Odoo vs. Viewpoint Spectrum

It is well suited for inventory tracking, shipping and sales work flows. While some customization is needed to make it functional, if done correctly Odoo can serves as a powerful one stop shop for all of a businesses needs. The ease of customization for email templates, both for sales communications and marketing outreach leaves something to be desired. Perhaps our team hasn't explored this fully enough. I have personally found it intimidating in trying to construct a news letter using the email marketing module

Incentivized

The Installation team is amazing. They provide clear guidance at the beginning of the process regarding what is expected and what needs to be done. The implementation manager follows up monthly with you to make sure you are on track and if you need additional help. They are very helpful and responsive in resolving issues.

Incentivized

• The creation of products is extremely simple, I like that it does not complicate you to put a lot of detail, of course if you want to put more detailed information later it allows you to do it without problems
• The fact that I can manage my inventory of my warehouse is very convenient, I only generate my stock report of the products we have in stock and taking inventory is easier
• The management of opportunities in the CRM is also great, because the guys from the sales department generate their opportunity, place what their client is requiring and we, the logisticians, can automatically generate the quote for what they are requesting, and from there they can only download their quote and send it to their clients.

Incentivized

• Job Costing - Viewpoint Spectrum handles job costing per project, per work order, per site, and gives us an up to date analysis of the project.
• HR - helps to keep all of the training certifications and HR incidents in a consistent and manageable order for all Managers to use.

Incentivized

• Customer service is nonexistent. You will need a 3rd party to assist you.
• The system has an open app for integrating with other programs. These are developed by third parties and can be hit or miss in functionality.
• The system offers great flexibility; however, it is too much and requires coding. For example, changing a Sales order PDF requires coding to modify the document.
• Initial implementation is clunky and seems to require a 3rd party just for setup.

Incentivized

• Support isn't readily available. You can submit a ticket and wait days before it's picked up. Even critical issues (system outages) can wait an hour or two before someone responds.
• Large companies will feel limited. This product wasn't designed to handle large amounts of data, and performance seems to slow when there are more than 80 concurrent users.
• The new developments are limited. HR Management is less robust than a third-party product specializing in HR Management. Viewpoint Analytics is nowhere near as robust as Power BI or Tableau.

Incentivized

The product is working for us and the cost to implement a new system does not warrant the expense.

Incentivized

Once you complete the training with Odoo, you have a great grasp of how the system works, and most every feature is intuitive- There is rarely a task within Odoo that I get frustrated trying to figure out- I can typically look through the system and find what I need to do, and if I ever do need support, the Odoo Support team is excellent

Incentivized

There's a little bit of a learning curve, but once you've been working in the system for a while, it becomes second nature. I would say that out of all of the other software that I've personally used, Spectrum has been the easiest one to pick up and learn quickly

Incentivized

I've never seen Spectrum down

For the most part the product is very reliable. Since we are hosted we sometimes have connectivity issues but I would say that is more our ISP than Spectrum.

Incentivized

Easy - there is NO SUPPORT (like in ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!!!!!). Even for legally mandatory requirements where the system MUST work, they will gladly take a month to get back to you with a NON-answer. We couldn't even get our bank statements correctly into Odoo for 2 months - leading to no reconciliation and the company accounts were a mess (still are!!) as a result - Completely irresponsible. Have not EVEN had an apology from Odoo - they couldn't care less !!

The support has recently changed. Last year, you could call in and get an immediate response. Now that doesn't seem possible unless you have an urgent situation with access to the software, payroll or payables. I have found that using chat or e-mail works nicely for the most part, but sometimes I feel it would be easier if someone from support would jump on our site and take a first-hand look rather than going back and forth

Incentivized

Our trainer was excellent and navigated the time zone differences expertly. She gave us test assignments to complete and was available for questions at any time.

Incentivized

My only insight would be to take time in your implementation and training process; ours was six weeks from start to finish.

Incentivized

We decided to go with Odoo over Netsuite due to a few factors. Price was a big reason why, Netsuite is the most expensive ERP we vetted. I also did not have a great experience with Netsuite at my last job. I was on the roll out team and it did not work as promised for POS, inventory managing or reporting, it crashed constantly in the middle of using it. Just over all very poor. Considering it is owned by Oracle and the most expensive, you would think it would be able to function on some sort of base level. That company ended up terminating their contract with Netsuite early and going with a different company.

We don't have crashing or error issues. I can complete receives, cycle counts etc and all of my information saves. Visually, Odoo is more satisfying also.

Incentivized

I have previously used Sage Masterbuilder, another construction industry software. This has been a number of years ago. The company I am working for already had Spectrum and have been using it for as long as it has been around when it was known as Forefront. Based on conversations I've had with the personnel that were here at the time of purchase, Spectrum clicked off all the boxes they were looking for.

Incentivized

You can grant user specific access which is nice. Project managers do not need all the same modules as Accounting. But Accounting does need access to PM modules as well

• In older versions, it was super expensive to make it even work. You had to hire third-party developers all the time.
• Newest versions have better built in functionality.
• Cost is pretty high. Odoo plus developers to support it could bankrupt a small business.

Incentivized

• [In my opinion,] it takes at LEAST twice as long to do our jobs now.
• [I feel like] we are paranoid about something not being printed correctly because of [what I believe are] buggy text fields.
• [In my experience,] we still have to refer to a physical file cabinet with paper, even though a main point of switching was to go paperless.
• [In our experience,] screens can now be "locked", so we can't see something if our coworker is also looking at it.
• [I believe that] the financial hit our company took from this switch was astronomical. [In my opinion:] Beware!