Astea vs. ServiceMax

Small deployments, where you have some specific need for ServiceMax and absolutely need offline capabilities, and are willing to deal with the problems. Otherwise, you may be better off looking at the built-in Work Orders and field service module that Salesforce is now providing. Their app is direct competition for ServiceMax and integrates much better with cases and knowledge articles.

Incentivized

• As it's built on Salesforce, the reporting tools are fairly robust
• The service flow managers can be setup to easily lead technicians to entering data in the right place

Incentivized

• Dispatch console seems slow and the data is more of a pull than a push into the database.
• It seems to be a Ferrari and takes a lot of labor hours to configure.
• Still does not integrate with Apple's products very well.

Incentivized

Engaged account management. Support is based worldwide but handoffs have not been too painful.

Incentivized

ServiceMax has an offline capability, and also integrates with our Salesforce side of business. At the time, Salesforce did not have a field service application so we could not consider it, but if we could now, we would probably go with that instead. ServiceMax is also expensive. But at the time, ServiceMax was the only offering out there that integrated with Salesforce, had mobile offline capability, and could operate at the scale we needed.

Incentivized

• ROI for ServiceMax is mostly dependent on how in depth the organization wants the software. Our ROI is expected within the second year of operation due to the complexity of integration and the initial training requirements for in-house programmers.
• Inventory control ROI is expected within year three or four due to the number of technicians and creating the foundation of information to import into ServiceMax. Expectations are the front end programming will be complete and our programmers will be better acquainted with the modules and architecture to make the inventory integration smoother than the initial integration.
• Our organization has been working with ServiceMax for ten months and beginning to incorporate the financials to the work orders. This process has not been as seamless as once projected and the root causes are under investigation. It appears the original fields available to track time between employees were not in depth nor segregated sufficiently for granularity.

Incentivized