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.
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Simpro
Score 7.5 out of 10
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Simpro, headquartered in Brisbane, provides business management software for the trades and services industry. The solution combines field service management with asset tracking and maintenance, project management features with resource scheduling, and invoicing. For enterprises, Simpro helps manage business complexity such as franchises, multiple companies or multiple locations with a tailored Simpro framework that aims to handle complexity while maintaining the simplicity of working with one…
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.
Simpro is well suited for job and team management, tracking inventory and the workflow is very logical. The mobile app for our field technicians works very well to clock on and off and then being in a position to report to a customer based on factual information has made invoicing a breeze! Reporting can be a bit frustrating especially on materials used on different cost centre numbers as you can only specify a job number, but not a cost centre number.
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.
As mentioned before, materials reporting could use some work as one cannot report by cost centre number, only by job number. It makes it difficult with large jobs with multiple cost centre numbers to easily extract information for reporting. Other than that the system is user friendly and easy to understand.
It is a great option for solar project management. It needs some improvements for real-time one-page reports, inventory management, scheduling and custom views. I believe these will come because they listen to their customers. I would also like to see some better training and not be expected to pay out of pocket for it.
Motorcentral, a software that is part of Trade Me and helps car dealer to manage their stock. Based on my experience, simPRO has way more features and better customer service. Motorcentral doesn't have help to keep most tasks under one system, the only real advantage is that they integrate with the car dealer website so that the stock is always up to date.
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.
