Aptean Made2Manage ERP vs. Sage 100

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

For small and medium business in the distribution and light manufacturing space, Sage 100 is probably the best bang for your buck. As a very scaleable system, you can modify the system to meet the needs of a growing business without making gross changes to the core of the system

Incentivized

• Order tracking
• Customer database
• Report printing

Incentivized

• Simple to implement and use. Operation very intuitive so new employees are quickly trained.
• It is very flexible with many modules and many features allows for easy customization to suit particular needs of any department or company.
• Context sensitive help, training and support make it easy for a company to operate with out a lot of additional outside tech support.
• Scalable plenty of room to grow as the business grows without being bloated.
• Pricing is very reasonable.

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

• Database backend, Sage 100 relies on the ProvideX database, which has limited ODBC functionality
• Document management. Paperless Office is not a robust solution for Sage 100 and feels like an add-on.
• Support. Getting support is tricky, and you will usually have to work with your reseller/support partner.

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

I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.

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

Overall Sage 100 has been pretty user friendly. If we have a question on anything, we are able to contact our implementation rep who helps us right away. Some of the Sage Field Operations may not be as intuitive for our field personnel to use. I wish the reports ran faster so that we could run and put together many reports quickly at once.

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

We use a local software technology partner to help support our Sage100 needs. We do not need much assistance with Sage100. There are very few issues or questions.

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 had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.

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

We have used Foundation and it did not work out well, so we selected Sage 100 because the implementation and functionality was much better. We didn't have to keep coming up with workarounds or complications on Sage 100. Also the data security is better.

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

• Sage 100 has allowed us to better serve & manage our customers since we integrated it into our system in 1996. Since then, we have seen a lot of changes but, the consistent, simple layout has kept us re-newing our contract year after year.
• Ordering inventory has been easier than ever since we integrated inventory tracking. No more ordering too much or too little.

Incentivized