BuildOps vs. IFS Field Service Management

BuildOps is well suited for any HVAC or commercial construction business there is no question about it. If you have teams of people in the field and you want to track them and the jobs and reduce the paperwork - think BuildOps. Their operations side functionality is strong too - quoting, invoicing, asset tracking, etc.

IFS Field Service Management is well suited for ad-hoc reporting and querying of your dataset(s). It also is great for inventory management, processing orders, and handling EDI transaction sets to third party partners and suppliers.

Incentivized

• Order Placement - IFS makes placing orders quite easy. From the simple interface down to selecting inventory, the experience is simple and clean
• Reporting - Querying database records is straightforward and easy to do. Queries can then be drilled down to individual records or exported to excel for further manipulation and analysis.
• Customer Creation - Creating new customers and managing and maintaining existing records is a simple and easily repeatable exercise

Incentivized

• Field Customization - Adding fields or inputs to particular entities is not very easy. In a world of point and click development, IFS is behind the curve
• Order Automation - for bulk order placement it would be nice to have an easy mechanism to upload orders via an Excel or csv template. We've written some custom programs to perform this, but a more user friendly, "out of box" solution would be welcomed.

Incentivized

I was not part of the software selection process and cannot provide insight into any of the alternatives in this arena at this time.

Incentivized

• Positive - streamlined order processing has allowed our business to scale without requiring additional bodies for that specific need.
• Positive - Reporting has allowed valuable insight into historic business trends which has allowed us to be proactive instead of reactive in many areas.
• Negative - Customizations have proved costly and cumbersome when upgrading to the next version of the software.

Incentivized