Can't respond to your clients, vendors? Go to KINTONE!
March 06, 2022

Can't respond to your clients, vendors? Go to KINTONE!

Shin Kishioka | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Kintone

At our company, we have two major goals we wanted to solve using Kintone. The first one is that we have small niche items and products but many types we resell, and I have been constantly bothering our team members about the last quote, last sales of particular products, and wasting their time. We(I) wanted to minimize our team members' time looking for past shipping documents, or sales-related documents. Some of the items or products we only have once-a-year inquiries and we certainly don't remember in our head the pricing, lead time, etc. Second, on another aspect is the expense reports, vacation requests, contracts/agreements we wanted to go 100% paperless and track the approvals.
  • Agility and flexibility in creating variety of apps for your office work.
  • Leave notes for particular people for each threads.
  • Logs and traceabilities.
  • Ease of use.
  • Fast implementations.
  • Trial collaboration apps with outside organizations and partners.
  • Ability to send emails from Kintone
  • Clarification on Collaboration capabilities with accounting software
  • Better visibility amongst our members
  • Saving time but saving more time LATER
  • Better recording and logs for our activities
Overall mostly great, but depends on Kintone's available resources, the timing, our capabilities in expressing what we want (clients usually don't have this), and the lack of available types of support by Kintone.
We need 1 min per application examples of automation so that we may be able to understand its capabilities. Right now, most of everyone does not have the time.

Do you think Kintone delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Kintone's feature set?

Yes

Did Kintone live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Kintone go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Kintone again?

Yes

During this pandemic with the high turnover rate at many companies, as a supplier, vendors, or clients, we would like them to use Kintone so that in case anyone leaves the companies, they will be able to find our past transactions, inquiries, and businesses to seamlessly take over and receive the support from them and vice-a-versa. I Hope Kintone has much more collaboration options with the outside companies of ours that we work with day-to-day. We are all heading into automation and seamless collaborations with our vendors, suppliers, and partners. We would need a much higher level of such options ready.

Kintone Feature Ratings

Platform Security
5
Platform User Management
5
Reusability
5
Platform Scalability
3

Using Kintone

8 - They represent wide range of functions and they are Marketing Research, Administration/Accounting, Sales, Technical Support, Import/Export, Business Development, Office Services and others.
1 - IT Services and web development, but these are not required skills but better or easier to support Kintone rather than not having at all. However, most of the Kintone applications can be supported via non-IT person without any problem. People with better communication skills is also important to listen to other members of the company to reflect the features to the Kintone apps., etc.
  • RFQ/Quote/Lead Management
  • Expense Reports/Vacation Requests
  • Contract Agreements Management (Digitization)
  • Collaborative ideas and Project Management app with outside partners (testing)
  • Purchasing approval purpose
  • Seamless integration with the suppliers (eliminate emails)
  • Seamless integration with the logistics companies (eliminate emails)
  • Employees calendar memos (last minute) incidents/notifications (eliminate texts)
I still think that there's a room for Kintone's future, and high expectations for them in additional features and innovative tools and supports. Truly hope that they will support email features, and standardized supports for various plug-ins with the 3rd party software and apps. In the meantime, we will have to consider our ways of doing our work in all aspects.

Evaluating Kintone and Competitors

Yes - This is not a complete replacements yet, but as our phase 1, we were able to replace our paper and many of our Excel files laying around all over the place. We still have to do better job in the identifying of how we use Kintone, Google Drive, etc., but we have been able to use Kintone now for the minimal requirement for managing our business docs. that are legally required.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Prior Experience with the Product
There's no single important factor these days on anything. With fast changing World we live in, we must have the product that has these minimum requirements, Price, Product Feature, Usability, and Prior Experience. For the price, the product must be flexible to adapt to the changes in the way do businesses and easily can be change with the competitive pricing.
Our evaluation and selection process shall be the same.

Kintone Implementation

Everyone has their own tastes of things and way they want to work. Asking them to adapt to the changes with the new tools or apps is always difficult. We would want to start with a very small but best example within the organization, which in our case was that the employees will not be bothered by the bosses by being asked to find the documents, status of the progresses, or major things/requests/projects.
Yes - In order for us to implement Kintone, we must first eliminate our time to look for the past business documents in the office. So, we took the below paths. Phase 1: Inquiry app. implementation to reduce the time to look for the past quotes, inquiries, shipping, import/export documents, shipping costs, MSDSs, etc. This is especially used to support our low frequent transaction businesses. Phase 2: Project Management implementations we rarely have a very long term projects we tend to have difficult time managing the project phases. This is used in very important project. Phase 3: Regular day-to-day businesses, expense reports, vacation requests, etc. This is not only to reduce/eliminate papers but to keep the records digitally and avoid searching in the employees email archives. Phase 4: Purchase approval implementations. This is to avoid misunderstandings of who said what etc.
Not sure - Some of the business processes, approval decision-making processes were unclear within ourselves. All of these unclear processes are revealed easily by the implementations of Kintone. Certainly, some of the business processes or approvals are sophisticated but most of the time, these clarifications done by implementation of Kintone clarifies our members and lead to better understanding of our businesses.
  • Too much Kintone notifications and requests coming to certain people.
  • How to make it manual and digital processes using Kintone.

Kintone Support

ProsCons
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
None
No. Did not know of the Premium Support availability.
There are multiple times, but just to mention two experiences, one was when we were trying to setup a test app for Kintone to connect to our partner company, they were able to revise my test app in front of my screen in live. Second experience is when we needed to support our client in coming up with them to connect and have few hundred individual accounts (very sensitive private information) to the end users without fail in a timely manner.

Using Kintone

Kintone is agile app and most of the time we can easily come up with new apps. However, there should be more feature-based drag and drop and or a visual-based usability, as we all want to minimize the number of clicks and dropdown menu selections as much as possible.
Thanks.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Transforming existing form-based functions to Kintone
  • Transforming existing excel-based functions to Kintone
  • Clarifying the approval levels and flows
  • To come up with a way to indicate/display the concepts for the re-seller's app with mark-up calculations etc.
Yes - Yes, it works well except that lot of times the Kintone apps works or integrated with attached documents, we usually use PCs especially during the pandemic, with much less travel time or on the road to use the mobile interface.