Item: M1
Rating: 9
Author: Vinicius Dadalto

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use M1 for managing projects, inventory, jobs, controlling costs, and labor. Although we are still facing some issues due to the learning curve, implementation, M1 itself, and customizations needed, M1 has been very helpful on inventory counts, shipping, controlling projects, and project/jobs costs. There are still several problems that we have been facing, especially on inventory unit costs (if set up as average), some errors caused by reversals, and some discrepancies in accounting. However, we are still investigating if the source of these is human error, conflicting customizations, or M1 itself. However, M1 is being great, and I am a heavy user of it.

Pros and Cons

Manage inventory counts. Good precision on quantities in and out, through shipping, MI, MR, and receipts.
Job costing shows great details on labor, operations, and materials to be used. I wished that would do better in outside operations that would return, but we still think it is great.
Ability to track changes (changelog), showing all changes that had in a particular place. Such as where, when, and by whom a line item unit price was changed in a PO.
Link, traceability, keeping history. If done correctly, it is amazing to keep the history of a part/lot.
The amount of user rights/customization is unbelievable. It can be hard to set up in the beginning, but it is great that you can give some very specific access to a user, and it is not (in general) as a package.

Inventory item specifications. It would be great to have more options and/or fields to add particularities of an item. Not needing to make different part IDs.
The lot selection screen should be customizable. This is a huge flaw of the system, causing several man-hours loss.
Although Crystal Reports is great, it would be great to see a 'report generator/editor' incorporated into M1.
Although SQL is not very complicated, some of the grid customizations should be easier for a regular user.
Inventory unit cost is not done correctly, not sure if it is our fault or if it is M1.
Backflush material in a job should work better. It not only with time cards associated with it, but should also work with a lot of trackable items.
Possibility to default decimal cases per item. Some have to be integer only, whereas others could be with several.
On Jobs and assemblies, could be better to specify the quantity needed. Quantity per assembly is not the best way always. Several times it will not work and/or will have a conflict with decimal cases.
Editing text fields is pretty annoying and comes with several errors.

Return on Investment

Time savings.
Job cost analysis.
Project costs evaluation.
Identify underquoted items.

Usability

Although it is great, Thera are still lots of places to improve. Some basic customizations should be easier. Some of the processes are not very friendly.

Key Insights

Do you think M1 delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with M1's feature set?

Yes

Did M1 live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of M1 go as expected?

Would you buy M1 again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

We are with M1 for almost 2 years and we have several customizations made. The improvements comparing to the past system are amazing. The biggest selling point to us was how customizable it is, and so far is doing good. In these 2 years in, I cannot think in a scenario that M1 wouldn't work somehow. The great thing is that even though we are very specific, we can always face the application in one way or another in the system. I believe that a lot of procedures would be out-of-the-box, but it is great that on M1 we can adjust for the specifics of the industry.

Sophisticated solution in need of better support.

Overall Satisfaction with M1