoices, customer statements, delivery-ticket and invoice notes, multi-warehouse sales, inventory visibility by warehouse, intercompany transfers, multiple orders from one sales order based on ship-to information, and inventory calendars for delivery schedules and truck-route maps.

Scheduling

Scheduling tools provide visual production management. Jobs can be scheduled based on earliest or latest production availability, while users can manually schedule or shift routings through drag-and-drop functionality.

The system supports just-in-time production by automatically creating and scheduling jobs from MRP based on lead times and demand requirements. Users can create a single view of production activities that incorporates inventory availability, job due dates, maintenance activities, and changeover requirements.

Maintenance changeovers can be built automatically into the schedule based on allergens, product colouring, or other product properties.

Serialization, Traceability, and Lot Tracking

Serialization, traceability, and lot-tracking functionality automatically creates product labels with GS1-128 and 2D barcodes. Labels can include product number, catch weight, serial number, and expiry date.

Businesses can report which lot or serialised inventory was used and where it was located. The platform supports unlimited layers of serialisation, including pallet, carton, box, and finished-product levels, to support regulatory and customer requirements.

Users can palletise finished products and generate licence-plate labels, monitor work-centre and operator performance, and store information related to commissioned and decommissioned serialised numbers to maintain 21 CFR Part 11 compliance.

Warehousing and Scanning

Deacom Essentials includes an integrated scanning system for warehouse operations, supporting real-time transaction posting and 3 of 9, GS1-128, and 2D barcodes.

Warehouse teams can receive purchase orders in real time, place inventory into designated locations, track lots with licence plating, pick and stage inventory for production jobs, and validate staged and weighed materials through multiple scanning capabilities.

Additional warehouse capabilities include inventory reservation for sales orders, item location and movement, paperless physical inventory counts, and Android WMS operation on handheld or vehicle-mounted devices.