Expanding on Expandable
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Expandable is used to manage order entry, inventory, purchase orders, and engineering change notices. It is used by each department - purchasing, production, shipping, sales entry, and engineering. Purchasing issues Purchase orders and manages the requirements from orders. Production uses it to control inventory to account for what has been sent out each day. Shipping includes the tracking numbers in the order entry after it has shipped. Engineering keeps track of the Bill of Materials as well as the changes to boms and part numbers.
Pros
- Great way for everyone on the team to see the same information - sales orders, inventory, purchase orders etc
- The support team is always very responsive!!
- Very customizable to create links between screens
Cons
- Data entry on certain tasks can be very tedious (for example effected parts on an ECN)
- Sometimes data connections for upload are very slow or just flat out fail multiple times. The problem is intermittent so difficult for support to track and fix
- Certain fields cannot be pulled on a report and require engineering time to create a process to add functionality. It would be nice to have unfiltered access to all fields
Likelihood to Recommend
Expandable fits our companies needs quite well to manage inventory, sales orders, and purchasing. We recently started to also use Expandable to track ECN changes. The ECN functionality is a little limited in the fact it is difficult to add descriptions or parts affected after it has been implemented. I would recommend having an additional program for managing ECN history.
