Spectrum Will Run Your Construction Business, but it will take some work
December 31, 2019

Spectrum Will Run Your Construction Business, but it will take some work

Les Papp II | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

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.
Support has degraded since they were bought by Trimble(?). We Purchased when it was Dexter Chaney, then Viewpoint and not Trimble. We spend a lot of time on hold. If they cannot answer your question when you get to them on the phone or chat, you can wait up to weeks to get an answer, which is not acceptable. Plus they have "Know Issues" which are not published, so you only find out when you need the feature. Not many of the support team knows the whole picture, so many times you are stuck with the support person, who is waiting for the person who is knowledgeable in that area to get back to them, to get back to you, instead of transferring the trouble ticket to that person. We also do a lot of Crystal Reports, and their support and documentation (and knowing the table and fields in any given screen, are terrible). The Implementation team you get sets the mode, and not everyone is up to speed on your industry, and you get the luck of the draw, which can dramatically impact your time to get all the features up and running, as well as the initial training (which was lax).
As to integration within your company, you really need to get good trainers from Spectrum, otherwise you will flounder and it will take more time for you to get your system up and running. You really need to have people dedicated to taking the time to really learn the system. I have found a lot of trial and error, as the training is not on par. They do have an import option for the integration of other software, but documentation is not where it should be.
We looked at Oracle as an option, but it was too costly. This is a good system within mid-sized budgets.
Spectrum is more suited for horizontal construction, and less suited for horizontal construction (which we use). The other pro/con is that the modules are priced separately, so you can only get what you need or you pay for what you need depending on how you look at it. If you are looking for an accounting package that does track your production to a point, it is an overall decent package.