Decent customizable solution for smaller businesses
July 25, 2017
Decent customizable solution for smaller businesses
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Exact Global
We use Exact Global as our primary ERP system, controlling everything from purchasing and inventory to manufacturing load, sales, and quality tracking. We do not use all available modules, but use roughly sixty percent or so. This has been our sole ERP system for a number of years and we have customized it as needed to fit our ongoing business needs.
- Exact offers a large range of user defined fields, which is especially useful once you've built a base on the system and need to customize certain aspects. Just last week we added the ability to track customer training by model using custom UDFs.
- Engineering bills of material are tracked in Exact and the engineering BOM module is pretty intuitive and easy to use. Modification and drill down/up is not difficult once you figure out he basics.
- Inventory control is fairly simple and offers a lot of information and options to track different kinds of products. We use bulk and each UOMs primarily, but others are used regularly depending on application.
- The necessity to buy individual modules to fit specific needs is a bit of a pain, it feels like you're being nickle and dimed.
- Revision control on bills of material and parts is not intuitive or easy. We have not purchased the engineering change module, but it appears it may be needed to really implement this.
- It's difficult to transfer engineering models from popular solid modeling software, requiring a third party solution to really make the transfer work as designed.
- Tracking bills of materials has been very useful. I would appreciate better revision control here and integration with modeling software.
- Quality metric tracking is not really done in Exact, instead in a sister software called Synergy. We have this and I don't particularly like it, especially for the cost.
- Shipping is still a bit clunky for us and we rely on more manual methods vs. the optional shipping module.
I've used other ERP systems in large organizations, one custom and one SAP. SAP is a very powerful suite of software, but comes at a price point that is unobtainable for many smaller companies. Exact is more realistic and accessible for smaller companies that are not necessarily global commodities, but instead smaller manufacturers in niche markets. I haven't had the opportunity to review many other options in this size range.