ETO by Social Solutions Review
Pros
- The main dashboard page/portal is attractive in color and font design.
- Honestly I'm really trying to be fair, but there is nothing this software does particularly well from the users standpoint.
- Some of the support staff have been responsive over the years.
Cons
- Still waiting for a seamless connection with SOMS (Strategic Offender Management System which is CDCR's main software for the State). We have been promised these two systems would speak to each other, but there has been zero progress in 6 years, and locally, ETO blames SOMS which is not helpful since SOMS is robust and functional unlike ETO-ARMS. Human manual entry of data dumps has been the "solution".
- The interface is far from friendly or intuitive. It also has serious functionality issues. It requires multiple duplication and excessive clicks for data entry (ex: entering the same date multiple times, not showing pertinent required info on the same screen, not remembering last entries and ERASING previous data entered when entering new data, using different terms for the same action, disallowing some corrections, not speaking to itself on basic logic - like having to enroll an individual profile just so you can tell the software to un-enroll him in 3 different fields etc). Another big problem is the reports generator cannot be trusted as the data is often wrong or dated (perhaps because it requires data from SOMS which speaks a different language).They don't understand how to filter previous entries and terms, so the coding is probably defective or misunderstood at the root. This is taxpayer funded programming that the state legislature requires for budget decisions. Entry touchpoints have fundamental basic flaws and reports are basically garbage. We have so many examples of issues...too many to list here. 2-3 years ago a team was set up to assess contract renewal with ETO, and despite multiple examples of problems submitted, we have zero progress, the team was disbanded and the contract renewed.
- I understand that the issues we are dealing with may have more to do with the way our product was customized for California, and not necessarily the software's inherent capabilities, but either way, the ARMS part of ETO has become somewhat of a running joke. Even an ARMS support Manager admitted to me that ARMS "sucks". In my honest opinion the entire ARMS suite should be trashed and rebuilt with consultations from actual users. It is costing countless man-hours of lost productivity and employee frustration. Sorry but we have been dealing with these problems for years.
Return on Investment
- That's not my wheelhouse so to speak, but I [think] hundreds of thousands of dollars if not millions have been wasted in lost productivity due to this flawed software.
