Item: Accruent EMS
Rating: 10
Author: Alicia Bogart

Overall Satisfaction with EMS Software

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a conference center that purchased EMS Campus to replace our reservations system. Since EMS Campus includes unlimited users, we began to roll out EMS to other College/Schools/Units. We have sold 8 shares of EMS throughout campus and have onboarded units with unique spaces such as Parking and Transportation and Marine Science Institute. the roll out has been a tremendous success and we'll continue to expand our reach.

Pros and Cons

Pros

EMS is extremely flexible for different use cases
EMS support via sales/marketing is particularly good. Technical Support, at times, very good and not so good at other times.
EMS Kiosk/room signs app has improved tremendously, the look and feel, with the most recent release 27.1
We are excited to begin with Outlook plug in

Cons

Releases and Upgrades are a nightmare. We routinely feel as if we are their QA team vs the other way around
Perhaps naive on our part, we jumped into 44.1 immediately upon install and have been routinely applying updates. However, each time we release an update, new bugs are introduced thus requiring more debugging.
EMS developers don't provide "hot fixes" thus requiring to install yet a new release in order to correct one problem i.e. most recently, the kiosk clock was off and couldn't get this fixed until we rolled out 27.1, which was deployed a couple of days ago.

Return on Investment

For our conference center it has been a huge asset since we were required to modernize and get off a home made software platform. Furthermore, rolling EMS out to campus has been a financial success, since we now have 8 departments sharing in the cost of our investment and the maintenance.
Accounting/invoices could use some improvement. Our accounting staff is always having to go back and correct the annual ASA invoice for a variety of reasons, i.e. we have a % cap ceiling in our contract, etc. etc.

Alternatives Considered

A10 Thunder CFW

Scalability

Once we figured out how to roll the product, it has been amazing. We do the departments configuration, train them, support them with internal resources.

Product Configurability

No, configuration is endless. We have configured boats, parking spaces, dorm room, meeting rooms, etc.

Likelihood to Recommend

EMS is well suited for high education since your customer based is primarily in that sector. It fairly intuitive, we love the web app since that's how our customers are used to reserving space.

EMS room displays (Glance) was NOT a good experience at all. We we told to buy iPads to roll it out, we ran into a lot of issues with iPad/wireless connection because of the University's fire wall. Once we figured out how to pass the wireless/security issue, we began to notice the iPads were melting, probably because they were on 24/7. Now, we are in the process of replacing these iPads with Memos.

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EMS Administrator's Review