Powerful but the UI makes it a mediocre product.
January 12, 2019
Powerful but the UI makes it a mediocre product.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate
It is used across the entire organization between Heavy Job and Sage 300, it is implemented by the field, the cost department, and the executives. We do change management, cost coding, cost reports, field reports, and revenue recognition. Essentially every facet of our business is carried out through Sage 300. Although it can be clunky at times, as an organizational tool it exceeds our expectations, but it has a lot of room for improvement, especially pertaining to the user interface.
- Sage 300 does a wonderful job in change management. Trying to manage a $90M job is difficult enough, but having over 60 change requests makes it essentially impossible if it wasn't for this module.
- Summary Reports. This module is the only way to get a true litmus test of the job. We use this during every monthly meeting and would probably be lost as to the status for the job without it.
- Transmittals are a masterpiece on Sage. I don't say this too lightly, but by all means it is an absolute masterpiece. When we have all different PMs doing all different transmittal, it's wonderful to see them all in one place following one template. No more trying to collaborate people's emails into a folder hoping they all are formatted the same way. This is a completely underappreciated facet of Sage 300.
- The user interface is not good, flat out. The style in which you access the information looks like a primitive version of Microsoft. In addition, there is a lack of congruence between certain screens. With some modules, you press the 'X' in the top right exit, with some you have to press a 'cancel' button, and then another cancel located elsewhere.
- To be honest a majority of the issues I experience can be correlated to the user interface. It is by far the worst aspect of Sage 300. With all due respect, Sage has a wonderful product that needs a new coat of paint. I'm hoping with the future updates they will take examples from other organizations in order to bring the UI into the 21st century, because their format is simply archaic.
- Sage has completely changed our culture at my company. At first, our field reports were not detailed, as they were not giving us quantities to actually track the job. We had no clue what the progress of activities was, because it was a general 'How are things going?' "Good" conversation. Now we track our progress quantitatively.
- We have been able to track and organize our change events to actually recognize revenue on particular jobs. We had so many Change events being lost and this simplified that. It allows us to pursue these events and actually recognize revenue. Overall this is an amazing benefit of Sage.
- As an organization, we have been able to identify losing bid items and avoid those in the futures.
To be completely honest, I think Sage is worse than JD Edwards. The user interface is by far the worst I have seen in this industry. It's as if every other company lives in 2019 and Sage is living in 1998. The largest flaw I have seen in a program that debilitates the program is this user interface. So Sage, if you're reading this, please hire some consultants to fix this. It's unacceptable to have such a powerful tool hidden behind such an ugly and nonfunctional interface.