Overall Satisfaction with Viewpoint Spectrum
We utilize Spectrum in all of our departments. It is used for our accounting and for cost tracking of the jobs we work on, as well as standard accounting and payroll. It does allow the importing of data, which we can integrate our different production systems into Spectrum to bring in data on production and inventory. Features of getting invoice approval out to the field for Supervisors has been a great help, as it expedites the process as opposed to email and phone call. Since it is an ERP system, it covers many areas that are needed to run a construction company in the accounting area, but lacked good production management tools. We continue to evolve and integrate Spectrum into our business and have pretty much integrated AP, AR & Payroll. We utilize the production data in our weekly meetings to determine the jobs' profitability, though we have had to create customized reports to fully utilize the data we are collecting. Overall, it will work in your construction environment.
- AP: you can integrate your paper into their Document System and send these out for approval which will save a lot of time (assuming your supervisors do look at their dashboard and open the items to approve/reject, I don't think any system has come up with that solution).
- AR: with the integration of documents and the flow of AR, it is a system that will allow your departments to find out where you are in your finances.
- Overall, there are too many clicks to get items done in all areas. We would like to see a better flow when entering data into the system and allow some intuitive decisions so you do not have to click multiple times to get something done.
- Inventory - some of our items are mix types of raw or purchased goods. As we produce Asphalt the price of oil determines our Standard Cost in our Asphalt mixes. If you change the Standard Cost of an item that is a component to many mix items, you have to manually change the Standard Cost of all the items. Not fun when you have 150 mixes that need to be updated.
- Positive: It does have a lot of components that can help you move away from doing many items in spreadsheets that may not get shared or stored correctly. If the data is entered you can have quite a bit of information on hand.
- Negative: Many of the reports are not quite where they need to be, so you do need to have someone that knows Crystal Reports to get what you may need specifically to your company, as many reports just don't get everything you need, so there is cost involved with that.
We looked at Oracle as an option, but it was too costly. This is a good system within mid-sized budgets.