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EMS, or Event Management System, is a versatile software solution widely adopted by colleges, universities, and organizations for …
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What is Accruent EMS?
EMS Software is an enterprise space management, event, class and resource scheduling application acquired and now supported by Accruent in June 2018.
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What is Accruent EMS?
EMS Software is an enterprise space management, event, class and resource scheduling application acquired and now supported by Accruent in June 2018.
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What is Accruent EMS?
Accruent's EMS Software connects people with the right spaces, resources, and technology, solving today’s workspace and scheduling challenges and enabling organizations to get the most from their modern work and learning environments.
Employees want the flexibility to work from anywhere and to collaborate using their preferred technologies in a safe and social environment. At the same time, leaders need to drive value for their businesses by making the best possible use of their real estate footprint. Multi-use spaces, hoteling or hot desking, and open floor plans can provide efficiencies, but not when burdened with redundant, outdated tools, and processes disconnected from the rest of a business.
So EMS Software is provided as an intelligent, enterprise-class scheduling and resource management software platform, configured and integrated to a unique office environment. The vendor describes it as a management tool that offers the flexibility employees demand, while providing users the visibility, control and insights needed to drive value for the organization.The vendor further boasts deep industry expertise, with over 35 years in the business .
Accruent EMS Features
- Supported: Self-Service Meeting Booking
- Supported: Desk Hoteling
- Supported: Digital Signage
- Supported: Video Conferencing Integration
- Supported: Web-Based Booking
- Supported: Managed Space and Events Approval Workflow
- Supported: Invoicing and Billing
- Supported: Utilization Reporting and Custom Queries
- Supported: Catering Management
- Supported: Academic Planning and Optimization
Accruent EMS Integrations
- Microsoft Teams
- Google Workspace
- Workday Student
- Microsoft Outlook
- Crestron Room Signs
- IAdea Room Signs
- Embrava Desk Signs
- Envoy Visitor Mangement
- Zoom Video Conferencing
Accruent EMS Competitors
Accruent EMS Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Mobile Web |
Frequently Asked Questions
EMS Software is an enterprise space management, event, class and resource scheduling application acquired and now supported by Accruent in June 2018.
Reviewers rate Availability highest, with a score of 9.1.
The most common users of Accruent EMS are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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- Business Problems Solved
EMS, or Event Management System, is a versatile software solution widely adopted by colleges, universities, and organizations for scheduling and managing events. The system efficiently books rooms, tracks conference room reservations, and facilitates communication between service providers. Users appreciate EMS for streamlining scheduling processes across the organization, from classes and meetings to events. It also helps with work assignment delegation and managing services for internal and external events.
Hospitals also benefit from EMS by using it to schedule conference rooms and manage room and catering requests. For example, TIAA integrates EMS with Outlook, creating a one-stop booking experience that includes features like Webex and attachments. EMS goes beyond room reservations and effectively manages non-room items like banner spaces and van usage.
EMS provides comprehensive support for academic scheduling, event management, and non-academic space management within universities. Many departments already use EMS for event scheduling, with plans to implement it in more departments in the future. In fact, the University of Kentucky relies on EMS more than any other university in the nation for scheduling across all buildings.
EMS is invaluable for risk management and logistical planning. It is utilized in conference centers and other school units with unique spaces. Real-time utilization data allows users to evaluate meeting spaces and classrooms' efficiency. By effectively managing resource allocation and service allocation, EMS enables efficient operations across different departments.
EMS plays a crucial role in enhancing safety and security efforts through essential reporting capabilities. It is used campus-wide for managing catering orders, facilities requests, IT requests, and room reservations. Various groups within an institution benefit from EMS implementation, including the Registrar's Office, Athletics Department, Performing Arts Department, Auxiliary & Event Services, among others.
Overall, EMS receives high praise from users due to its ability to streamline scheduling processes, allocate resources efficiently, and optimize space management within organizations. Its wide range of use cases makes it a valuable tool in educational institutions, conference centers, and organizations requiring efficient scheduling and event management.
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(1-25 of 68)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
EMS software is used by our registrar's office as well as other departments across campus. In my department, Notre Dame Studios, we use EMS to schedule services, resources, and space. It has helped us manage all of our resources in one place.
- EMS allows us to schedule our staff, equipment and rooms that are needed to complete our services.
- EMS process templates allow flexibility in scheduling among different types of users across the University.
- The book view in EMS allows the staff to view the day ahead in a glance.
- When using the calculations option in pricing, it is almost impossible to report on those amounts. We currently have to run several reports to get the details needed. It can be very tedious pulling the data together.
