Collaborate 2021: Vista ERP Users Reveal Their Favorite Tricks

With Trimble Viewpoint’s Collaborate 2021 conference now in the rearview mirror, we’ve had a little time to reflect on all the big industry news and educational sessions. In particular, among the more popular courses were those that featured real-life users showcasing how they utilize Vista’s vast capabilities to create shortcuts, avoid duplicate entry, and save time and energy.

Below, we’ll share a few tips from sessions featuring Vista ERP users—so these tips come straight from the people who use it most.

4 Vista ERP Tips that End Users Love

End-User Tip #1 - Use Custom Folders

- Custom folders organize forms and reports for your own workflows

- Great for organizing your most commonly used sessions

- Just don’t forget you may have access to more

Luke Kotz, Enterprise Applications Manager for MMC Corp., says his company finds custom folders to be an invaluable tool in organizing information by role, job title and other factors.

“Viewpoint has lots of programs, lots of reports . . . there's just so much out there,” says Kotz. “So we've really spent a lot of time using these custom folders to their benefit.”

Custom folders fortify the project management structure by ensuring the appropriate forms and reports that are needed for each process can be accessed by those who need it.

“What's cool about that is if you wanted to build up your folder structure there, you can hide all the rest of the standard module folders,” explains Kotz. “So you don't even see all that other stuff that you just don't use on a daily basis.”

End-User Tip #2 - Use Vista’s Broad Search Capabilities

- Don’t overlook the value of searching for what you need using keywords

“There are lots of different ways you can search for things in the system,” says Kotz.

Whether it’s a full name or a single word in the name, Kotz says that the search functionality of the Vista ERP allows him to find what he’s looking for across multiple fields.

“Let’s say I’m looking for a service partner or company with the name ‘drilling’ in there,” says Kotz. “It’s going to search for anybody in that field with that related word. It’s really powerful.”

End-User Tip #3 - Speed-Up Data Entry

- Speed up your data entry with F3

- Use “Previous Value” for sequential entry that may change from transaction to transaction (INlocation, Scope, Vendor, etc.)

- Use “Fixed Value” where entries never change based on your role or geographic location (Service Center, Tax Code, PR Local, etc.)

- Column Reordering: A superior alternative to hiding columns

 -Consider mandatory fields and validation checks when you do this

Veronica Healey, Development Manager of Process and Systems at Troy Life and Fire Safety, utilizes keystroke shortcuts to tackle data entry more quickly and efficiently.

“These shortcuts can really help speed up your data entry and are great for forms with a lot of manual entry,” says Healey. “If you can imagine purchase order forms where you're entering multiple lines, perhaps a project material entry, or work order scope.”

While this allows Healey to tackle vast amounts of data all at once, reordering columns can make some processes more efficient by compressing or eliminating steps.

End-User Tip #4 - Quick Document Editing Access

- Quick and easy document viewing, adding or editing with grid views

- Enable your attachment lister so you can quickly see what’s there

- You can access and attach your documents this way as well

The document management tool is one that Kotz and Healey both use often, and allows for quick and easy tweaks to documents whenever necessary:

“It’s a great way to just quickly see what’s attached to that record as you're switching between them, so that if you're looking for something specific, and you're not sure where it is; or you want to make sure all the appropriate attachments are where they're supposed to be, you can use the attachment lister to do that instead of opening the attachment form itself or the record form. You can then use the attachment form itself to get to those items,” says Healey.

Next-Level Data Configurations

Mary K. Rosenthal, Construction Application Manager for Sellen Construction, told her own story, which she hoped listeners would be able to “take back to their respective companies and say ‘I learned this great thing at the user conference and I can’t wait to rattle everyone’s world with how awesome this is going to be!’”

Rosenthal covered a few basic customizations—that are available to all Vista users—that she used to capture data and allowed her to “maximize Vista as a centralized database” for Sellen Construction, starting with a Business Intelligence project that she was tasked with helping to develop.

In other words, visualizing data with “pictures, the fun colors and the charts and the graphs and the pie charts.” But she needed more information. “I need to know how many superintendents we're going to have in five years, or how we are doing with diversity and inclusion, and all of those things that are important to HR and everyone else.”

“So we started by making a list of all of those pieces of information that we wanted to be able to utilize in these new dashboards and to feed these analytics,” said Rosenthal.

Slicing & Dicing: Necessary Data Points for HR Analytics

Rosenthal says that when her team looked at all of the different data points they wanted to add to their BI tool, they had a number of projects to consider:

- Full list of employee attributes

- How attributes may change

- Any relation to other data

- Adding data points without adding data entry by employee

“What did we think was going to change in the next year, or the next month, or ever? How are those things going to change? How would they change based on the employee? And to that point, how are all those things related to other data that already existed in Vista? And then number one, because we didn't want to add a ton of new data entry points because setting up an employee, there's already a lot of fields, a lot of data points to hit. And the more data entry that's required on every person, the more room for error and the less consistency that we have.”