Aptean Intuitive ERP vs. Microsoft Dynamics SL vs. SIX ERP

Intuitive ERP is particularly well suited to be used for small to mid-sized manufacturers. It has enough complexity to handle most any business process yet is simple enough to not be cumbersome. It is probably not appropriate for a very large organization or enterprise, or to non-manufacturing related businesses

Incentivized

In the service series, there is a weakness in applying revenue recognition concepts which are a strong point of the project series. It is difficult to get a period sensitive WIP that could be recreated at any time for a point in time (fiscal period).

Incentivized

I can really encourage every start-up that is a little further to explore SIX ERP. With the pricing it might be also the best solution on the market right now for SMEs (we did extensive comparisons and SIX was by far superior to other choices, paid and open-source). But also considering the vast modules and the extensive features with warehousing, project management etc. it is great for large corporations as only those can really make use of the extensive features. I guess also bigger corporations will love how easy it is to integrate systems, which could save a lot of money. Especially in comparison to Microsoft, Oracle or SAP the integration costs what I have seen as a consultant are ridiculously high in comparison of the SIX costs. So highly reccomended for every business owner to at least have SIX on the short list and check it out. We love it!

• Easily allows adding fields to the database. The data manager reads all fields, so just adding a field automatically brings it over.
• Optionally purchasing a tool called "Form Wizard" allows non-programmers to add new fields to a form and move around existing fields freeing up the developer to work on other things.
• They have a wrapper for the DevXpress grid which allows individual users to add and remove columns pertinent to their specific job.

Incentivized

• Ability to add companies, and sub-accounts on the fly allows for the growth of the system without conversions, and flexible reporting allows for the quick utilization of the data.
• Multi-Company allows for easy and automated data entry and reporting across multiple legal entities and business segments.
• Multi-Company also allows for easy centralization of business processes (AP check writing and Fixed Assets for example), while spreading data entry across the enterprise.
• Ability to Copy/Paste into Dynamics SL has always been a strength- especially from Excel. The additional power of being able to use Excel for a myriad of calculations, including complex allocations, and formatting the result into a JE to paste directly into the Journal Entry Screen has saved countless hours in data-entry, and made re-use of complex items very easy.

Incentivized

• Very easy to use
• Super fast
• Affordable (great transparent pricing)
• Super easy to expand and integrate other systems
• Offers more modules and functionalities as many other ERPs

• Lack of consolidations between systems
• No APIs yet

Incentivized

• When we have a lot of invoices rather than just a few large invoices, we can be frustrated by how long it takes Flexible Billings to generate a lot of invoices
• It would be nice if Dynamics SL had an easy integration to some of the nicer salestax tools such as Avalara and CCH.
• It would be nice if the fixed assets module and electronic banking were not third party.

Incentivized

• We would love to see automatic integration with taxes ... but also many others don't have this

We have a lot invested in this from user education to customizations. It would be hard to justify the cost for changing.

Incentivized

Unfortunately, Dynamics' lack of ability to smoothly integrate with our CRM system is causing us to look at other solutions. The efficiencies that we gain by using Dynamics for our day to day accounting are lost in the constant headaches of getting sales quotes to import properly into the system for invoicing. Another major issue for us has been budgeting and reporting. We currently do all of our budgeting and board reporting in Excel, which is too time consuming and inefficient, especially when a system as robust as Dynamics should easily be able to handle this relatively simple task.

Incentivized

We don't just want to renew it, we are just in the process of evaluating a second license for the new platform MoreThanDigital Insights. So we will definitely stay with SIX ERP and we are looking forward to also seeing the evolution of the system plus grow ourselves with the system as it has unlimited users.

SL itself is relatively easy to use and most of the Help Files documentation is well kept and outstanding in the amount of information that is given. Most end users pick up the functions quickly and are off and running after some limited training. There will always be questions and research to be done, but overall SL is relatively easy to follow for a seasoned user

Incentivized

It was one of the best ERP interfaces we have seen so far. Fast, easy, love the shortcuts, and also web-first, with not much resource usage. So highly reccomended to make a demo there and just see it for yourself. We also love the custom dashboards, quick shortcuts in many areas and pages and that it was fast to onboard our employees and all of our volunteers quickly. (more work, less explaining)

We have had only one unplanned outage for 2 hours in the last 30 months. We shut down for 30 min to 1 hour once a month, but that is for Microsoft OS updates to the servers. Being a 24/7 world wide operation, the reliability is really important. We do get an 8 hour window on the weekend that we can be down for a short period to install Microsoft Dynamics SL updates, but we do not have many of those. On our last version upgrade, we shut the users out at 9:30 am and were fully operational in less than 6 hours. The upgrade was New SQL server, New SL server and 2 new Citrix servers.

Incentivized

Many times support will tell you that your issue is an identified bug and will be scheduled in the future to be fixed in a future release. The knowledgebase has gotten worse in recent years and much more difficult to use. many times you can't find the error during the search

Incentivized

The founder Dr. Andreas Maier was super helpful and tried to really help us as a start-up to get up and running fast as well as implementing our new platform with the ERP. Great work of him and his team! Especially the many updates every months are also a great plus; fascinating how much is being integrated - just like Marketing Automation

Just to let it take its course. The implementation for me once I became a part of my former organization was pretty seamless. Just get to know the basics and call the support team to ask questions if you need help on an issue, should they arise. They are ready, willing, and able to help!

Incentivized

We select Aptean 19 years ago, most of the other SMB packages back then no longer exist. While we have discussed whether to consider other ERP systems here an there over the years we have always come back to the fact that our existing ERP system is well established and easy enough to maintain, and is cost effective

Incentivized

We started with QuickBooks Enterprise when our company was young. We quickly outgrew this program as it was not able to accommodate the financial reporting we needed to satisfy our investors. QuickBooks was also very limited in managing our revenue as we grew. We did try Great Plains and Peachtree (now Sage 50) and we discovered that they were rather complicated for our users. They were not as easy to maneuver and manipulate as SL and we felt that SL was much more "user friendly" and simplified, but still able to produce the same results.

Incentivized

We screened over 20 different solutions from local and international ERP providers. Especially the costs to scale, the easy integration and the vast functionalities were unbeatable at the price it offers. Another big plus-point was the nice interface and that it really works fast and frictionless. Some of the other systems were really slow and tedious to handle. So our team was quite happy with how easy SIX was to use.

Since the backbone of the database is MS SQLServer, the database can be easily scaled.

Incentivized

• Runs well without a ton of support
• One server license required for site, can run several businesses
• Concurrent licensing keeps costs down for global business

Incentivized

• Dramatic improvement in our ability to judge the profitability of jobs.
• Lots of improvements in delivering invoices and statements to customers.
• Automated AP approvals and imaging made our last tax audit a breeze.
• Ease of reporting data is a big plus. Financial statements with drill down capability are very useful.
• One integrated system means less data moving around and more real time information.
• EFT payments, email statements and live linked Excel charts have improved our efficency
• Too many more to name.

Incentivized

• SIX saved a significant cost for Backend
• We could cancel other subscriptions in order to streamline
• Till now the ROI Break-Even was achieved already after 4 Months