ECI Software Solutions offers e-automate, an ERP for office technology companies to automate business workflows and increase contract profitability.
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ServiceChannel
Score 9.0 out of 10
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ServiceChannel provides facilities managers with a single platform to source, procure, manage, and pay for repair and maintenance services from commercial contractors across their enterprise. The company aims to deliver transparency and data-driven analytics of service quality, across all trades, locations, and contractors, allowing facilities managers drive significant brand equity and ROI for their organizations without outsourcing or investing in new infrastructure. …
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.
ServiceChannel is well suited for companies that have multiple locations or a few very large buildings. In my experience the system allows one person to manage 150 to 200 small retail locations but when you add restaurants and buildings with lots of equipment then it gets more complex and the number of locations that one person can effectively manage is greatly reduced. You can effectively manager 50 or 30,000+ locations with this system if you have the personal. There are several free or cost-effective programs available if you are only looking to manage a dozen or so locations.
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.
ServiceChannel listens to me the user more than any other product I have ever been involved with. It seems like every few months there are some upgrades and improvements to an already great system.
They have some great folks employed who are very accessible and very knowledgeable in this system, they are eager to help out and jump in, and they are never trying to up-sell me during these times.
I believe they have some of the best practices around for helping out new vendors, who have never been exposed to any CMMS system, they help to ease the fear that contractors/vendors have from the onboarding process thru system training.
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.
Sometimes the functionality of the software is slow.
Example...I insert a WO# into the home search box and it comes up with "nothing found". I return to the home screen and repeat the exact same process and it takes me to my WO. This happens at least 50% of the time.
They just finished up with a system upgrade (I think), and during the 3 week period I could not pull mass approved invoices for my AP department. That was a real hindrance.
I am not particularly fond of the new dashboard format. It's not as easy to move around in. However it's new and I'm sure I will get used to it quick enough.
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.
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.
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.
It is very easy to set up ServiceChannel but the one thing I believe they could make easier is the vendor portion of ServiceChannel. We get a lot of complaints on how difficult it is for them when trying to get set up.
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.
Service Channel bridged the gap for us to issue work orders directly to vendors. Maximo Asset Management did not have a user-friendly way for us to do what Service Channel does on the vendor side. Also, at the time of our selection, Maximo was missing the site portal but has since developed a solution of their own.
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.
It increased visibility on how much we were spending on HVAC repairs/replacements and allowed us to make changes to reduce costs
Before we were using paper invoices from the vendors, which creates a scenario of losing/missing invoices into AP. Then we start using the Service Channel invoicing and reduce errors to below 1%.
Gives you the capability to add trades and adjust to your needs, so you can get better tracking of specific items.
