July 20, 2020

Underwhelmed and exhausted from trying to work with CMiC

Item: CMiC Construction Platform
Rating: 5
Author: Kathy Hogeveen

Kathy Hogeveen

Director of Finance & Administration

ROSSCLAIR Contractors Inc.Construction, 51-200 employees

Score 5 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Software Version

ERP & Financials

Modules Used

Accounting & Financial Controls
Enterprise Content Management
FIELD: Mobile Applications
FIELD: Project Management & Collaboration
Human Capital Management & Payroll
Project Controls

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This purchase has been 50% of what we had hoped for. We definitely feel oversold. The product delivery was fraught with errors that took months to be resolved, causing our implementation to take 18 months. Since that time we have consistently found the support to be weak and extremely slow.

We chose to stay with CMiC purely because of the amount of time and effort put into the implementation with the hope that their R12 version being released in May 2020 would improve the ability for their team to support their clients. We participated in the beta testing and all training that was offered in preparation for the changes to come. The new version crippled us for 2 weeks. We still have numerous issues not resolved. They have tried to be helpful, however, what was implemented is not what we tested. We truly do not understand how this went into production.

We have stepped back to reevaluate the decision to stay with CMiC and have found that all our project teams and finance department have become inefficient. We have all found workarounds outside the software to remain in the construction business rather than problem-solving with CMiC. The cost involved for our staff to use this solution is not worth the price of the software.

Pros and Cons

Real-time information from field to finance

User interface needs to be simplified to speed up entry
Support has simply got to improve in all areas
Drag and drop functionality needs to be added to project controls
Emailing directly from the software and allowing for replies to be recorded is crucial
Ability to see your GL entries in bank reconciliations
Allowing one cheque per vendor when they are on numerous projects
Being able to see all invoices awaiting approval by Project Manager
GPS on time tracking app for people in the field

Return on Investment

Improved project cost visibility
A 50% negative ROI with the inefficiencies

Alternatives Considered

Jonas Enterprise Construction Management Software

We moved from Jonas to CMiC. We found the payroll more difficult in CMiC.
Progress billing is equally difficult in both solutions, any time you have to make a change to a previous billing.
Jonas uses Digio for unapproved invoices and CMiC uses Imaging. Both programs do not give you a report of your invoices that are outstanding. This requires a manual calculation to be done by exporting the invoice details to Excel and then reviewing them in order to create any sort of an accrual entry. This is highly suspect and not an accurate way to record the biggest part of the AP figure on your financial statements.
Jonas's bank reconciliation program is better.
We never implemented project controls properly in Jonas so I cannot compare.
CMiC's standard reports are somewhat better than Jonas'.

Support Rating

They do try. However, we have numerous cases that have gone on for months without the original challenge being dealt with. We've been very frustrated with quick answers that have led to several back-and-forth conversations only to point the support person back to the original challenge. We gave them a lot of grace considering the numerous versions of the software they were supporting. However, their support delays have cost our company a lot of money.

In 2020, it is time for online chat support or at least a phone number. The current support system is ineffective.

Key Insights

Do you think CMiC Construction Platform delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with CMiC Construction Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did CMiC Construction Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of CMiC Construction Platform go as expected?

Would you buy CMiC Construction Platform again?

Likelihood to Recommend

The one positive thing we achieved by using this solution is real-time information between field, project controls, and accounting. This was a major reason we chose a full ERP. However, the software is simply too cumbersome to be effective. The number of steps it takes to create any document is too many. Other solutions do document creation with one-third the number of clicks it takes in CMiC.