Genius ERP

Our whole manufacturing process is managed including inventory control. I really like that the team can look into a job and figure out at what stage certain items are at in the manufacturing process.

The engineering side is great, and allows our team not to have to do duplicate entries. This also ensures that there is much less human error since the items are imported directly from Inventor to the Engineering Document. This in turn is transferred to the job.

From the quoting side, we were doing our small quotes manually previously, and now we quote within the system and then when a PO is given we convert it. Therefor no extra entry is needed.

The accounting side is not the greatest. You can tell that this was added to the software after. It is really hard to follow the transactions. There is potential for it to be better.

I think that one of the biggest downfalls of the software is how buy and sell parts are handled with regards to inventory. The system was not created for this purpose, and therefore is has a big weakness on how this is controlled/handled.

The scheduling is a very hard concept to understand and it takes time to get it to work. There are items that don't make sense at times and you have to dig to figure out why. It is not always clear to know why certain dates are given.

The standard reports are not great.

The integration by far was the most seamless and easy process that we've gone through with an ERP implementation. Being a custom manufacturer, we needed an ERP designed for our type of business. From CAD to BOM capability, preliminary purchasing of long lead time parts, scheduling using the drum-buffer-rope method and the ability to access data for metrics and data driven process control, Genius had it all!

There are some features that are not customizable. If you can't adapt your process to fit then you've got to figure out ways to use other features in a different manner to achieve the goal. Luckily we've been able to do that for most processes and still maintain a high level of efficiency. The software has a Gantt chart feature but its not printable in a format that can be shared. That for us is the biggest omission for software focused on custom manufacturing.

Having been in ERP space for 30+ years in Manufacturing Environments, I can attest that Genius ERP provides very robust functionality at a very competitive price. From BOM to Engineering Lifecycle to MRP and MPS, it really does it all. Their training is straightforward and their support is excellent! They also have scheduled "talk with an expert" sessions (~2x week) that enable you to get quick responses on issues of functionality.

Being Cloud hosted means you don't have to invest in the infrastructure and sleep at night knowing your data is safe. Their security is as robust or simple as you'd like it to be. Lastly, if you're familiar with SQL databases, they have a very nice interface through their own Analytics Product and Power BI.

Other nice features: Downloads of views of data to excel, Export/Import of major data sources; Robust custom fields; Report export to Excel, PDF, etc..; REST API to enable web based integrations.

Being cloud hosted, we have to RDP into Azure (as opposed to a full-fledged html version) to get to a desktop (I believe this is on their roadmap). They do, however, have a Web Shop Floor interface that eliminates the need of the Remote Desktop for shop floor reporting. Lastly, because of the RDP, we have to rely on local default printers for printing (but there are many option for preview->pdf/excel).

No OBC data access, but they do have a nice Power BI connector.

Their General Ledger is servicable, but they tell you that from the outset. And I would never make a manufacturing ERP decision with the quality of the G/L being a major factor. Besides, you can get the data out of Genius via Analytics and/or PowerBI and cut/paste into Excel.

File exchange (through Azure connectors) is accomplished by creating a share on Azure and local company and syncing the two. It's not immediate, but it is relatively timely.

No local admin rights on the desktop, requiring a help desk ticket for any software install or upgrade.

These are all relatively minor inconveniences, when you look at the core functionality of Genius.