ECI Software Solutions offers e-automate, an ERP for office technology companies to automate business workflows and increase contract profitability.
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ServiceMax
Score 7.4 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.
For the office equipment industry, there is none better than e-automate. I've used other software and assessed newer offerings, but they all lack the complete suite of tools necessary for our business. Managing multiple ERP solutions and other information silos can take up valuable time. E-automate allows businesses to consolidate those silos into one centralized platform. Unless you are a business with 5 or fewer customers, e-automate can greatly improve your business efficiency and help drive revenue.
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.
I like the way I can create a sales order and right click and instantly create a purchase order for that sales order, and the process continues when I clear the PO, it releases the items on the Sales order for shipment.
When attaching related items to equipment, it seems that you have to jump through a bunch of different hoops to make sure it shows up.
Customer service is slow and can sometimes takes weeks to respond to issues that need to be addressed, and that is only to get the ball rolling for a call to take place.
With every update, it seems that instead of just adding features they change old features so then you have to go back and relearn everything. This is especially difficult when it comes to clocking specific buttons that have moved or when words change. For example, when adding contracts, it used to say include in expiring copies and now it says exclude.
PLEASE CREATE A FUNCTION WHERE YOU CAN HAVE MORE THAN ONE TAB OPEN AT A TIME. i.e. dispatch and sales orders split screen to one another. So, you don't have to lose your spot closing out of sales ordered to put in a service call.
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.
I have used many different ERP programs over the years. It's hard to compare e-automate to other programs because a lot is dependent on the client (size, needs, etc.). I would probably put e-automate in the lower tier when stacked up against some of the other solutions. I think at one point, they were much higher, but we haven't seen much technological advancement from e-automate over the years, where the other companies have really moved along.
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.
