Infor Distribution SX.e vs. M1

Overall management of companies operations including sales, inventory control, warehousing, accounting (ar, ap, and gl). We are able to take a customers order, provide information if the product is in stock, send the order to the warehouse, pick the order, deliver the order using our custom routing program built inside SX.e, invoice the order upon receiving shipping feedback, and then collecting payment within SX.e. We also use SX.e for our purchasing of products from our vendors, tracking the products, entering the products into inventory, and then updating each location with the current inventory. We also are able to track pricing and vendor rebates as well as special price adjustments within SX.e.

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

• Integrates with supported 3rd party solutions
• Very customizeable
• Robust

Incentivized

• 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

• User Interface customizability
• Q&D programming
• Database management

Incentivized

• 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

It is very customizable and has lots of scalabilities. However, it can get out of control if not contained with proper business process control.

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

We use a Channel Partner and don't interact with Infor directly for support.

Incentivized

Support has been great and timely

Incentivized

SXe fit our distribution model and it allowed us to customize it to our specific needs that were not available in the other solutions. The 3rd party integration was also a nice benefit as we use multiple solutions that were not part of the SXe Suite.

Incentivized

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

• Ability to stay on top of Inventory as not to carry too much overhead
• Keep Inventory set to FIFO
• Manage deliveries to keep cost per stops to a minimum

Incentivized

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

Incentivized