ABB Ability Solution Suite vs. IFS Applications vs. Sage 100

Of course this is the one of the best solution available in the market at present. When you have Multiple system in a plant then you need a powerful tool for Computation which Ability does it smoothly.

Incentivized

Order to cash processes and scenario are implemented natively in IFS. An HR module exists for career management also (objectives, comportments, training, mobility) but may be improved in terms of workflow validation (e.g. training to validate by a manager) or reporting.

Incentivized

Sage 100 has been well suited for running the monthly accounts receivable and accounts payable aging reports. This helps us track our accounts that need to be collected and payments that need to be made. Our field operations team has been slow and unwanting to adopt the Sage Field Ops just because they're resistant to change and technology. It's less appropriate for really detailed accounting reports spanning for long periods of time with all accounts because it takes a very long time to run and process.

Incentivized

• Computation of data.
• Presentation to right person.
• Ability to perform critical task and sending to users.
• Multiple control system connectivity.

Incentivized

• It supports the web version in most later versions.
• It provides various mobile versions of the applications as mobile apps to cater various areas.
• IFS Applications allows easy configurations of the application without going for costly customization.
• It covers almost every areas of an industrial company so any other third party applications are minimum.
• It allows safer and easier built-in options for integrations capabilities.

Incentivized

• Simple to implement and use. Operation very intuitive so new employees are quickly trained.
• It is very flexible with many modules and many features allows for easy customization to suit particular needs of any department or company.
• Context sensitive help, training and support make it easy for a company to operate with out a lot of additional outside tech support.
• Scalable plenty of room to grow as the business grows without being bloated.
• Pricing is very reasonable.

Incentivized

• May be for smaller PLCs this can't be implemented.
• Cost may an area ABB can look in to.
• Improvement in GUI

Incentivized

• Handling massive volumes of data can be improved.

Incentivized

• Sage 100 at times will simply not connect to our server, we get remote support & all is well but, that issue tends to happen 2-3X a year.
• Other than the above, I really can't complain. Coming from a more custom U.V. type database that used a whole bunch of codes to navigate, I think Sage 100 is 10x easier to use.

Incentivized

I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.

Incentivized

One of the best solutions in the market with a user-friendly system. This is very useful when the ABB system (Like we had 800xA) is there, new or existing; all the ABB systems can be integrated using this rather than going to a 3rd party vendor, which may have interface problems.

Incentivized

The system is very difficult to use, overly complex, and difficult to learn. It also has limitations that are hard to overcome.

Overall Sage 100 has been pretty user friendly. If we have a question on anything, we are able to contact our implementation rep who helps us right away. Some of the Sage Field Operations may not be as intuitive for our field personnel to use. I wish the reports ran faster so that we could run and put together many reports quickly at once.

Incentivized

Good support in terms of quality and promptness. When we had problems with some of the commands not getting executed, their online support also provided a good solution to solve the problem. Even mission-critical task we were able to solve during this Pandemic time. The suggestion is to go for the online support 1st in the future, followed by a visit.

Incentivized

We have been unable to get answers to our questions, solutions to our problems, and they don't seem interested in working in the construction industry.

Sage Support is very good. I usually get a person on the phone in a short time frame and usually get my issues fixed in one called.

Incentivized

We had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.

Incentivized

Better suited for the ABB System as Microsoft is a third party for ABB Control System.

Incentivized

IFS Applications is based on Agile Technology which allows organizations to reconfigure user interface as per user requirements and make it user-friendly. Other applications are lagging on many fronts like User Interface, Online help document availability, Implementation methodology, and post-implementation expenses.

I didn't choose Sage 100 ERP -- it was already in use when I started at the organization over five years ago. It has the same types of pros and cons as other big hulking software suites meant to power the infrastructure of corporations. It's slow, tough to customize, and doesn't connect well with other software. It does bring all the information into one place, which is great

Incentivized

• Positive is definitely ROI since manual intervention is minimized and the process is automated.
• Cost wise, ABB has been looked upon considering the small industry.
• Overall, a good solution for a large companies.

Incentivized

• Reporting is now centralized and managed. Previously, reports were outside the information systems and there was a risk of incoherence.
• Accounting controls are now in place on the overall processes, including production, which helped the company to reduce closing periods or to produce more easily official mandatory accounting files yearly.
• Interfaces between the CRM forecast tool and IFS helped to keep the tools in sync, and to decrease the processing times prior to production launch.

Incentivized

• Sage 100 overall had a very positive overall ROI for the business. All users were making decisions based on the same information and valuable time was no longer spent trying to analyze data from a number of sources.
• Moving the warehouses to using Sage 100 reduced the operating expense of the distribution side of the business by 5% on an annual basis (~$100K).

Incentivized