ECI Software Solutions offers e-automate, an ERP for office technology companies to automate business workflows and increase contract profitability.
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Mhelpdesk
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Mhelpdesk is a field service software solution that manages field technicians, work orders, employee scheduling, and client billing. By combining and integrating multiple business management tools, Mhelpdesk provides a solution that eliminates double-data entry while giving business owners visibility over their field technicians in real-time.
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.
Mhelpdesk is perfect for smaller companies and mid-sized companies I would say. Larger companies may need something a little more advanced for lack of better words or able to handle thousands upon thousands of constant work orders, etc. Smaller companies or companies that are mid-size would benefit from this program the most as it provides the necessary programming to succeed along with its ease of use.
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.
mHelpDesk can be used to initiate work orders, track them, update them, and know when they have been completed without a log of phone calls or emails being necessary.
mHelpDesk allows administrators to see an overview of the workorders which have been placed or are in progress to analyze the efficiency of the operation.
mHelpDesk permits mobile updates, questions, comments, or completion notes to be entered and immediately seen by all involved parties (tech, dispatcher, tech supervisor, administrators, and originators of workorders).
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.
mHelpDesk grew VERY fast during the time we used them. I think as a result of trying to cater to many industries and customers, they weren't able to add new features and fix bugs as quickly as they could have if they would have spent a little less on advertising and more on perfecting the product first.
Nesting layout. Looks very much like Quickbooks Online. If you open a customer, then a ticket, then an invoice, etc., - you have all these windows open and have to close out one at a time. When you're in a hurry and time is critical, this becomes annoying quickly.
Speed. mHelpDesk 1 was really fast. mHelpDesk 2 was SLOW! It's improved over time, but as pretty as it was, we ended up sticking with mHelpDesk 1 because it was so much faster.
Want to send your client a statement of all their invoices? Too bad! If you integrate with Quickbooks, you can do this - but mHelpDesk didn't have an option to simply send a statement of all invoices. This is such a simple thing that was needed and no great solution to do it. You could export to CSV, but how many customers want to get that?
Invoice/Commission tracking. Say you create an invoice and you want to track the sales person that created it - maybe for a quick purchase without creating a ticket. You can't do that in mHelpDesk 2. You HAVE to create a TICKET first, assign a staff member, THEN create an invoice. That's a lot of work to make a quick sale and track the commission. With mHelpDesk 1, we were at least able to make the invoice - it would automatically create a ticket, and then we could assign the ticket to the tech afterward. With Version 2 - creating an invoice stopped generating a ticket automatically. This was very frustrating and another reason we stuck with version 1.
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.
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
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.
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.
This tool is very affordable, easy to use and to adopt than any of its competitors. Since we purchased this tool our field services feels smooth, seamless and professional. This has highly promoted to productivity in the company.
According to my experience Mhelpdesk offers more robust inventory tracking, integration, automation and streamlined workflow than any of its competitor.
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.
We are 6 months into it with a 50% rollout completed. We need more time to pass and full rollout to be completed before making a hard statement as to the ROI.
We have already seen greater efficiency in dispatching techs in regards to how many projects per day may be handled (we know of their downtime) and travel time mangement (by being able to map the locations and track them easier).
No negative impacts on ROI have yet to be seen nor are they projected.
