Interprise Suite and its users
Hi Everyone,
Sorry was away from this forum last few months and wanted to pitch in my 2 cents, again i'm not siding anybody here just the facts.
We have been in ERP space for 10 yrs and have seen the mighty empires rise and fall, bugs, fixes, releases, patches, version, support, customization etc etc ... and I can say honestly there is not even 1 solution out there which is perfect and fits all business...
When buying/evaluating software's I would use same analogy as buying real estates, in real estate you would look at price, location and type of house... you can pick only 2 choices third is dictated by the market ... similarly in software you can pick price, features & company ...
Let's say Jon Doe is our customer and he picks price (has pretty good budget) and wants more features so his 3rd choice wld be company which cld be NetSuite/Everest Software/SAP Business One.
If Jon picked low-medium price/budget and more features then Interprise/Evolution can be his choice...
Other side of grass always looks green, step in you will always find bugs/issues/enhancements etc you have to coz its called software development life cycle you can't run away from it ....
With Interprise yes its support back in Philippines is not US standard (its good standard for Philippines but for for US customers) the US support is pretty good and we deal with them and has been exceptional good at least the e-Commerce team ...
One of the most important factor in ERP is "Implementation" if you can't do it then you better not buy an ERP and you would rather buy non-integrated softwares like Quickbooks, yahoo shopping, etc and manually import or export data and spend way too much time ...
Implementation is "Key" if you can't do it then find a good reseller to implement it. The Total Cost of Ownership for an ERP software is
Cost of Software + Support + Maintenance + Hardware /Hosting cost + Implementation cost + Customization (if any) + Training = TCO (total cost of ownership)
We recently migrated our customer from another ERP system to Interprise and they are live after 4-5 mths of hard work, now they are able to conduct their business (e-Commerce and POS) they could have done better with IS 2009 version (if it was released) ....
You can read about it by visiting this link
We are working with another client who is going live in 2 weeks from now and we are confident we can get them there, its not easy but we understand the challenges and again there is no perfect company or ERP solution out there that will make everyone happy....
We looked at Evolution and Interprise back in 2005 and spoke to both Gary and Damian and felt Evolution had to evolve still but looking at some screenshots they might have evolved, but again I saw recently they called their product as Tradepoint and now after a week I don't see anything abt it so there are yet to launch out and with Interprise we felt after it was taken over by Taylor they may get some funding and we will see light at the end of the tunnel ... but i guess we yet to see it and we are hoping we see it ... but for now we are understanding this complex ERP system and trying to make our customers happy and get them a good ROI (Return On Investment)
Again i'm not here to confront somebody's experience or views or thoughts, these are real facts that we face day in and out and I thought of sharing my view that I have witnessed in this ERP space for SMB (Small and medium business) ...
Interprisesuite: STAY AWAY
My company has personally attempted to go live and evaluating the software. WHAT A RIP OFF!!! Read the forums. This software does not work. IS support is support is horrible. call yourself.
The management team is just putting out fires for pissed off customers.
don't waste your money. i am willing to talk to anyone personally if they are considering this. STAY AWAY!!!.
Tons of bugs.. you will loose your mind trying to make this garbage work.
STAY AWAY. THIS PRODUCT STINKS FROM THE SALES GUY TO THE SUPPORT GUY!
Responding to your post abt the Interprise Suite Blog
Quote:
Originally Posted by
interprisesuite
I was making cross reference with regards to support and maintenance of ERP software with car industry, it doesn't have to BMW or Merc Vs Interprise or NetSuite. I was referring that support is essential for such integrated systems and the vendors have to build a good framework and the mechanics have to do good job while servicing the car.
This blog is maintained by us for our IS prospect & customers and this is not Interprise Suite's blog this is InfoSourcing managing it.
Thanks for visiting our blog and continue to read it, we have some good news to follow ...
Interprise Suite New Owners as of March 1
I just received a long email from IS. To quote a small portion:
"On March 1st 2010, Interprise Software Solutions Inc. was acquired by a group of private investors from the Taylor Corporation."
"Gary Harrison, the original Founder of Interprise Solutions, will be returning to daily operations as the V.P. of Product Development after working for the company as a consultant."
It goes on to list the improvements in support and feature plans for new versions.
Maybe there is a much desired resuscitation in process here. This appears to be real movement. The website has finally been updated a bit and the email promises much more for the users there. Time will tell.
The Latest From interprise Solutions
It’s been a few years since I posted here but thought I would clarify a few things. I apologize for the long post but I’ve been away a long time and feel that a detailed explanation is only fair given the number of posts made here.
As many of you long term forum reader know, I was one of the founders of Interprise Solutions and was on the forum quite a bit a few years back.
Reading through the posts, I would have to agree with many of the negative comments made about Interprise Solutions over the past two years.
