IFS Field Service Management (formerly Metrix) is the field service management application from Industrial and Financial Systems (IFS). It is built around features such as a contact center, dynamic scheduling, and service contract management.
N/A
Mhelpdesk
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Mhelpdesk is a field service software solution that manages field technicians, work orders, employee scheduling, and client billing. By combining and integrating multiple business management tools, Mhelpdesk provides a solution that eliminates double-data entry while giving business owners visibility over their field technicians in real-time.
IFS Field Service Management is well suited for ad-hoc reporting and querying of your dataset(s). It also is great for inventory management, processing orders, and handling EDI transaction sets to third party partners and suppliers.
Mhelpdesk is perfect for smaller companies and mid-sized companies I would say. Larger companies may need something a little more advanced for lack of better words or able to handle thousands upon thousands of constant work orders, etc. Smaller companies or companies that are mid-size would benefit from this program the most as it provides the necessary programming to succeed along with its ease of use.
Order Placement - IFS makes placing orders quite easy. From the simple interface down to selecting inventory, the experience is simple and clean
Reporting - Querying database records is straightforward and easy to do. Queries can then be drilled down to individual records or exported to excel for further manipulation and analysis.
Customer Creation - Creating new customers and managing and maintaining existing records is a simple and easily repeatable exercise
Field Customization - Adding fields or inputs to particular entities is not very easy. In a world of point and click development, IFS is behind the curve
Order Automation - for bulk order placement it would be nice to have an easy mechanism to upload orders via an Excel or csv template. We've written some custom programs to perform this, but a more user friendly, "out of box" solution would be welcomed.
I spoke about reporting, perhaps they can make this system a little better by integrating new ways to report, perhaps even several options .
The mobile app sometimes lags which can cause a few issues, nothing too major however.
Although the customer support provided by Mhelpdesk is relatively great, there have been times when things go unsolved or not taken care of within the amount of time needed.
When we first started using Mhelpdesk, RepairShopr was just a blip on our radar and didn't have the feature-set that Mhelpdesk did. RepairShopr looked great, but the Mhelpdesk had a lot more features. Every 6 months or so, I'd check on RepairShopr and it was growing fast and adding new features all the time. After a few years - the difference was night and day so we switched to RepairShopr and it's been a much better fit for our business.
Positive - streamlined order processing has allowed our business to scale without requiring additional bodies for that specific need.
Positive - Reporting has allowed valuable insight into historic business trends which has allowed us to be proactive instead of reactive in many areas.
Negative - Customizations have proved costly and cumbersome when upgrading to the next version of the software.
We are 6 months into it with a 50% rollout completed. We need more time to pass and full rollout to be completed before making a hard statement as to the ROI.
We have already seen greater efficiency in dispatching techs in regards to how many projects per day may be handled (we know of their downtime) and travel time mangement (by being able to map the locations and track them easier).
No negative impacts on ROI have yet to be seen nor are they projected.