ECI Software Solutions offers e-automate, an ERP for office technology companies to automate business workflows and increase contract profitability.
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JAGGAER
Score 6.5 out of 10
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JAGGAER is a procure-to-pay provider in the higher education and government sectors. JAGGAER eProcurement and strategic sourcing customers gain access to suppliers on a scalable, customizable platform. The JAGGAER SaaS-based, source-to-settle solution provides unparalleled visibility, insights and recommendations to procurement leaders and suppliers. The result is a fluid supply chain driven by spend analysis, contract management, and an accounts payable solutions.
If you need a system to place and track sales quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, and service calls then E-Automate is perfect. However, if you want to be able to easily bulk upload customers and contracts or if you want to be able to quickly and easily track contract profitability, customer costs, etc, then you'll likely want/need a secondary or different system to do so.
As a purchasing app, it is excellent. I cannot speak to its usefulness in the AP area. it may be less useful in a different environment, such as manufacturing. For research and healthcare use, it is excellent. Also, we use Banner as our ERP. SciQuest is well versed with integrating with Banner. Users with a different ERP may experience less pleasant results.
Sending Invoices out to customers via email or printing.
Keep track of ordering and inventory.
Sales Tax reporting.
Monitoring customer payment activity/setting up and removing credit holds.
Calculating payments to process each cycle.
Excellent aging reports.
I like the fact that when I am looking at one item, such as an invoice, I have the capability to switch to the customer menu rather than having to exit out of invoices and then enter into customers.
I love the flexibility of the search menus - being able to sort on several factors at once.
Source to settle: Although we did not purchase all the new applications in the suite SciQuest made, what we did use, worked and worked nicely. With SciQuest you can get a turn-key system.
I love the way SciQuest rolls out changes, measuring customer feedback, and rolling out major changes 3 times a year. Like clockwork you know what to expect ahead of time, deciding whether or not you need a particular enhancement (if optional), having plenty of time to make adjustments in business processes if needed, and/or user-base announcements.
I was always astonished to see both clients and potential clients come to the conferences. SciQuest would allow the "mixing" of clients and potential clients, apparently unafraid of any negative commentaries the potential clients might get. That has always been impressive to me as a techie myself.
Make sales invoices not require serial numbers, or be more flexible with it.
Make contract invoices have some sort of flexibility in terms of editing. Our end users complain that QuickBooks made it very easy to edit invoices, and in e-automate, for them, it is practically impossible. (I do personally understand why it has to be as it is myself, I'm just forwarding their observation.)
Make the API actually useful. I spent days looking at the functions and the functions available are not really useful.
Their existing pricing model for the number of Suppliers onboarded or removed has been a little disappointing as there are times when suppliers do have to be switched out.
They have greatly helped in making UNSPSC updating easier, but I would like to be able to get an extract with a delta that would make it easier for us to update our ERP as this information needs to be stored on both sides.
Its really the only option for the industry that does enough of what we need for it to function . I'm not sure if there were better options out there if we would have to renew our subscription. With the addition of AI, hopefully something will be able to become more useful.
Simplified and user friendly system that has been implemented across our entire institute and with all of our vendors. We really like this program and it works well for us. Changing to another program would be a significant time investment and hassle
The user interface may be slightly outdated, but it is very intuitive and easy to navigate. Once you have learned one module within the system it is very easy to apply that knowledge to any other module. It makes using the system much easier, and it makes training another person on the system quick and efficient.
There is a 3 month learning curve and then the features are easy to use. My AP team processes 400 invoices daily through the system. The things to watch for are vendor billing mistakes (no/incorrect PO number, information discrepancies) and buyer purchase request inconsistencies. Those are part of AP anyway so maybe it is what it is. The Sciquest AP software performs as designed some improvements needed. In our system I have documented a list of 60 improvements that could increase throughput up to 50%. Those improvements include making the AP records GUI format more customized for AP purposes, and improving the QC tolerance functionality, which can be laborious to sync (Match).
They have had only a couple of very quick occasions where they were down for 1-2 minutes. One time they had a problem adding attachments. Very Reliable!
Reports are the struggle the most with the information being extracted in a way that you need to copy and paste it into a new document so some of the information is not covered
Having used SciQuest for over five years and having their competitors, SciQuest offers the best user experience and integration between vendors and ERP.
Sometimes when you need answers quickly, a voice on the phone is far better than having to wait for email support or a callback. I have found this to have delays and feel ECI e-automate should invest more in its support infrastructure.
They usually respond to medium-to-low priority issues very quickly, and high priority issues almost instantly. Their support team is knowledgeable and responsive. Their Supplier Enablement team is very good and is a feature that most of their competitors don't have. The company makes a serious effort to maintain good relationships with their customers.
We had an internal project manager who was well versed in PMI methodologies. I think the implementation would have gone far less successfully, or may even have failed entirely, without her. She was able to do all the things a project manager is supposed to do, and in an ordered and organized manner.
E-automate is much better at understanding the needs of the office equipment industry and provide the necessary tools. SAP Business One has limited features specific to the office equipment industry and includes things that are not useful. E-automate is also priced much better and provides the best value for your investment.
Again, our SciQuest system integrates with Banner. Banner does have a way to create, approve and report on POs. However, the SciQuest product is so much more user friendly, so the learning curve is very steep. Also, SciQuest gives us a lot more detail in our reporting and PO history, which is helpful when trying to remember what happened 6 month ago
Highly reliable remotely hosted PTP solution that interfaces with our remote OCR vendor and with university sited operational servers. Twice a year over the last 3 years a SciQuest/OCR system file handling or network problem occurs that gets fixed within a day.
The e-automate will stop working if we stop paying each year. We chose not to go to the cloud and buy the software. QuickBooks and other software are a one-time fee.
E-automate has very few outside vendors for add-on modules.
Customers seem to be fine with selecting requisition items and having them pushed back via carts to a legacy system.
Converting one's legacy ERP system to a SaaS solution may prove to be too much of an overhaul in regards to converting to a new set of rules which do not fit exactly with current business processes. The inability to enhance in great detail is also a drawback for customers coming from a highly modifiable system.
