Find a real ERP. Don't buy this gold plated do-do.....
Updated July 14, 2022

Find a real ERP. Don't buy this gold plated do-do.....

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Aptean Made2Manage ERP

Made2Manage (M2M) has been used as our company ERP for a number of years now. It's used by purchasing, engineering, production, and customer service as the main company database. Purchasing utilizes the PO functionality, engineering creates the new part numbers and bills of material (BOM) for our equipment, the production uses it for restocking parts and BOM information, and finally, customer service uses it for selling parts to customers and for technical support.
  • It does tie the functions that we use together fairly well.
  • It's a very old platform and even when it was updated about 7 years ago, it still felt like we were in the MS-DOS world.
  • We requested that they have a warranty component when they did our upgrade 7 years ago and they told the purchasing manager that it was in there. When we got the final program loaded and running, there was no warranty component in the system, so their credibility went out the window in my book.
  • M2M does not do reporting well. We have to go out to the Aptean report writer to develop our own reporting functions rather than them being right in the software package.
  • Our purchasing manager still uses tons of spreadsheets. She should be able to do all her work in M2M. Not user-friendly at all from that aspect.
  • As I am not on that side of the house, I cannot answer this question.
No others in manufacturing. Came into this industry for this position so no other company I worked for utilized ERP.

Do you think Aptean Made2Manage ERP delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with Aptean Made2Manage ERP's feature set?

No

Did Aptean Made2Manage ERP live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Aptean Made2Manage ERP go as expected?

No

Would you buy Aptean Made2Manage ERP again?

No

This software is not user-friendly nor easy to train on. I train people for various departments and had argued for the company to go with another company. I was not alone. When the time came for us to do an upgrade (necessitated by the advent of Windows 10 compatibility issues), a number of managers at our organization wanted to seek out other vendors due to the difficulty in training people to use the software. Then have to deal with so many of the user issues and lack of functionality created by the need for using an outside software programmer to bring in software that interpreted what M2M was doing and then translate it back into the program so that we had an end-user solution. This software should be robust enough to do it all. It is not. I hate to be so negative about it but anyone that has spent as many years using this software as I have should find something good to say about the platform and I struggle to do that. I had asked for the warranty section that would tie into the return authorization process. I was told it would happen. It didn't. Bad karma.
I go back to the warranty segment of the program to help track expenses that were generated by returns and zero-dollar sales orders to resolve customer issues. I feel like I was lied to by the company. They said they would have it in there on the new release. They told the purchasing manager it would be on the new release. The purchasing manager assured me it would be on there. They even showed 'warranty loading' on the screen when you signed in. However, there was no additional component of the return material authorization process for warranty adaptation. I even challenged our upload team about it and they had no answer. It does a few functions well but in my personal experience, buy something else.
For parts sales, M2M is not a good program. There are too many glitches that happen between the sales order process and the shipping process. At the same time, we have to work with outside vendors to make certain functions work in the program. Or it has to work outside the program and communicate back to the main software. Way too clunky.

Aptean Made2Manage ERP Feature Ratings

Accounts payable
6
Accounts receivable
5
Primary and Secondary Ledgers
5
Journals and Reconciliations
5
Configurable Accounting
3
Standardized Processes
6
Billing Management
6
Cash and Asset Management
5
Travel & Expense Management
5
Budgetary Control & Encumbrance Accounting
5
Period Close
7
Inventory tracking
1
Automatic reordering
2
Location management
2
Pricing
4
Order entry
4
Cost of goods sold
4
Order Orchestration
2
Dashboards
2
Standard reports
3
Custom reports
3
Role-based user permissions
2
Single sign-on capability
5
Budgeting and Forecasting
3
Project Costing
3
Cost Capture
3
Capital Project Management
3
Customer Contract Compliance
4
Project Revenue Recognition
3
Bids Analyzed and Compared
4
Requisitions-to-Purchase Orders Integrated
5
Fulfillment Management
3
Production Process Design
2
Production Management
4
Configuration Management
2
Work Execution
3
Manufacturing Costs
4
Inventory Planning
2

Using Aptean Made2Manage ERP

65 - Purchasing department staff Engineering department staff Production department supervisors and reorder staff Technical supports department staff Parts sales department staff
We have no internal Aptean support.
  • Reordering parts stock for production and sales
  • Part number creation by engineering for use in production and sales
  • Bill of material (BOM) creation
  • Parts sales to customer for repair
  • Production staff use for BOM information
  • Unit pricing based on cost
  • If it had sufficient report creation capability within the software itself, a lot more cost analysis could be done.
I am not in the decision making group any more for this product. When I was, I along with many other managers, voted to go with a competitive product software vs re-subscribing to Aptean for this product. We were convinced by certain parties at our work that the new product was head and shoulders above the old product. While they freshened up a few things and there was an increase in some functionality areas, it was still tired.

Evaluating Aptean Made2Manage ERP and Competitors

  • Price
Decision to go with it was made by a select few individuals that were very knowledgeable in the older variant, so they wanted to stay with something they knew, vs going with a probable improvement of performance with another MRP/ERP system.
Equal vote by all managers without internal influence by a few.

Aptean Made2Manage ERP Implementation

The actual implementation was no worse or better than other software updates. There were days of pain and additional training helped overcome a lot of the learning curve associated with that. However, that training came from our own internal staff vs anyone from Aptean.
Change management was minimal
  • Finding out after the fact that certain functionalities didn't actually exist in the updated software package, even though we were told that they did exist. Nor were they even going to try to make it happen. Basically told "we don't do that". Sold a bill of goods.

Aptean Made2Manage ERP Support

ProsCons
None
Slow Resolution
Poor followup
Less knowledgeable
Problems left unsolved
Not kept informed
Escalation required
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
Support doesn't seem to care
Slow Initial Response
I can't answer that question, as the final decision was left up to a select few people.

Using Aptean Made2Manage ERP

ProsCons
Feel confident using
Do not like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Requires technical support
Not well integrated
Inconsistent
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • None, really
  • Even though it has a sales component built in, its not really built to do any type of retail sales
  • No warranty system built into the return authorization authorization process to track warranty costs, especially those where a part or parts have been sent to a customer at no charge to do a warranty repair.
  • Finding items in the 'Item Master' where part numbers are housed is a real chore to work with/too many potential search fields to look through vs one location to do a search.
  • The system in many fields make you think you have tons of character space to use, but the fields are deceiving because you can type in info and you can't fill in the space that it looks like they gave you to do any particular function. Its only a 12 character field, then make it look like a 12 character field. Clunky