Item: Accruent EMS
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with EMS Software

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses EMS to book meeting space across the United States and abroad. We use it for reoccurring meetings, multi-site meetings, town halls, and everything in between. The integration with Outlook allows all of the employees to seamlessly book meetings in calendar invites and adjust the locations as times or needs change.

Pros and Cons

Pros

EMS seamlessly manages time zones, so when booking across multiple time zones you do not have to do any conversion or look at any charts to book in the correct time.
Manages inventory, so if you only have a specific number of tables for example, it will inform users when the max has been reached and it will set out a sheet detailing where the inventory is booked so it can be managed appropriately.
Overall, customization is very nice with EMS. You can create your own views to group rooms together. You can pull a lot of different reports, or run queries to gather other information. You can change room names easily. You can add a pop up to individual rooms if there is information pertinent to users before they book that space. You can add features to rooms so someone can search for rooms that include only that specific feature. There is just a lot that can be done with the program to customize it to your needs--which can even be done differently from user to user, administrator to administrator.

Cons

Catering reports could use some improvements. There is not a way to customize the catering reports to have it not only itemize the orders per booking, but also include tax. We have to pull multiple reports to be able to complete billing with our caterers.
Adding a new Item such as a new building or a new catering menu can cause challenges because there are so many little areas that MUST be updated for the new item to be seen by all users at all stages. Not only do you have to create the building and all the rooms, but you also have to add those rooms/building to each individual template, add it to the CONFIRMATION of each individual template, add it to the custom views created, ensure Web Users can view the rooms/building, and a few other places you didn't realize you had to update until you receive communication from end users that there are challenges. It would be nice if there was more of a one-stop-shop for adding new items.

Return on Investment

EMS has allowed us to book more meetings efficiently.

Scalability

EMS is able to meet our needs and has grown with our company as it has grown. We are able to include new buildings and rooms as well as update catering information as it changes. The updates to the software and our ability to test it out before we introduce it live to all users helps us trouble shoot challenges and promote the benefits of the system overall.

Product Configurability

Overall, it is a good product. For our purposes, we are able to customize to our needs pretty easily. We can add new rooms, create new views, change room features as needed, update catering, send our AV team their reports, change bookings for Everyday Users, etc. We have enjoyed the software thus far.

Likelihood to Recommend

EMS is great for Outlook integration for the end users because it allows them to book and edit within their calendar. however, for Desktop users editing something made from Outlook it can be a challenge. We have had to cancel all rooms and rebook them if one room isn't available at a specific time but the others are. Or if someone wants to merge two different reservations from 2 Outlook invites into one large invite, we have to again cancel one and add it to the others. If the cancellations are not done correctly from the desktop client, then the entire invite can be cancelled accidentally and the end user has to start over again. These are more exceptional bookings than standard that cause problems. Most of our events booked in Outlook occur without challenges.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

EMS Everyday