Sage North America has released Sage 100 ERP 2013 and included new cloud services and usability features for its user base of small to midsized distributors and manufacturers.

Key features in Sage 100 ERP(formerly MAS 90/200) include the integration of cloud services Sage Exchange, Sage Shipping and the addition of Visual Process Flows -- a new interactive graphical interface that illustrates the steps required to complete various tasks.

Users can now process credit card payments through Sage Exchange, which was designed to reduce the time to enter orders paid by credit card by four minutes per order. Sage 100 ERP Shipping by SmartLinc is a new Web-based, multicarrier shipping solution.

“This latest release of Sage 100 ERP shows our continued effort to provide a simpler user experience across the entire Sage portfolio,” said Joe Langner, executive vice president, mid-market solutions for Sage North America. Through the integration of Sage Exchange, we’ve significantly reduced the time it takes to enter sales orders when customers pay by credit cards. Our research has shown that integrating payment processing with ERP reduces order entry time by four minutes per order on average. This time savings is the main driver behind customer adoption of Sage Payment Solutions, which is now at over 9,700 customers. It’s also why we’ve seen an 18 percent increase in payments cross-sell revenue.”

Other notable features include:

• the addition of Sage Auto Update and Sage Smart Update, which were designed to help manage product updates for Sage 100 ERP.
• improved integration with Sage CRM, including alignment of multiple ERP companies to a single CRM database and the ability for salespeople to enter orders within their familiar Sage CRM environment.
• enhanced Sage Intelligence Report Designer, with new drag and drop features that make financial report designing easier and more intuitive and provides significant performance improvements through in-memory processing.