Item: Accruent EMS
Rating: 10
Author: Dana Mims

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

EMS is used across our institution. We use it for managing all classes and event spaces. We also use it to communicate needs with service providers - catering, event and classroom tech support, facilities, card services, guest housing, public safety, transportation, and card services.

Pros and Cons

EMS allows us to communicate with our campus partners in a number of ways - via auto reporting, notifications or reminders, depending on the preference of each user/group.
The customer service team is always well versed and extremely helpful in knowing the software so they can help us tailor the system to best suit our needs when we have questions.
Reporting options are really flexible. Having the option to create queries outside of the canned report options is truly helpful.

One area that needs to be better developed or looked into is the Master Calendar. As universities continue to looks for ways to provide one-stop shopping, it would be helpful to have a place that easily streamlines event data and event marketing in one place. Students want to go to one place to see events and plan events. Master Calendar was a good start but it is ancient and very disjointed from EMS.
We would love to have the webclient back. We have several users that use an ipad or apple computer and the webclient allowed that functionality.
One area for improvement is managing system changes. As the EMS administrator for the university, it would be great to be able to add a new building or category to EMS and add those items to all existing templates, reports, etc in one place.

Return on Investment

We have seen a significant cost savings in time management. The time it takes to communicate about event needs as a whole is drastically reduced through use of the software.
The system allows us to do a significant amount of reporting, reducing the need to export and/or manually manipulate the data to get reports regarding events, resources, classes, etc.

Alternatives Considered

EMS is much more advanced that R25 and allows more reporting capabilities. Communications with services providers is also leaps and bounds above their capabilities as well. EMS is considered to be the industry leader and standard for most higher-ed institutions.

Scalability

I think EMS is a great resource for higher ed institutions, but I am not sure it would be worth the investment for small orgs or one-off departments.

Product Configurability

I think it is just the right level of complex. I am currently working with two other products on the opposite ends of the spectrum and find that EMS is just right. With one system, I need IT's support to manage and changes in the system and requires me to know coding. With the other, we are so restricted in use and have to work with the system company to make any changes and sometimes they charge extra for the changes. For this reason, we are considering using a different company for the latter. I would not recommend EMS going in that direction.

Likelihood to Recommend

EMS is a great tool for managing campus space and events. It is also well suited to manage service providers as they relate to events (though there are some restrictions for catering). It is however not the easiest to use to market those events, even though all of the event data is stored there.

Users and Roles

94 - Events Management
Library & Technology
Registrar
Catering
Facilities
Campus Theater
Card Services
Athletics
Campus Activities & Programs
Transportation Services
Public Safety

Support Headcount Required

4 - Tech support
Flexible
Someone who can see the bigger picture
Collaborator
Organized

Business Processes Supported

Events Scheduling
Clase Scheduling
Resource Management
Service Provider Management
Metric Data

Innovative Uses

Managing university vehicle fleet
Managing guest housing

Future Planned Uses

Emergency Planning
Understanding energy use/sustainability efforts

Likelihood to Renew

Haven't found a product that comes close to the functionality that we need

Other Software Used

Cvent Social Tables, Banner Student, Adaptive Insights, a Workday company

Products Replaced

Yes - Resource25 - limited capabilities in managing resources, classes and events

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Third-party Reviews

It was important that we found a system that could manage class scheduling, service/resource schedule, and event scheduling.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I would ask more questions about future product developments and enhancements, including timing.

Implementation Rating

be sure to gather your key stakeholders as well as your general daily users to feedback and process flow; It is helpful to ensure that as you build the system you are keeping all users in mind.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Third-party professional services

Dean Evans/EMS implementation team

Implementation Phases

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled

Implementation Issues

since the system is used for classes, events, and summer conference schedule, deciding the best time to transition took some discussions
cleaning up internal processes to make the best use of the system

Support Rating

Since the merger, our team has found that there are a select few of the tech team that can actually support our questions. More often than not, we have already tried the suggestions that they give us and they are either unable to answer our questions and submit them as update suggestions or they have to be sent to supervisor for an answer. Once or twice in the last year we have received bad advice that resulted in system issues.

Prior to last year, the customer support system was at the top of the list of tech support departments that I have ever had to deal with, especially during our upgrade to 4.0.

Accruent EMS Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Good followup Problems get solved Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	Slow Resolution

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

General scheduling
using the dashboard to manage event statuses
adding resources
making event changes

Difficult Tasks

on the end user side for web requests - reserving events over multiple days with different times

Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions

Yes - N/A

Bucknell University Review

Overall Satisfaction with EMS Software