abas ERP

Effective & easily customizable ERP software

Avantages :

- Using their inventory mobile app, our inventory accuracy has improved vastly - With a coding class from abas, small customizations can be done internally

Inconvénients :

- We have large & complicated bills of materials that were difficult to manage. We did a bit of work to get them flowing through abas effectively.

A solid ERP solution for most

Commentaires : ABAS was purchased by a company that buys and consolidates software companies. When that happened, the family feel started to leave as did many technical resources that we'd grown to know and love. Overall ABAS was a very good solution for us and helped us as a business to succeed. However, over time we saw areas that needed something different, like scheduling and the loss of the team we'd had been working with all the years prior led us to change to a different ERP. ABAS is a great ERP solution that is customizable and has a lot of rich features. Unfortunately for us scheduling of our type of business was too critical to not have it working with all other functions of the ERP.

Avantages :

ABAS was our first ERP system. It helped us grow into the business we are today. The ability to customize the system to fit your business was crucial for us. The teams we worked with through the years were great. For years we felt like family and they worked like part of the team.

Inconvénients :

We are former users of ABAS. Its only because as a growing company, we needed the ability to schedule for engineered to order, custom manufacturing and ABAS excels at scheduling for "widget" manufacturing. We tried to customize it but where we had success in other functions, for scheduling, it didn't work. We had to find a solution that could help us in this critical area. Otherwise, ABAS is a great solution.

All these positive reviews make me wonder if we are really using the same software ...

Commentaires : I would never recommend this software to anybody! If this is considered to be a good ERP, I really do not want to see the others. So to be fair I have no comparison when it comes to ERP but many other pieces of software. When it comes to sales there is no automated support to follow up on leads, projects, etc. There isn't the slightest piece of CRM integrated. We wanted to connect a softphone to the ERP (which shouldn't be that complicated) and asked our IT administrator to get in touch with ABAS. The answer of the guy answering the call was that he will need to ask his boss. Of course, we never heard from them again. If it wasn't such a headache and expensive to switch to another ERP we would have done it years ago. It is definitely on our agenda.

Avantages :

... or ifi it is jsut our local support which is so bad. As far as I know we didn't have any major blackouts during the last ten years which, of course, is really positive! Colleagues who use the software since the beginning know how to use it and developed their own workarounds for most problems (or finally accepted them as a given). Because they have worked with the software for the better part of the last twenty years (of course with many updates inbetween), they do not know any other software and probably think that it is the state-of-the-art.

Inconvénients :

Okay where should I begin? As somebody wrote in another review the colors really hurt your eyes. Of course, that is only a minor issue which I can overlook if it was the only problem. UX is a nightmare! There are endless lists, tabs and fields that are useless for 95% of the users. So when you introduce a new colleague it is absolutely overwhelming for them and you will hear yourself saying "ignore this field", "you don't need this tab", new colleagues ask what a specific field is used for and you answer that you have no idea at all, etc. ... for most of the time. None of our new colleagues in the last ten years managed to learn how to use the software properly which I do not blame them for because it seems that if you didn't grow up with it, it is next to impossible. I think that we even had new colleagues getting so frustrated because of constant complains from the "old crew" that they never managed to integrate into the team and finally gave up / quit the job. At least, it takes all their motivation. During the last years, we wanted to get some modifications done because we couldn't stand some of the time consuming workarounds of our colleagues anymore. We had several (expensive!) in person meetings with ABAS where they made many notes but never came back with any solutions until today.

Abas made our business run better and enthusiastically gave me the tools to make abas even better for our unique business.

Commentaires : I have enthusiastically recommended abas to several other businesses. The abas-USA team is great to work with. Even at the highest level (owners and executives) they take a personal interest in their clients and have a deep understanding of their product. It would be expected that someone in my position would interact with several consultants and technicians at abas-USA but over the course of the last five years I have also come to personally know the over/President of abas-USA as well as the VP of Operatoins, the VP of Information Systems, and pretty much the entire US-based management team. I have also had the opportunity to meet several of the German executives, company officers, and programmers to discuss the system. You can't fake the enthusiasm these guys have for their customers and for their product.

Avantages :

It's a complete solution - you won't be asked to pick and choose between dozens (or hundreds) of modules that can be included or not during implementation. This program was also not cobbled together from disparate programs and modules purchased by some corporate entity and bundled for sale. Abas technical support is excellent (more on that later). Abas user support and training is also excellent - they run what they call the "abas academy" out of their Virginia offices. They have frequent multi-day training courses focused on different aspects of the software. The best are the technical training courses where they teach 'higher-level' users (like the system admins from their clients) how to program customizations for themselves. Some of our most useful processes were programmed by me in-house. Abas is always getting better and changing with advances in technology. The program is remarkably stable. It runs (preferably) on a linux server and uses a custom designed database (that is a big $ savings over an erp running on a windows server using an SQL database). In four years, the only time our ERP system has been down has been during power failures or when I did something to break it. When I did disrupt the system, during non-business hours, the support team had us up and running again withing an hour. In general, support tickets are handled very promptly. Urgent or critical tickets are addressed immediately. There is a group on LinkedIn where users communicate and help each other out. Many of the members are "IT Manager" types who use/administer/customize abas where they work.

Inconvénients :

On the technical side, getting into programming the proprietary database means a bit of a learning curve for anyone who is used to using SQL. Mobile applications aren't fully implemented but more are constantly being developed. The mobile app server addition is a significant investment. The system had no built-in capacity to close idle sessions (to free up licenses for the pool) so I had to program a work-around. I have had a couple instances where a fairly green support tech got assigned to a ticket and wasn't much help.

Commentaires : Pankl Racing Systems, based in Austria, specializes in developing and manufacturing engine and drive-train components for racing cars, high performance vehicles and the aerospace industry. Pankl is a global organization with worldwide subsidiaries in Austria, UK, USA, Slovakia and Japan. In Austria we've been using abas ERP since 1995, in the USA since 2002, in the UK since 2004 and in Slovakia since 2008. At the moment we are running abas ERP version 2009r4n11 at all the Pankl subsidiaries. We decided to use abas ERP because it provides all the necessary functions for a mid-market manufacturer like Pankl and from our point of view it has a really good cost/performance ratio. Another benefit is the flexibility of abas ERP. If your company needs customizations, like additional fields in screens to enter data or personalized reports, abas can make that happen. I was not personally involved in the abas ERP implementation process in Austria and the UK, but I never heard anything negative about these projects. The implementation process in the UK and in Slovakia took 3 to 6 months at each subsidiary. It took us a little bit longer in Slovakia compared to the UK, because we are running abas ERP in Slovakia in 4 different languages: Slovak, Czech, English and German. Both software vendors, in the UK and in Slovakia, were really helpful during the whole roll out process.
We received all the help we needed during the implementation process and I really appreciate the fast response time of abas USA when there are problems or just user requests. In a demo system, which is actually a copy of the live database, each department receives special training in abas ERP. This approach has 2 major benefits:
1. The user has the chance to increase his knowledge of abas using familiar examples from the live system
2. The user is already in contact with the abas ERP system, but in a "save" demo environment, where he cannot damage anything in the live database.
Based on our experience such lessons are more efficient for a new user than just classroom lectures. Our users usually learn to use abas ERP really quickly after these training sessions. As with each software solution, abas ERP has "special" features and functions, but if you are aware of them you gain a big advantage in handling the abas ERP software. The biggest benefit is to have all the relevant data from purchasing and sales, production, materials management, production planning and control (PPC) and financial accounting combined in one system.