- When entering payments it would be ideal to allow a batch of reservations to be shown as paid, rather then entering each reservation number individually.
- When processing invoices, it would be ideal if the invoices could be emailed as a mail merge instead of one invoice at a time.
We use EMS to schedule all meetings on 12 departments. It handles all of our meeting problems pretty well. At our office of the department there are only two meeting rooms for 87 workers and 9 squads. We can book a room easily.
- Implementation takes little time.
- Easy to interact with other reporting tools.
- Enables everyone to easily access and utilize data.
- Interface, I think it's a little bit hard.
- Of course, price.
We've been using EMS for several years now and have found it to be efficient and easy to use for both desktop and web based clients. We have very few issues and when we have, we have had a positive response to our questions. We are not yet using it campus wide, but hope to incorporate other buildings in the future. Right now our student union buildings and visitor's center are the only buildings that use EMS.
- Easy scheduling
- Convenient to look at what is taking place on campus
- Multi-level information; seems endless on the amount of information you can track.
- Knowing the scope of what can be accomplished before configuration process
- Would like the capability of better separating features between the individual buildings
July 18, 2022
Satisfied
I am the campus administrator for EMS. I oversee all event scheduling, consult on academic scheduling, as well as coordinate with IT on upgrades, implementation, client installs, and troubleshooting.
- Response time by EMS support staff
- Greatly reduced double bookings
- One stop shop for all campus event needs, resource allocation, and billing
- Numerous “glitches” lately
- Some support staff needs additional training
- Monthly patches that require attention and time to implement
June 24, 2022
EMS - it truly is a one size fits all software!
We use EMS on a department level for room scheduling in our student center. In addition to scheduling, we can provide room usage reports to upper university management.
- Invoicing
- Reports
- Scheduling
- Make it easier to select multiple rooms on a reservation
- Create a common list of reports
- Easier every day user interface
We use Accruent EMS to help build transparency for room availability for our stakeholders: students and staff. The use case for our org is having different stakeholders with different booking privileges, whether it's boardrooms, multipurpose rooms, hoteling stations, promotional tables. Through the Accruent EMS web app, we enable some stakeholders to place a tentative hold on the space and then the room owners approve the space without the need to go through multiple iterations of emails to request a space. Other stakeholders use the desktop client to see and request for space.
- Easy to navigate
- Quarterly updates
- Showcasing use cases of other clients
- Desktop client only available on windows OS, macOS users must have parallel desktop or a virtual box loaded with an image of windows
- Should transition to 100% cloud-based platform without the need of desktop clients
- Minimizing outages
March 16, 2022
EMS Live is a Must
We use EMS college wide to for academic scheduling and in our capacity to manage group reservations both with internal and external clients
We use it to manage our event space, classroom space and now use it to book AV services, shuttle buses for college events, requesting public safety officers and for financial reporting.
- Schedulng space and requesting space to use for internal clients. Also good at identifying conflicts with space that may arise as academic classes always take presidence for event space being utilized.
- Booking reminders for business, for example it helps me manage tasks I need to complete by a due date such as contract payments due, etc,
- Tracking client transactions and client issues
- Financial reporting is difficult to do through EMS, I wish we could have a system that synced with our business office accounting database (CARS). We report revenue in EMS and the business office logs in a completely different system.
- Reminders for clients- currently I send reminders to clients, I am notified of due dates in EMS and have to go to Gmail to send a reminder. Also under reminders I wish the reservation # showed up on the dashboard like it does under notifications view...
- A better way to merge contracts from EMS to a Word document
May 10, 2021
Overall, EMS Excels at Space Management
Accruent EMS Software is being used by our department primarily, the University Conference Center, to manage our meeting and event spaces, as well as all physical resources (equipment, A/V, etc.) associated with that. We also use this to track and manage our client database. In addition, it allows us to produce our contracts and develop and generate several reporting features that benefit our business.
- Booking/reservation of space - manages convertible/shared spaces (such as multi-section breakout rooms) exceptionally well.
- Group/client management - tracking of contacts and associated reservations
- Reporting - easy to build custom reports and a plethora of useful, standard reports
- User Interface - could look a little more modern and cleaner
- Staffing/event coordinator management - develop more support for managerial tracking and support of event planner staff use/reservations
- Automated report delivery message text - ability to add a email message/body to automated report delivery
October 26, 2020
Accruent EMS Review
We use it throughout our Events and Conference Services Department. It ensures that we are utilizing our space to the optimal level and staying organized. It also streamlines communication from bookings to setups.
