M1 ERP

Benefits:

Good Sales Team :) Might be good for very small company but wouldn't recommend to any company. After trying other ERPs have almost no Pros except how they did Part Revision.

Drawbacks:

Software failed when was put to load. Worked fine in pilot but when needed to manage 1.4k POs on daily basis it couldn't do math. At one point had daily meetings with development team from Australia on issues but still couldn't resolve all issues. About twice a week were getting orphan records in DB, development team were no help on this. ECi started promising us new version but promise was sliding. After 8 month of deployment time and about 6 month after go live hard decision was made, search for new ERP. When ECi was asked to give us partial refund because their product didn't perform as advertised they revealed themselves as very bad partner. M1 also has major security issue.

In sum:

Before giving any attention to this product do your own research on it. Original M1 code was stolen from other company by former employees then followed by lawsuit in which M1 people lost.

Benefits:

What I like most about the software is how easy it is to stay on top of the General Ledger on a daily basis. If something goes wrong, I don't have to wait until closing to find the problem. M1 makes it possible to make corrections immediately.

Drawbacks:

1. We were told the job costing module would apply labor & burden properly. It doesn't. 2. We were told the BOM would upload to the job. It doesn't. That was an expensive lie for us. 3. When the guys make mistakes, it can be difficult and tedious to find and correct mistakes. 4. We made it clear from the start that one customization would be needed and would be VERY important. Numerous attempts have not gotten a result.

In sum:

Poor customer service is the biggest problem. There are some in "support" that are very good and know the software well. But there have been major issues with some of the "management" types and emails go unanswered on a regular basis. I honestly don't know what some of these people do. Once they get your money, they aren't really interested in helping.

Benefits:

M1 is incredibly visual; whether you prefer traditional forms or spreadsheet views, you can customize the navigation and data forms with ease. Search features are robust in the spreadsheet style views. M1 is also fairly flexible for customization regardless of programming skills. We can easily add fields to any module and forms can be manipulated to match our information flow. In our business every order is a custom order yet the straight forward manufacturing module makes planning and scheduling simple. Dashboards on the start screen are great to monitor daily activities. While most ERP implementations require significant work, the visual nature of M1 really helped us keep the project on track. The M1 implementation specialist spent time to learn our business and specific information needs. 9 months running and we are very happy. We have added several additional modules since the implementation and have linked M1 to our sales tax service provider. The suite of included reports are handy, though they need some customization when you start up. Export to Excel is very easy. We added Spreadsheet Server option to really increase the capability to share data with Excel. Security controls are very robust.

Drawbacks:

At times customer service response is a bit longer than we would like though once they are working on an issue, they are great at resolving. Some of the included reports are fairly complex yet require customization in Crystal Reports. Best to have some working knowledge of Crystal reports. Some modules in M1 are not consistent with others - probably different programmers or different schedules for upgrading - however that slows the process just bit when you move module to module.

Benefits:

The only thing that was good was the dashboard The software appeared to be ideal for a company making thousands of components in production runs - the very thing that we don't do.

Drawbacks:

The software is extremely clunky. it seemed that anything that could be done with 1 click in our old program program takes 5 clicks. Support was often vague - it didnt sound like support personell had the correct training They sold us a web app that they said was up and running, which was a large influencer in our decision as we required remote access to the CRM, however they hadn't finished developing it. They didn't seem to understand NZ laws Overall, the recommendation made by the company seemed to be motivated by getting the sale, rather than providing a solution that was fit for purpose.

Benefits:

Completely customizable. Access to consultants who helped us decide as a team why or why we shouldn't run something one way as opposed to another. They were very knowledgeable and insightful.

Drawbacks:

The consultants gave employees too much reign over the server and the potential to mess up the data base we were building. Their lack of support for the payroll module.

In sum:

The cost was extremely high although we were basically building our own system the way we wanted.

Benefits:

All the data you could ever need about your business can be housed in M1, between the data and the custom reports that can be made, it is a valuable tool to have.

Drawbacks:

Its clunky to use, most things take too many clicks to find and it feels like you have to go out of your way to find what you are looking for. It takes some work to make it user friendly in the least bit

In sum:

Everything from sales and marketing data, to employee data as well as financial data is housed in our M1 system.

Benefits:

The low cost of overhead to run M1 is its best feature. It is very robust, and runs day after day with minimal support required. M1 is very user friendly and intuitive. Also, the use of Crystal Reports on an SQL database allows for easy modification and development of reports that then are easily run from inside M1 giving users a seamless feel. We have had excellent support during implementation and post implementation.

Drawbacks:

I am anxious for continued development of the manufacturing floor scheduling.

Benefits:

Highly customizable to fit your needs User friendly Tremendous search capabilities Great service staff Highly reliable

Drawbacks:

Quality Module. Quality module lacks reports and some linking of data, however, we can create any report we need through Crystal Reports.

In sum:

This software continues to be extremely reliable. M1 is very innovative and always increasing the capabilities of the software by listening to the customers' wants and needs. We have been able to grow with this software and will continue to do so in the future. It was the best buy we have ever made in software.

Benefits:

This ERP software is very intuitive and very flexible relative to the previous software from Made2Manage that my organization ran for the past 24 years. The input of transactions is straightforward with minimal training, and searching for almost any data is substantially easier.

Drawbacks:

The only issue we've had any challenge with so far is with the conversion of our old Made2Manage data, which was an old FoxPro version into a pure SQL format. Some data came across easily, and some data didn't come across at all. We could have come up to speed running the new software much faster if we'd have been able to convert our M2M data in a more timely fashion.

Drawbacks:

Terrible customer support right from the initial implementation, we have had issues with this program from the very start and get 0.00 help...there is some hype that they will get our issues solved with no, or very little follow through, we just get sent from one person to the next and start from square one each time.

In sum:

We purchased this program more that 3 years ago, the implementation process was horrible! and they have done very little to help us get this program up and running as a result we are using about 10% of the program that we have paid for. we purchase a copy of Sage every year to handle our accounting, because we have not been shown how to use the accounting side of the program( I have never even looked at it to see what it looks like). We have tried to use the payroll side of the program and it was not accurate so we stopped using it.