GoSpotCheck by FORM enables brands to streamline their sales and merchandising team's surveys, audits and reports through mobile data collection. Companies can arm their teams with GoSpotCheck's mobile app to get real-time information about merchandising, product line performance and competitive research.
N/A
IFS Field Service Management
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
IFS Field Service Management (formerly Metrix) is the field service management application from Industrial and Financial Systems (IFS). It is built around features such as a contact center, dynamic scheduling, and service contract management.
GoSpotCheck has been great when we want to collect data regarding price, number of items, yes or no responses and pictures, however it is not best used as a tool for audited large number or products. It is fairly easy to do this in the app but the data from the backend is a little bit of a nightmare! I'm hoping one day this can be looked into and provide a different way of collecting the multiple select question data to better suit audit data.
IFS Field Service Management is well suited for ad-hoc reporting and querying of your dataset(s). It also is great for inventory management, processing orders, and handling EDI transaction sets to third party partners and suppliers.
Ease of designing and creating survey questions for field team to answer. It was so easy to edit, add or remove questions so that I could alter what I wanted to see in real time.
Ease of completing survey on mobile device. While it was important for the data to be collected, it needed to be done efficiently. The app was easy to use, navigate and made filling out the surveys quick.
Customer Service- whenever we had a question or an issue, customer service was there to solve the problem quickly and effectively. Typically an email was the best way to get a quick answer. Their service and sales teams would also help us build missions to ensure we are capturing the data we want to capture and were able to export it and read it the way we wanted.
Ease of the back end system, not just building missions as previously stated, but also reading and exporting the data and photos collected.
Order Placement - IFS makes placing orders quite easy. From the simple interface down to selecting inventory, the experience is simple and clean
Reporting - Querying database records is straightforward and easy to do. Queries can then be drilled down to individual records or exported to excel for further manipulation and analysis.
Customer Creation - Creating new customers and managing and maintaining existing records is a simple and easily repeatable exercise
Field Customization - Adding fields or inputs to particular entities is not very easy. In a world of point and click development, IFS is behind the curve
Order Automation - for bulk order placement it would be nice to have an easy mechanism to upload orders via an Excel or csv template. We've written some custom programs to perform this, but a more user friendly, "out of box" solution would be welcomed.
We used to use a product called "Stay in Front." This was a product that was used prior to my arrival at Alliance so I don't know a lot of the ins and outs regarding comparison. I have heard that Stay in Front had a much better auditing system, however retrieving pictures from the software was a little cumbersome and not as efficient as what GSC has set up for its users. The ability to pull data quickly and consistently for our clients is so important and one of the reasons why we made the switch. GSC is also often updating and upgrading the software to include more functionality and this is something we can really take hold of.
The ROI was difficult to measure in dollars or units, but the data and intel we were able to collect and provide to our buying teams and use internally was invaluable. We no longer have the team collecting data in the field and it's a huge miss.
Alerted marketing team of competitor's promotions, merchandising and POP
Alerted product team of new products coming to market, feedback on new products in market, and consumer feedback on our products
Visibility to inventory standings and areas that needed improvement
A way to track in store planogram changes and total SKU count by brand - used to leverage our products in line review meetings
Ability to capture endless photos of merchandising and new products to have a visual at meetings
Positive - streamlined order processing has allowed our business to scale without requiring additional bodies for that specific need.
Positive - Reporting has allowed valuable insight into historic business trends which has allowed us to be proactive instead of reactive in many areas.
Negative - Customizations have proved costly and cumbersome when upgrading to the next version of the software.
