How is Vormittag Associates Inc. (VAI) developing its ERP software to meet the needs of the new workforce and other changes in our dynamic market? TEC principal ERP analyst PJ Jakovljevic looks at how the vendor is expanding its ERP offerings to better meet the needs of manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and services companies.

While the market observers’ obsession and interest about the largest and/or fastest-growing enterprise software vendors is logical, there are always honorable cases of gritty enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors with their focus and defendable niches. One such example is VAI (standing for Vormittag Associates Inc.), which is a long-standing (since 1978) and independently owned mid-market provider of ERP software solutions for the distribution, manufacturing, retail, and service sectors.

Even these days of the layoff news in the information technology (IT) industry VAI continues to hire at an aggressive pace and has also promoted several employees throughout the last year. The plans for the new workforce, whether remote, onsite, or hybrid, will include an expansion in the development, testing, implementation, and training units.

VAI Backgrounder

VAI started as a regional IBM Business Partner and ERP software developer for small to midsize companies in the New York area, given its headquarters in Ronkonkoma, New York. The company expanded over the decades by marketing its enhanced products and services elsewhere through its direct sales force and reseller channel. VAI has several offices in the United States, but it also maintains a domestic and international presence through resellers, especially in the regions where it does not sell directly.
 
With specific ERP solutions for companies in the hard goods, food, and pharmaceutical industries, VAI currently has over 1,500 companies using various versions of its flagship S2K Enterprise suite. VAI customers come from many industries, from discrete to process manufacturing, retail point-of-sale (POS) to distribution, including automotive, pet supply, medical, plastics, industrial, janitorial distribution, HVAC, plumbing and heating, and more.
 
In its very early days, VAI focused on customer service, inventory management, and financial applications. Other technologies have since emerged such as electronic data interchange (EDI), wireless scanning and barcoding in the warehouse, and shop floor control, which have resulted in additional e-commerce, mobile technology, and retail POS capabilities. Following those, other major advancements were developed in warehouse management, including RFID, voice picking, and automated putaway.
 
Today, VAI’s cloud-based ERP product lines, S2K Enterprise, S2K Food, and S2K Pharma, all include financial, distribution, manufacturing, and retail applications as well as cross-industry solutions such as warehouse management, analytics, sales force automation (SFA), marketing automation, procurement, e-commerce, field service, pricing and promotions, etc. The suites also feature numerous mobile apps, predictive analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), business intelligence (BI) dashboards (S2K Analytics), and more technology.

VAI’s S2K Smart Center (shown above) is a role-based, customizable, user environment. The users see things relevant to them all on one page without having to go look for it or run reports.

Enter VAI Cloud

In 2009 VAI transformed its business by building a cloud infrastructure with IBM. Now VAI customers can focus more on their business and less on IT infrastructure. Plus, they have peace of mind with included High Availability and Disaster Recovery, with 100% uptime and scalability.
 
VAI Cloud, LLC is the primary provider for cloud deployment of VAI’s S2K Software Suite. VAI Cloud infrastructure spans multiple data centers with full synchronization between the redundant systems. Customers in VAI Cloud can add more resources, when needed, and the updates can be done without the need for downtime. VAI Cloud can then free up critical IT resources to focus on strategic initiatives and innovation, rather than hardware management.