- Organization
- Communication
- Easy to Use
- Ability to highlight certain points
- Be able to "un-cancel" events and keep details
October 21, 2020
Very customizable and flexible to your needs
The whole firm uses Accruent EMS to book conference rooms along with any additional services in those rooms. It allows us to have a complete look at meetings firm-wide. It also allows us to track the client matters for those rooms.
- Easy to use calendaring system for all conference rooms firm-wide.
- Allows add-on services for all of those rooms. These services can be customized per office.
- Track billing (if required) of those services
- Allow access to the system by role so some users can edit and others can just view.
- Reporting can be confusing for new users.
- Mobile app that shows technicians their responsibilities (this may be available but we haven't implemented it)
- Easier Administration. So many of the features are not intuitive where you would edit them. If this could be streamlined, that would be great.
September 25, 2020
EMS Review
Across the entire organization for hoteling and meeting management.
- EMS is extremely customizable.
- Advanced research and reporting capabilities.
- Catering and service order tracking and lifecycle.
- API Calls
- Improved Desktop Performance
- Enhanced settings for override description room for a managed meeting workflow
September 19, 2020
EMS Software: A great option for your team.
Our conference services team utilizes Accruent EMS for managing conference space for our client's entire footprint. We use it to reserve space and detail events for the client as well as using it for statistical reporting. We are able to provide accurate reporting on a variety of topics that help the client better understand their space usage.
- Accruent EMS is very easy to use. It has a straight forward approach to entering information, making us very time efficient.
- It has a great ability to create personalized reporting to focus on specific needs requested by our client.
- We utilize the API to work with digital signage on our account. This has been a very helpful feature for our team.
- Would like more flexibility with utilization reporting criteria.
- Auto-triggered notifications are a nice feature but would like the ability to edit the outgoing messages a bit more.
Accruent EMS was a replacement product from a program that required a great deal of maintenance. The beauty of this program was how little maintenance it needed once it was up and running. We started off by allowing all users to access it to create their own reservations and, then, took advantage of its flexibility. We changed the "Buildings" to "Conference room," "Vehicles," and "Outside areas" as we only have one - very large - campus. That allows a user to select one of those instead of "all" and see only what they provide. For example, if I'm looking for a vehicle, I don't have to sift through all the room and garden areas to find one. Another advantage is how Accruent EMS keeps everyone up to date on events and their details, alerting each department of what is expected of them when/where. This worked great for years and allowed me to print reports of upcoming events so we could meet every other week to hash out campus and staffing obstacles. However, recently, our company decided it wanted one person inputting most of the reservations so we could keep a Master calendar more consistent having someone who knows what details should be added to every reservation and to force the departments to give more descriptive summaries for publishing. Once that person created it in the user's name, they still have access to see it for reference or to ask for additional details to be added. Accruent EMS is a huge program with so much to offer and we have tried to take advantage of all of it. The auto-reporting has been a great advantage to the technicians who provide the actual services as they can receive those in email every day and know what's needed. They no longer have to depend on work orders or direction from administrative staff. The reminders, confirmation emails have also been a great advantage. I am the IT support for the program and I rarely have to deal with it, which frees me up to tackle bigger network issues.
- Auto-emails to service providers
- Easy reservation process - little need for training staff
- Report creation
- My Page - allowed me to post short video links and campus-related alerts.
- Accessibility: Two ways of using it - one for super users and another for staff
- Room Details: I could add images, directions, alerts
- Alerts & Special instructions: Can be added for individual rooms as necessary to pop up when choosing the room.
- Making background changes is easier for me (IT person), but may not be for a regular user.
- HIGHLY recommend the purchaser read the administrative paperwork. I did and tried to load and configure it myself and actually did most of it correctly. However, I would recommend having an EMS technician show you, then you do it. That allowed me to learn the back-end really well so I could make changes throughout the years.
- Two-step process to add a user to really use it. After they try to use it, they need to alert me to do the second step to complete their user profile.
September 08, 2020
EMS is straight forward software for conference room scheduling
We use EMS to manage our internal conference and meeting room space. It is used extensively throughout our organization. It allows our staff to reserve meeting space and designate food service.
- It allows cost accounting.
- It avoids double-booking meeting space, thus it prevents confusion and wasting time.
- We have had issues with the EMS plugin for Outlook. Sometimes the plugin stops working after Microsoft Windows updates. We have to uninstall and re-install the plugin and re-enable it in Add-ins.
