M1 ERP

The ability to drill down between modules is wonderful. I've never used a software that allowed this so seamlessly.

The lack of online inquiries through the internet from fellow users that might have experienced something that isn't typical to help others figure it out. This can be technical or a way to resolve a process issue.

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.

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.

If you are able to deploy, implement and customize M1 for your company without any support from ECI this is a good option.

Support is terrible -
ECi was unwilling to respond to any of my questions on the software's functionality. I have paid for maintenance and support on 9 licenses for over 15 years and they will not even respond to my online request. When I finally called in and waited for a live person they insisted that I needed to pay for training in order to get answers to general use questions about how to setup and use different functions in the software. After 2 hours of paid training I had very few answers to my questions and my trainer "[SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]" had a list of questions he was going to "get back to me on". It has been several weeks and once again I have no answers and "[SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN]" is ignoring my emails.

Once you understand the features and how to navigate, it is a fairly easy software to use. Information is easy to find. It is also easy to query for information.

There are not any modules available that we know of that can assist in training to understand the features that M1 has to offer. There are several features that we don't use. Features that we wish we knew more about are scheduling and the possibility of integrating a bar code scanning system. Our IT admin has been working on this with M1.