ECI Software Solutions offers e-automate, an ERP for office technology companies to automate business workflows and increase contract profitability.
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ServiceMax
Score 7.9 out of 10
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ServiceMax’s mission is to help customers with asset-centric field service management software. ServiceMax’s mobile apps and cloud-based software provide an overview of assets to field service teams. By optimizing field service operations, customers across all industries can better manage the complexities of service, support faster growth and run more profitable, outcome-centric businesses.
If you need a system to place and track sales quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, and service calls then E-Automate is perfect. However, if you want to be able to easily bulk upload customers and contracts or if you want to be able to quickly and easily track contract profitability, customer costs, etc, then you'll likely want/need a secondary or different system to do so.
ServiceMax boasts that it runs natively on the SalesForce platform however, in reality, it functions less as a native component and more so as a confusing doppelganger that redirects your work at every turn from its intended output to something else entirely. Although it blends right into SalesForce on a surface level it is by no means seamless as it takes every frustrating or slow element of its host platform and amplifies them, seeming exponentially at times. This is of course until you'd like the ServiceMax components to differentiate themselves in some manner from elements that are actually native to SalesForce. For example, let's say you'd like to run a report of tickets pending review for invoicing but both SalesForce and ServiceMax's service platforms have the record types "Ticket" and "Invoice", what do you do? Well, you get to take part in what will soon become your new top housekeeping task, hours of trial and error until you stumble upon the magic combination of selections that might get you *most* of your data. In short, ServiceMax is...
Painfully slow - I wrote this review while waiting for it to update a single line in Price Book)
I like the way I can create a sales order and right click and instantly create a purchase order for that sales order, and the process continues when I clear the PO, it releases the items on the Sales order for shipment.
Make sales invoices not require serial numbers, or be more flexible with it.
Make contract invoices have some sort of flexibility in terms of editing. Our end users complain that QuickBooks made it very easy to edit invoices, and in e-automate, for them, it is practically impossible. (I do personally understand why it has to be as it is myself, I'm just forwarding their observation.)
Make the API actually useful. I spent days looking at the functions and the functions available are not really useful.
The offline sync is very buggy and has many limitations. Recovery of the sync if it fails because of technicalities is in many ways, unrecoverable and unexplainable by the user.
No integration with Salesforce knowledge articles.
Support is limited and usually not knowledgeable about their own products.
Its really the only option for the industry that does enough of what we need for it to function . I'm not sure if there were better options out there if we would have to renew our subscription. With the addition of AI, hopefully something will be able to become more useful.
Reports are the struggle the most with the information being extracted in a way that you need to copy and paste it into a new document so some of the information is not covered
Sometimes when you need answers quickly, a voice on the phone is far better than having to wait for email support or a callback. I have found this to have delays and feel ECI e-automate should invest more in its support infrastructure.
I actually liked Microsoft 365 better than e-automate. The "flaws" that I identified in e-Automate did not exist in Microsoft 365. I did not select e-Automate - the software was selected several years before I started here. E-Automate does a few things better than Microsoft Dynamics - Bank Account Reconciliations and Sales Tax reporting are 2 that stand out.
ServiceMax has an offline capability, and also integrates with our Salesforce side of business. At the time, Salesforce did not have a field service application so we could not consider it, but if we could now, we would probably go with that instead. ServiceMax is also expensive. But at the time, ServiceMax was the only offering out there that integrated with Salesforce, had mobile offline capability, and could operate at the scale we needed.
E-automate has allowed us to trim down our internal workforce by not re-hiring departures. Our employees are able to do more with their time.
E-automate allows us to maintain optimal inventory levels, decreasing our inventory value by 50%. This is accomplished by using the rich analytics and reporting.
E-automates contract billing has allowed us to fine tune how we bill our customers and increase the accuracy by 30%.