- The client software must match the server software. There is no backward compatibility. We have to track down all the users who have the client software whenever we upgrade the server.
September 19, 2019
A Review from a Canadian Post-Secondary Institution
EMS is used to manage bookings from various room owners for different rooms such as classrooms, boardrooms, computer labs, and multipurpose rooms. Student group leaders use Virtual EMS to request bookings. EMS Web Client is utilized for users that are using Macs or a wireless connection.
- Transparency for all bookings
- Easy to view details of all rooms
- Minimizes double bookings
- Pushing events to a public calendar events
- EMS web client is slow and clunky
September 13, 2019
EMS is very flexible and a very powerful tool if you have a good training-- but not an accounting tool
EMS is used across Columbia University. My department is using EMS to manage four different departments, one of them is Catering which doesn't have any building related. I am working in finance, so I have a general view of the behavior of these department business and the final procedures like billing, invoicing, and analysis.
I can see how EMS is very flexible in terms of event management, daily reconciliations and implementing resources and categories for types of uses. However, in terms of analysis there's a certain lack of consistency. We are missing an alternative option to void invoices since we don't want our past revenue to change but rather have the alternative of having a credit invoice instead.
- I can see how EMS in very flexible in terms of event management, daily reconciliations and implementing resources and categories for types of uses.
- EMS has a very good tools of utilization analysis tools
- EMS is so flexible that almost any type of business can use for event/bookings purposes
- We are missing an alternative option to void invoices since we don't want our past revenue to change but have the alternative of having a credit invoice instead.
- We would like to have more tax detailed reports
- Query builder is a great tool but there is some room for improvement in terms of making even more easy to use
September 13, 2019
EMS Software Saves Schedulers at the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is preparing to use EMS Software for event and class scheduling across our entire campus. Initial users will include the registrar's office, scheduling and event services, our alumni center and our business school; we hope to roll it out to additional departments within the next couple of years. This application and anticipated integration with other software will help aggregate our school's activities in a single source for better communication of information to customers and use by risk management services.
- The graphic user interface is well-designed and intuitive, which promotes productivity.
- It provides workflow functionality for schedulers and service providers to efficiently relay event details and status.
- The user-defined fields add the ability to customize reservation and space records to better meet campus business needs.
- Bookings contain a limited number of standard time fields (event start, event end, setup time, teardown time); more options here are desirable.
- Resource records are not as robust as some of the other areas, and could benefit from additional standard and user-defined fields.
- Applying blackouts to spaces (to prevent bookings during certain times) appears to be a challenge: we believe it can be done, but the process doesn't seem to be straightforward.
September 10, 2019
I could not do my job without EMS
EMS is being used to manage space and services in our Student Union Building. It addresses the the high volume of space requests, and inventory tracking. We use it to push a master calendar, bill for our event services as well as provide comprehensive space utilization reporting. With a 5 tier rat structure and varying access to different group EMS is the best tool for our job.
- It has excellent stock and customization reports. We have a responsibility to communicate the activity in the building to multiple stakeholders (dining, custodial etc) EMS allows us to create a custom report and automate it to send so we never miss a communication
- It has a robust amount of tools to assist you in both space and service management. The way the Process Templates (web intake forms) have been designed allow us to use logic based reasoning so that one form can handle complex events all the way down to a simple boardroom reservation.
- It has numerous integrations available to help make a seamless event management process including connections to 7pointOps and Campus Labs Engage which we use for our Student Organizations
- We desperately wish there was a simpler way to do invoicing notifications to our clients rather than the manual email process
- It would be excellent to simplify the rate schedule and pricing plan process. There are almost too many ways to change pricing. The ability to import an excel document of new pricing would make our lives much easier.
September 03, 2019
EMS Saves Money and Time
We use EMS across our whole university. We use it to schedule academic courses as well as events.
- Scheduling rooms and controlling traffic in the rooms.
- It is very helpful for resource providers to schedule their services in reservations within the system.
- It helps with safety and security by providing transparency of all the events happening on campus so that the university police department can see what’s happening.
- EMS does not provide a useful tool for scheduling people.
- Billing multiple clients is difficult for one event.
September 03, 2019
EMS: Event planning made easy
We utilize EMS at our student center to help manage and schedule all of our event spaces on campus. It used by our department and our department alone. The registrar's office utilizes 25Live. EMS helps us keep track of our events in a nice organized fashion and helps make life easy as an event planner, especially with the automated reports.
- EMS Software is very easy to read if you're trying to get a quick scope of what is going on in your facilities.
