Aptean Made2Manage ERP is an enterprise resource planning software solution. It is built specifically for small and mid-sized manufacturers. It includes dynamic, to-order environments such as make-to-order, engineer-to-order, assemble-to-order, and mixed mode operations.
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Podio
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Podio is a cloud-based platform for organizing team communication, business processes, and reporting in project management workspaces; also it may be used as a light CRM platform. It enables workflow automation and integrations. It includes a free version and paid packages with additional features.
For parts sales, M2M is not a good program. There are too many glitches that happen between the sales order process and the shipping process. At the same time, we have to work with outside vendors to make certain functions work in the program. Or it has to work outside the program and communicate back to the main software. Way too clunky.
[Citrix Podios's] customer support is very quick and they provide you an option to convert your project into small tasks so that you can better assist your team and extract maximum work out of them hence I will totally recommend its usage. I could not think that keeping track of tasks could be this much easier and smart. It is a fully customizable tool that manages my tasks efficiently and deal with them effectively.
Very easy for people without coding or technical skills to set up and maintain information in "Apps".
Platform is very easy to learn and adopt--it's intuitive.
Project management potential is awesome--instead of having to fit your projects into a structure that is industry specific, you can build an app that tracks what you want, in the order you want it.
Has a "relationship" field that allows you to relate an individual item or record to a record in another app. It effectively gives some of the functionality of a relational database.
Very useful for information sharing when staff members are in different regions or places.
A customizable profile status – would love to work with Podio in silent mode (logged in while working, but "not available" for requests when in heavy work mode)
I am not in the decision making group any more for this product. When I was, I along with many other managers, voted to go with a competitive product software vs re-subscribing to Aptean for this product. We were convinced by certain parties at our work that the new product was head and shoulders above the old product. While they freshened up a few things and there was an increase in some functionality areas, it was still tired.
Podio customer service is great. The cloud and mobile service is fast (almost instant, continuous syncing). With a solid user base, and backed by Citrix, this is a serious business solution. They're also constantly working on improving and making it more powerful. I anticipate it only getting better
This software is not user-friendly nor easy to train on. I train people for various departments and had argued for the company to go with another company. I was not alone. When the time came for us to do an upgrade (necessitated by the advent of Windows 10 compatibility issues), a number of managers at our organization wanted to seek out other vendors due to the difficulty in training people to use the software. Then have to deal with so many of the user issues and lack of functionality created by the need for using an outside software programmer to bring in software that interpreted what M2M was doing and then translate it back into the program so that we had an end-user solution. This software should be robust enough to do it all. It is not. I hate to be so negative about it but anyone that has spent as many years using this software as I have should find something good to say about the platform and I struggle to do that. I had asked for the warranty section that would tie into the return authorization process. I was told it would happen. It didn't. Bad karma.
I go back to the warranty segment of the program to help track expenses that were generated by returns and zero-dollar sales orders to resolve customer issues. I feel like I was lied to by the company. They said they would have it in there on the new release. They told the purchasing manager it would be on the new release. The purchasing manager assured me it would be on there. They even showed 'warranty loading' on the screen when you signed in. However, there was no additional component of the return material authorization process for warranty adaptation. I even challenged our upload team about it and they had no answer. It does a few functions well but in my personal experience, buy something else.
Podio support was always responsive and very quick to provide answers and assistance during the history of using this product, their support team has always been top notch. There have been several cases where calling podio support a feature was not available and they provided either workaround solutions or added the features straight into their roadmap.
The actual implementation was no worse or better than other software updates. There were days of pain and additional training helped overcome a lot of the learning curve associated with that. However, that training came from our own internal staff vs anyone from Aptean.
Compared to Salesforce: Podio is not as robust as a tool for CRM tracking. It also doesn't have the in-email capabilities that SF offers. Compared to Basecamp: Podio is somewhat similar to Basecamp but doesn't offer the same functionality with checking items off and archiving projects. Compared to Zoho Projects: Podio is vastly superior to Zoho Project's lack of flexibility (requiring a development team to build) and accessibility by all members (Zoho Projects requires a very limited number of "owners" of projects which makes it difficult if multiple owners need to assign one or more people to a project).
I came on board after M2M was implemented so I'm not sure how it has changed from previous software. However, I do know it has the ability to grow with the company.
Podio is great for task assignment and tracking. The ability to enter and assign tasks from mobile and track their completion saves me several phone calls a day.
Podio outdoes email as my go to place to search for information. The ability to forward emails into the system, organize by projects and contacts, and search it all saves considerable time and confusion.
Podio has considerable potential to reduce overall admin time spent organizing information (filing, tracking, etc) The ability to keep a single record of a given piece of information without being tied to email vs file structure works very well.
