Overall Satisfaction with Accruent EMS Software
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.
- 40% of my day was spent maintaining the old program...that EMS replaced. I spend almost no time maintaining EMS.
- Multi-day reservations: I've had a tough time getting staff to understand not to create a reservation from 12 am to 12 am...because of the auto-setup/breakdown time the system adds. It confuses the system once that auto time is added and a multi-day reservation starts at 11:30 pm the day before and ends at 12:30 am the day after.
- Multi-day: A user can't say it begins on Aug 1 and ends on Aug 5...through the web version. They create it for one day and then use 'recurrence', which took our staff some time to figure out. It then allows you to open and edit each day individually though.
We had used MRM before finding Accruent EMS. Before finding EMS, I received demos from multiple other companies, but none fit our needs. When I finally found Accruent EMS, I was impressed immediately, but before deciding, I gathered 25 of our 'super users' together and had EMS demo it again for all of them. They asked numerous great questions, but it didn't end there. Even after two hours, I received more questions so I scheduled another demo...and then another demo...I think we had that large gathering about four times before finally deciding. Everyone was excited because the technician that did the demos, had personalized a test copy so we could wrap our heads around it better. They spent a LOT of time with us, be we were so happy once we decided as a group to go with Accruent EMS.