- The system is super easy to use, manage and customize.
- Teaching others to utilize EMS is easy as user.
- There are a lot of underutilized features I wish I knew were apart of the software from the beginning.
- The book interface could be cleaner.
- Other than that I enjoy using EMS.
August 24, 2019
EMS - our former room management system
We used EMS software to help manage our use of our facilities. As a church, it is critically important that we have a reliable way to reserve different rooms as well as communicate between our various teams about room usage (facilities, hospitality, event organizer, etc.).
- EMS is extremely powerful, can fit most organizations needs, and has several different offerings based on use
- EMS is a recognized industry leader and therefore integrates well with many third party packages
- EMS provides phone support
- It is hard to be all things to all people, over time we saw more focus on their larger clients in the design decisions they made.
- Their back end structure and support of their software was stellar; best in class - however in recent years I have seen that drop off.
August 23, 2019
I love EMS and think you should too
Our college has primarily used this to schedule all events and catering in campus. It primarily ran non athletic events, and we are now implementing the EMS course scheduling for the optimizations. A few specific departments really use it, primarily performing arts, and catering. Everyone else on campus uses it but not to its fullest extent and not if they can manage to not use it (no services or publicity required). The Grant and community outreach folks have finally discovered its usefulness for their reporting by principal investigators and for auditing purposes.
- Room optimization
- Parity for all users
- Reporting
- HVAC integration
- Support (recent not past)
- Customization of reports ( crystal or similar)
- I sometimes feel like it would be interesting to get sandboxed versions of other users' really well implemented environments for others to look at. And probe into.
August 21, 2019
EMS! Look No Further!
EMS is an integral part of the management of space on both the Allendale campus and our downtown Grand Rapids campus. It is used to manage equipment inventory, event specifics, internal record-keeping, and much more.
- Data collection and ability to access the data quickly
- EMS does an excellent job of responding to and considering feedback as they continue to make their product better and better
- The ability to use 7PointOps and Social Tables with EMS have been an invaluable to our operations
- We have connectivity issues at times. I am not certain this is due to hardware on our end or software issues.
- Regional customer groups are a good idea for us to take part in. This would allow us access to best practices of others
August 20, 2019
EMS great for conference center space
We use EMS organization-wide. We have a small conference center plus internal meeting rooms and conference bridge lines that we book through EMS. We have different price structures for internal and external clients and use various resources including AV, catering, and facilities.
- Flexibility. We can easily have different rate plans for our internal departments and for our external clients.
- The new web app is extremely intuitive and makes it super easy for general staff to reserve space.
- We can’t automatically associate an additional resource with external reservations. We charge a facilities set up fee for every room and currently have to add it manually to every booking.
- There’s no “rapid entry” of resources. Example, our event coordinators enter an agenda for every meeting but can’t do it all at once—they have to go back and enter another line for each different agenda item.
August 07, 2019
EMS Everyday
Our organization uses EMS to book meeting space across the United States and abroad. We use it for reoccurring meetings, multi-site meetings, town halls, and everything in between. The integration with Outlook allows all of the employees to seamlessly book meetings in calendar invites and adjust the locations as times or needs change.
- EMS seamlessly manages time zones, so when booking across multiple time zones you do not have to do any conversion or look at any charts to book in the correct time.
- Manages inventory, so if you only have a specific number of tables for example, it will inform users when the max has been reached and it will set out a sheet detailing where the inventory is booked so it can be managed appropriately.
- Overall, customization is very nice with EMS. You can create your own views to group rooms together. You can pull a lot of different reports, or run queries to gather other information. You can change room names easily. You can add a pop up to individual rooms if there is information pertinent to users before they book that space. You can add features to rooms so someone can search for rooms that include only that specific feature. There is just a lot that can be done with the program to customize it to your needs--which can even be done differently from user to user, administrator to administrator.
- Catering reports could use some improvements. There is not a way to customize the catering reports to have it not only itemize the orders per booking, but also include tax. We have to pull multiple reports to be able to complete billing with our caterers.
- Adding a new Item such as a new building or a new catering menu can cause challenges because there are so many little areas that MUST be updated for the new item to be seen by all users at all stages. Not only do you have to create the building and all the rooms, but you also have to add those rooms/building to each individual template, add it to the CONFIRMATION of each individual template, add it to the custom views created, ensure Web Users can view the rooms/building, and a few other places you didn't realize you had to update until you receive communication from end users that there are challenges. It would be nice if there was more of a one-stop-shop for adding new items.