Aptean Intuitive ERP vs. Aptean Made2Manage ERP

Intuitive ERP is particularly well suited to be used for small to mid-sized manufacturers. It has enough complexity to handle most any business process yet is simple enough to not be cumbersome. It is probably not appropriate for a very large organization or enterprise, or to non-manufacturing related businesses

Incentivized

It is good in manufacturing. It helps with planning and scheduling. Also, employees can clock on and off jobs simply to see what each job actually entails in regards to time, quantity and dollars. Shipping and receiving also utilize multiple functions inside of M2M heavily. I think it is less suited for anything outside of manufacturing.

Incentivized

• Easily allows adding fields to the database. The data manager reads all fields, so just adding a field automatically brings it over.
• Optionally purchasing a tool called "Form Wizard" allows non-programmers to add new fields to a form and move around existing fields freeing up the developer to work on other things.
• They have a wrapper for the DevXpress grid which allows individual users to add and remove columns pertinent to their specific job.

Incentivized

• Order tracking
• Customer database
• Report printing

Incentivized

• Lack of consolidations between systems
• No APIs yet

Incentivized

• Their support has drastically gone downhill over the last few years. For the amount of money paid for the support of their product, there should be no outsourced tech support, however, they have started doing that lately.
• The development team has no idea how to test a product or release patches in an effective manner. Our last major upgrade was not until the 12th revision of the software and there were still major flaws on the financial end. When I called them about it, they stated that they knew of the issue but had no plans for a fix until the next version release.
• There has been more than one occasion where I have informed them of a way to resolve an issue that should've already know about.

Incentivized

We have a lot invested in this from user education to customizations. It would be hard to justify the cost for changing.

Incentivized

I am not in the decision making group any more for this product. When I was, I along with many other managers, voted to go with a competitive product software vs re-subscribing to Aptean for this product. We were convinced by certain parties at our work that the new product was head and shoulders above the old product. While they freshened up a few things and there was an increase in some functionality areas, it was still tired.

Incentivized

This software is not user-friendly nor easy to train on. I train people for various departments and had argued for the company to go with another company. I was not alone. When the time came for us to do an upgrade (necessitated by the advent of Windows 10 compatibility issues), a number of managers at our organization wanted to seek out other vendors due to the difficulty in training people to use the software. Then have to deal with so many of the user issues and lack of functionality created by the need for using an outside software programmer to bring in software that interpreted what M2M was doing and then translate it back into the program so that we had an end-user solution. This software should be robust enough to do it all. It is not. I hate to be so negative about it but anyone that has spent as many years using this software as I have should find something good to say about the platform and I struggle to do that. I had asked for the warranty section that would tie into the return authorization process. I was told it would happen. It didn't. Bad karma.

Incentivized

I go back to the warranty segment of the program to help track expenses that were generated by returns and zero-dollar sales orders to resolve customer issues. I feel like I was lied to by the company. They said they would have it in there on the new release. They told the purchasing manager it would be on the new release. The purchasing manager assured me it would be on there. They even showed 'warranty loading' on the screen when you signed in. However, there was no additional component of the return material authorization process for warranty adaptation. I even challenged our upload team about it and they had no answer. It does a few functions well but in my personal experience, buy something else.

Incentivized

The actual implementation was no worse or better than other software updates. There were days of pain and additional training helped overcome a lot of the learning curve associated with that. However, that training came from our own internal staff vs anyone from Aptean.

Incentivized

We select Aptean 19 years ago, most of the other SMB packages back then no longer exist. While we have discussed whether to consider other ERP systems here an there over the years we have always come back to the fact that our existing ERP system is well established and easy enough to maintain, and is cost effective

Incentivized

We haven't compared any yet but hopefully, we will in the next couple years so we can put a figure on what it will cost us to move away from Made2Manage.

Incentivized

• Runs well without a ton of support
• One server license required for site, can run several businesses
• Concurrent licensing keeps costs down for global business

Incentivized

• I came on board after M2M was implemented so I'm not sure how it has changed from previous software. However, I do know it has the ability to grow with the company.

Incentivized