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.
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Upwork
Score 7.2 out of 10
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Upwork headquartered in Mountain View, California offers their eponymous freelance management system (FMS).
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.
I would recommend Upwork to a colleague as a solution to workplace issues. Our company has utilized Upwork to vet out potential competitors as well as partners in a lengthy data analysis project, as well as given our engineering team extra hands when implementing new products, projects, and features. This has allowed our company to stay on track with projects without in-house manpower.
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.
In my opinion the worst customer service. It is impossible to contact them via phone, and they are not transparent about their decisions.
I feel they don't have the freelance community's best interest in mind. Their focus is on the companies that pay. Freelancers are disposable.
They charge ridiculous fees to the freelancers that are the ones that need the money the most because they are the ones starting their businesses. It is like if your employer charges you for coming to work.
Support has been great. Rarely have I ever had an issue that has required support but when I have they have been great. I did have to interact with support to confirm my identity and the process was easy and quick and support was helpful to know what I needed to do to accomplish that task.
Upwork is better suited for finding contractors that you can have ongoing relationships. Compared to Fiverr, it's a much easier process to find qualified designers rather than one-time contractors to design simple things for you. The interface is easier to use as well and the billing management makes it so much cleaner and easier to know how much we're spending and how contractors are logging work hours.
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.
We have gotten close to 50% of all of our clients through the platform.
Upwork backs the work done through the platform, so no matter what the client or person you are working with does, you get paid for the work that you do. You aren't left hanging after doing hours of work for a client and then never getting paid for it.
Made it easy to communicate with clients from different parts of the world and set up partnerships and agreements in an easier fashion. I would highly recommend it to anyone with a unique skill set.