In early 2008, Interprise was bought by a large multi-billion dollar company which quickly brought in its own management and turned most of the original management team into “consultants”. Within a very short period of time each release became worse and worse as the focus went from creating a great product to finding ways to increase revenue by turning the programming department into a services group that they could bill time for. In short, “why have our developers fixing bugs when we can bill out their time” became the business plan. Realizing that this was no way to run a software company, the executive management of the parent corporation elected to divest Interprise Solutions and in March 2010 Interprise Solutions changed ownership to a group of investors that includes a happy user of our product.
Since then most of the original team has been brought back and we have been 100% focused on product quality and openness. Our latest releases have been stable and our new community website features forums, blogs and other venues for ecosystem of customers, partners and employees to interact.
To respond specifically to a few of the comments made in this thread and a few of the other threads on this forum:
Stock Allocation Errors: Many of our customers had reported stock, costing and allocation going off balance from 2008 to early 2010. This was especially true for companies that were using the stock allocation related screens that are turned on by default in the UK version but hidden by default in the US version. This no longer seem to be a major issue in the latest US releases with less than 2% of our customers reporting these balances going off in the past 4 month. We have been able to bring those customers back in balance by running a “stock fixer”. In our upcoming 6.0 release we will be making some design improvements that not only eliminates the possibility of these values going off, but is also 20x faster.
Sales Tax Calculation: We calculate sales tax “per line item” using 6 decimals as that is the correct way (different items can have different tax rates). The problem is we are posting the sales tax to the general ledger per line item instead of per transaction which can create a rounding issue by up to a ½ penny per line item (general ledger items are posted in the number of decimals of the currency – i.e. 2 decimals for the usd). Because one line item could round up by a ½ penny and the next round down by a ½ penny this is not a major issue for most companies. With that said, we do recognize that this can be an issue for certain companies and in our upcoming 6.0 version we have made several improvements to our tax engine which now includes posting to the general ledger per transaction. I apologize it took so long to get this changed.
Since the change in ownership six months ago we have accomplished the following:
- Three major releases with each one adding improvements to stability and performance. In all, over 500 enhancements. A forth major release, 6.0, will be the largest release ever for us as we upgrade our program to the latest technology and implement a number of community driven improvements.
- Two entirely new modules – Shipping and Live Chat
- An entire new product – eCommerce Plus which is NO COST TO DOWNLOAD for UNLIMITED WEBSITES / UNLIMITED USERS (see more details below). We feel that this product is a game changer.
- An entirely new website which is fully community driven with forums, blogs, groups, new features suggestions, facebook like profiles (you can even login with your facebook ID), etc. Feel free to visit our community to see what our users have to say about our products.
- Increased our support department by over 300% and implemented completely new systems and processes to increase response time and resolution time.
- Seen the majority of our former partners return to selling and supporting our product line.
- Launched a community marketplace of add-on products and services. There are some incredible add on product to Interprise that help you with everything from fixed assets to a fully integrated multi-channel marketing product that goes far beyond anything else in the market (i.e - can dynamically reprice your products on multi-channel markeplaces based on competitors prices and your cost). Want to use another cart like Magento with Interprise - yep, there is even a app for that. :)
- Launched our cloud based platform that allows you to run Interprise on your Ipad, Smartphone, etc.
- Brought to market our new Interprise Merchant services. This will become an important part of our value proposition in the years ahead. eCommerce gateways are very poor for mail order /telephone order transactions and a complete waste of money for point of sale transactions due to their higher rate. By offering our own credit card processing mechanisms inside the program, we can save our customers a considerable amount of money in fee’s and gateway charges. Also, in future releases we will be offering a “credit card” vault to our PCI certified environment so that you can allow customers to save their credit card details to simplify future orders.
- Brought Ezra Weinstein into the company to head up our new POS / Mobile Technologies division. A new POS module is in development and it will be a game changer when released.
- And much more…
Back in the late 90’s I lived in China for a while where they had an old proverb that went something like… “once you get bit by the snake, you don’t trust the rope”. As poorly as Interprise has done over the past few years, I can understand the hesitancy to take another look at our products. For those that may be still interested, this week we released out our new “eCommerce Plus” product which includes our eCommerce module, ERP Back Office Modules, Shipping module and our new Live Chat module. eCommerce Plus is free to download UNLIMITED USERS / UNLIMITED websites. The only restriction is that you have to use our merchant services (we will meet or beat your current rate and we do not charge a gateway fee) and pay a 1% transaction fee on credit card transactions. In other words, we only make money when you are successful with our product and you can upgrade to our full product (with no transaction fee) at anytime. You can download eCommerce Plus today at our website. Please note that our merchant services are only available in the U.S. right now with Canada and the U.K. coming very soon.
I hope this clarifies some of the issues of Interprise in the past as we work to improve the future for our customers and partners.
