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 7.4 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.
$49
per month
ServiceMax
Score 7.9 out of 10
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ServiceMax’s mission is to help customers with asset-centric field service management software. ServiceMax’s mobile apps and cloud-based software provide an overview of assets to field service teams. By optimizing field service operations, customers across all industries can better manage the complexities of service, support faster growth and run more profitable, outcome-centric businesses.
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.
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.
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.
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 lacks in its expansion ability of multiple administrator types. We have executive level, midlevel, and department level administrators in addition to the tech, managers, etc. working directly with the system. It seems we are always about one admin level shy of what we need and are unable to create it.
mHelpDesk sometimes has difficulty with its mobile tracking either being accurate as seen by the administrators or in locking up the mobile devices of the techs. It is not a constant issue yet one which occurs often enough to be of note.
mHelpDesk doesn't track automatically so our mobile techs can shut that off. While that may be a disciplinary operational issue for us as well, we should be able to lock that setting "on" so our users are tracked which using the app.
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.
When we first started using Mhelpdesk, RepairShopr was just a blip on our radar and didn't have the feature-set that Mhelpdesk did. RepairShopr looked great, but the Mhelpdesk had a lot more features. Every 6 months or so, I'd check on RepairShopr and it was growing fast and adding new features all the time. After a few years - the difference was night and day so we switched to RepairShopr and it's been a much better fit for our business.
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.
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.
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.
