ECI Software Solutions offers e-automate, an ERP for office technology companies to automate business workflows and increase contract profitability.
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Salesforce Field Service
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Field Service (formerly known as Field Service Lightning) is a customizable, mobile-friendly field service hub in Salesforce. It provides tools to manage work orders, scheduling, and a mobile workforce.
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.
We've demoed quite a few models, different companies. I know Salesforce has huge backing, but even so they're open to customization and solutions. Some of the competition, keep in mind for my industry, there's not a lot of options out there. We're not your typical Salesforce target market. I mean we're not really selling a lot. I mean, quite honestly, I don't even have a sales department because can't do all of the work that my current customers need me to do. So I don't need to go drum up new business. I just needed it for more of tracking and a work management solution. And in the construction, specifically utility construction, industry, there's not a lot of options, but it definitely was the best option for us.
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.
Real Time Communication with back-office team When our nurses need anything by using mobile app they can reach out to our back office team to resolve their issues
Utilization of resources We can see the all the appointments view with the assigned representative in a single page so We can assign more appointments if any resources has any free slot it is just a drag and drop
It helps us to automate the process like delay or reach notification we can also route the appointments based on representative skill set, location and urgency of task
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.
At times updates from may take a while to come back to the main database. This is generallly because of a loss of internet connectivity due to poor data coverage from cell towers or Wi-Fi networks.
Organizational IT policies of network architecture/DMZ/Firewalls may add to the challenges of deploying ClickMobile outside of the organization domain, thus allowing field resources the ability to access relevant work order data without connecting the company network via VPN. This can usually be overcome with quality solution design and implementation.
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.
ClickSoftware is still being used. As far as I can tell it will be used tomorrow as well. Once you make the commitment to run with that as your scheduling engine, it would take a lot of effort to evaluate and implement another companies' solution without significant disruption to your service organization.
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.
Having a program that gives sales leaders a real time view was game changing. Time was always an issue because there wasn't always a sales leader available for closing sales. This has allowed for any sales leader to jump in and help make the sale without the need to do a warm transfer.
Overall the training was quite informative but did lack detail in some areas. It had all of the necessary content for an experience product user but didn't offer enough information for a new user to complete the training and then feel comfortable in real-world situations running or managing the software. I would recommend this course for anyone with at least 1 year of full-time exposure to the ClickSchedule product.
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.
I have added a few of the many Salesforce products we use. We also use HubSpot but they all have different functions so not really comparable as they are used for different things/ teams.
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.
