Compare ChannelOnline и PEP Technology

Benefits:

Easy to use. Professional looking quotes. Easy access from any computer or mobile device. Integration with vendors was simple.

Drawbacks:

It's a little expensive. And there are suppliers that are tied to it that shouldn't be. Otherwise, its a great product.

Summary:

Saves time. Allows my sales team to provide customers professional looking quotes. Easy follow up by having quote and sales data available from a... Read more

Saves time. Allows my sales team to provide customers professional looking quotes. Easy follow up by having quote and sales data available from any computer.

Benefits:

Compiling the catalogs of our primary distributors into a single source that we can use for quoting and ordering makes our work much easier.

Drawbacks:

Channel Online has to try and meet the needs of what I am sure is a vast variety of businesses, so not all their features will meet all needs for e... Read more

Channel Online has to try and meet the needs of what I am sure is a vast variety of businesses, so not all their features will meet all needs for every business and is lacking in some features that would be very beneficial, to at least some businesses like ours.

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Summary:

ChannelOnline's strengths are its time-saving measures: ability to get product information, check cost and availability from multiple sources, do ... Read more

ChannelOnline's strengths are its time-saving measures: ability to get product information, check cost and availability from multiple sources, do comparisons, and generate PDF quotes. Customer service isn't bad - the last time I had an issue it was resolved in a reasonable timeframe. Biggest weaknesses are reliability and inability to effectively manage large and complex quotes (e.g. HP Big Deals). The latter issue is not a deal-breaker - I only use ChannelOnline for simple quotes anyway. Reliability has become a major issue lately. The past 2 weeks I've been getting a lot of error messages and interruptions. I learned early on to hit the save button constantly or risk losing changes that I just made, but these latest issues just happen suddenly for no reason at all. The sad part is, there's no notification given from CNET of any awareness of the issue or timeframe for resolution. I've learned to resign myself to hoping it gets fixed eventually. Finally, why can't I utilize my older quotes? Why do quotes expire after a limited timeframe and then become utterly useless thereafter? If you guys can change this annoying habit, it would be a great timesaver.

Benefits:

Ease of use in creating and updating quotes in addition to adding new customers and editing new customers and contacts

Drawbacks:

Not very useful if the internet is down! Sometimes it doesn't pull in some of the product codes from some distributors.

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Summary:

I have looked around for years trying to find a better means of converting the PDF drawings I get from my customers into a cutter path so I can quo... Read more

I have looked around for years trying to find a better means of converting the PDF drawings I get from my customers into a cutter path so I can quote them accurately. A lot of companies talk about being able to convert a PDF, but usually if they can do anything it is only a Vector PDF. And, it's not a good a the software from PEP. PEP corrects the errors and cleans up the drawings. In most cases I can use the the converted drawing to produce the part on my laser, plus give my customer a precise quote. This even integrates with PEP's software for nesting the parts. By far, I have nothing the compares to it anywhere. Only negative issue is it is a little expensive, but I paid for it after quoting my second job.

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We recently got this at our shop. I'm a laser operator but also do programming sometimes. We "upgraded" to PEP and it is absolutely awful. We had C... Read more

We recently got this at our shop. I'm a laser operator but also do programming sometimes. We "upgraded" to PEP and it is absolutely awful. We had Cincinnati programming which worked great. Should have went with the old saying "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". In my opinion ita just a way to make programmers more lazy. Does not help laser operators at all.