Rootstock has unveiled details of the Winter ’25 release of its Manufacturing ERP solution. The announcement also launches the Rootstock Idea Factory, a new portal designed to accept and manage customer suggestions. As is the norm for Rootstock, the updates included within this release are mainly derived from customer suggestions and also include more AI capabilities powered by the Salesforce platform.
Raj Badarinath, Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Rootstock, commented, “With this latest version, our customers gain precise control over sales and financial transactions, accelerated workflows, and advanced analytics—all designed to address real-world needs voiced by our users.
“The Winter Release also includes the launch of our Idea Factory and the delivery of our first top-voted customer feature. This milestone demonstrates how our customers directly shape the evolution of our ERP, ensuring the platform continues to anticipate and meet their future needs.”
The Idea Factory
Launched at the same time as the Winter release arrives, the portal will become the foundation on which future releases are built. The portal enables customers to generate, share, comment on, and then vote on ideas for product improvements and new features. It will become a community hub where users can share business challenges and suggest resolutions.
The portal is part of the Rootstock Success Community and formalizes what can be a fairly ad hoc process in other SaaS vendors. In a recent blog, Badarinath commented, “We initially discussed the Idea Factory at our Rooted-In Manufacturing Conference. Now, we’ve rolled it out, making it easier than ever for customers to co-create the next generation of Rootstock ERP—and for our company to deliver capabilities that truly matter to our users.”
Once ideas are mooted, other community members can comment and collaborate on them, upvoting them. Once ideas are submitted and progressed, Rootstock will update their status to indicate whether they are being prioritized, developed or implemented.
Early access customers are impressed. Oen Eugene, Salesforce Admin & Developer at Beta Bionics, received an early tour of the Idea Factory and commented on the user interface. “Rootstock users will find the portal easy to use and navigate, and they’ll be excited to see that the Idea Factory offers visible tracking of their submitted concepts—all the way through to an implemented capability.”
The first idea developed within the Idea Factory was released during Winter ’25. Rootstock has improved the navigation for its Lightning Console App, simplifying it and enhancing workflow efficiency.
What is in Rootstock Winter ’25?
Key highlights of the Winter ‘25 Release include:
Enhancements to Sales & Order processing
The release contains three improvements to Sales and Order processing. The first is an update to the Sales Order entry process. A new enhanced grid feature enables users to rapidly create Sales Order headers and lines. The grid makes order creation faster and more efficient.
The grid also supports customer and flow actions. This feature is also available in Invoice Line grids. The feature allows greater configuration options and increases productivity for users. Single and multi-row flow actions can be initiated directly from within the grids and selected records will be passed into the flow.
Once the automation is complete the grids will refresh any updated data, ensuring the user sees the impact of any changes immediately. These premade flows enable users and admins to automate previously time-consuming processes, which also have a higher risk of errors.
Other enhanced features on Sales Orders include the ability to reprice orders and support customer actions on sales and invoices. In addition, order fulfilment can be automated where inventory is available. For administrators, new configuration settings enable automated processes for credit checks and intercompany sales.
Enhancements to Financial Management
Rootstock continues to enhance the financial management module within its ERP. It has added new financial controls and VAT flexibility. New features include:
- Ability to specify accounting dates for accounts receivable (AR) transfers
- Customize value-added tax (VAT) settings for payables and receivables
- Manage VAT classes on bulk records for more accurate tax management
- New controls for data reporting following M&A activity to simplify the consolidation process
- Enhanced vendor prepayment processes
Rootstock has further strengthened Rootstock Financial Analytics (RFA) and added new capabilities to support financial analysis and decisions. The platform now provides period-to-date, quarter-to-date, and year-to-date comparisons against any prior year data.
Inventory valuations have added more granular variations, though details were not revealed, and the release notes are not available. Rootstock has also added an integration to a leading product lifecycle management (PLM) system. These two enhancements will empower better decision-making. Enterprise Times asked Badarinath which PLM was added.
He replied, “Rootstock has always connected seamlessly with Propel on the Salesforce Platform. Now, through Rootstock Financial Analytics, we also connect with Arena.”
Powering up ERP with AI
This release also sees Rootstock continue to embed AI across the application. The main benefits customers will see are automated and streamlined processes using templates that help automate processes such as:
- Sales Order Picklists
- Split Purchase Order Receipts for precise transaction management
- Automate labour backflush transactions for final work order operations
Within Materials Requirements Planning, Rootstock has leveraged predictive and generative AI to forecast lead times, anticipate production bottlenecks, and dynamically adjust procurement. These improvements deliver flexibility to planning.
Still in proof of concept, Rootstock has created Rootstock ERP Agents. These bridge Salesforce CRM and Rootstock ERP. The Rootstock agent combines a generative AI interface and automates workflows by autonomously handling tasks like procurement and production scheduling and analysing data in real-time to optimize operations and reduce human error.
Agents can also help manufacturers by providing an AI-powered workforce that will conduct tasks that untrained people cannot yet do. This will enable manufacturers to increase agility, manage labour shortages, and increase operational efficiency.
No details of the costs were available, and Salesforce Agentic AI works on the basis of credits, one for each Agentic AI action. It means that the defined actions must be meaningful and save resources to bring value to an organisation.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a substantial update from Rootstock with its first foray in Agentic AI. At Dreamforce 2024, Enterprise Times spoke to Rick Berger, CEO of Rootstock, who revealed that Rootstock was looking to join the partner program for Agentforce, the Agentic AI solution that Salesforce announced at the conference. Under Badarinath, the development team has clearly been busy and is looking to bring agents to the customer base quickly.
For interested manufacturers, contact Rootstock for further information and demonstrations. Rootstock is also working on videos that will reveal more details about this release.
