Genius Solutions vs. M1

Genius is well suited to our fabrication business as it covers all sections that need to be addressed in one program e.g. shipping, receiving, Sales orders, Purchase orders, invoicing, Employee clocking times from the scanning machine. easy to navigate between modules where needed once you know how.

Incentivized

Implementation is by far the weakest link in the ECI/M1 process. Although the tool is powerful, the client is expected to drive the process of learning the tool, planning the meetings with consultants, identifying risks and making mitigation plans, etc. without any samples, guidance or assistance on the part of ECI. The tool is best suited to high volume, standard product manufacturers who build to inventory or to order without much variation. The shop floor routing and time tracking are straightforward if you can master the convoluted Unit Of Measure calculations. The tool is either hosted locally or accessed through Remote Desktop. Shop floor is web enabled but the main desktop for M1 is still a relay which makes connectivity a potential issue. Moving this platform to a truly web hosted environment would substantially improve connectivity and eliminate compatibility issues with Apple products

Incentivized

• It has a variety of modules and can customize reports or filters to suit all our needs.
• I appreciate that we can export and import from Excel.
• This freed us from certain tasks, automate certain processes and be more efficient in our work.

• Manage inventory counts. Good precision on quantities in and out, through shipping, MI, MR, and receipts.
• Job costing shows great details on labor, operations, and materials to be used. I wished that would do better in outside operations that would return, but we still think it is great.
• Ability to track changes (changelog), showing all changes that had in a particular place. Such as where, when, and by whom a line item unit price was changed in a PO.
• Link, traceability, keeping history. If done correctly, it is amazing to keep the history of a part/lot.
• The amount of user rights/customization is unbelievable. It can be hard to set up in the beginning, but it is great that you can give some very specific access to a user, and it is not (in general) as a package.

Incentivized

• Customization of reports can be costly.
• In my opinion the Quality section is not as good as we expected.
• For Customization we need Power BI knowledge

• Some of the functions are pretty detailed - and so they take a while to generate screens and pages in reports.
• We actually use it for 2 companies we own - and it would be nice if the inter company communication was a little smoother. It's hard to share some data, and not everything is possible to be shared.
• Customized reports need to backed up before any updates to M1 or they're lost. It seems M1 overwrites the report folders everytime you run an update - so you have to keep track of what you've changed in Crystal Reports and restore it.

Incentivized

Genius is easy to use but you have to male sure it's set up properly. You also have to make sure you understand what an ERP should do to know the right questions to ask when you contact customer support.

Incentivized

Because it would be helpful if ECI would provide better documentation, communication and workflows to understand how each field interacts within the system and how each of those touch other areas within M1. It would also be useful if ECI would provide prescheduled training for how to customize things with M1 through Design Studio

Incentivized

patient, friendly and clear explanations

Incentivized

Support has been great and timely

Incentivized

Genius had a far better implementation team and had everything we were looking for without having to super customize a product. The implementation was also far easier than expected due to their ability to manipulate spreadsheets and import them in. We are glad we went with Genius due to the flow of the software and the syncable database. The main thing missed about Quickbooks is the ability to easily fix mistakes by deleting transactions or edit them even after they posted. This however made financials less reliable

Our customization requirements were not that high and based on a price/cost benefit M1 was the winner. SAP was considered but the upfront costs and challenging learning curve together with the lack of flexibility in the SAP HANA public cloud version made the M1 choice more natural. SAP Services is usually more expensive compared to M1.

Incentivized

• Tracking job costs makes it easy to see where we are in the projects.
• We save a lot of time for the production of "repeat" jobs.
• With job tracking from start to finish, we can easily schedule deliveries.

• Time savings having to only enter certain information once and have it follow through the entire order process from quote to cash

Incentivized