An ERP system designed by ECI Software Solutions for manufacturing companies.
ECI M1 is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, providing total integration and automation of jobs from quoting through invoicing. M1 is a business system designed for small-to-medium manufacturers including job shops, custom, mixed-mode and make-to-order manufacturers. M1 is built with the objective to improve processes. This leads to savings in time, resources and money.
The implementation and customer service teams will have your M1 system up and running quickly. With dedicated professionals and locations throughout the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and Europe, ECI M1 will be with you every step of the way. Training and M1 customer service are always available to ensure you get the most from your ECI M1 ERP system.
Developed for Microsoft SQL Server with a Microsoft Outlook look and feel, M1 runs on Windows 7/8 and Windows Server 2003/2008/2012. This makes the software easy to learn, run and maintain, making it the most cost effective solution. It also integrates with your familiar everyday email and document tools Microsoft Word®, Microsoft Outlook® and Microsoft MapPoint®. State-of-the-art navigation methods allow users to quickly find information.
The M1 Start Page features a fully configurable dashboard so that you can monitor pertinent parts of the business. All information is in real time. Powerful yet easy-to-use customization tools let you tailor M1 grids, forms and reports to your needs. The Mail Merge function allows you to merge M1 fields into any Mail Merge document. Send documents to multiple contacts at once, and include attachments from within any module. Quickly and easily transmit your advertising material to large groups of contacts and increase your marketing power.
With M1, you make the software work for you. Ensure your unique business processes are handled as you see fit. M1 does not force you to fit your business to the software. Additionally, all standard reports can be customized and new reports created using the industry standard Crystal Reports.
M1's Advanced Planning & Scheduling System (APS) provides amazing flexibility on the shop floor, while delivering unprecedented levels of scheduling accuracy and efficiency. Schedule your floor forward or backward, finite and infinite. Simple "drag and drop" features allow you to instantly reschedule jobs or make routing changes. Advanced finite/infinite scheduling feature allows you to quote jobs more accurately through custom job forecasting and "what-if" scheduling. Real time reporting enables you to respond instantly to customer demands and changes in the marketplace. With the most robust Advanced Planning & Scheduling system in the industry, M1 puts you in control of the entire production process and provides more control over your bottom line.
M1 CRM provides you with a complete 360-degree view of customer and vendor information and the tools necessary to cultivate those relationships. Efficiently manage complex relationships across partners, direct and indirect sales channels, distributors, retailers, and service providers. Leverage your competitive advantage and concentrate on growing your business using the powerful business analysis tools and interactive Executive Dashboards. The seamless interface with Microsoft® Office efficiently processes customer email, documents and data ensuring complete documentation at the customer record level. M1 CRM helps you to improve visibility into your valuable business data and use it to drive decision-making in real time!
Maximize your competitive advantages with real-time production data. Manage complex production jobs with multi-level BOMs. Capture true labor costs through bar-coded labor reporting. Retrieve job cost reporting in real-time and compare estimate to actual. Monitor each job as it progresses through the production process from planning to release to production complete. Leverage Key Performance Indicators, Data Inquiry Screens, Trend Viewers, Calendars and Reports to ensure jobs are on track and on budget.
M1's Product Configurator will allow you to offer superior service to your customers by simply and easily being able to configure products to their exact needs. Build custom screens that allow parts to be configured from Quoting, Order Entry, Job Entry and Lead Entry. Design entry screens to walk your staff or customer through the decision process to design and configure any product. Design anything from simple single-level BOMs to complex multilevel products using the powerful Product Configurator module. Not only does the M1 Product Configurator make internal quoting simple, but the seamless integration with the Web portal e-commerce module WebGear means your customers and distributors can configure their product 7 days a week 24 hours per day.
M1 Purchasing provides critical information and visibility of all purchasing requirements. It includes complete knowledge of what to buy, when to buy, and how much to buy from each supplier in a real-time environment. Purchasing Wizards will generate purchasing suggestions based on filters you select including supplier, part, job, date, or inventory class. Flexibility is key to "justin-time" inventory and M1 Purchasing enables you to buy directly to a job or directly into inventory for later use. Quickly identify service requirements as production orders are generated to ensure delivery dates are met. M1 Purchasing seamlessly integrates with multiple modules thereby eliminating duplicate entries.
M1 Quality Management will provide the tools necessary to monitor and maintain your quality standards and ensure your quality certifications. Inspect your incoming materials, in-process operations, and customer returns. To ensure parts under inspection, rework or claim are not used on a job, a quarantine bin holds the stock. Create, track, follow-up, verify and sign-off all corrective and preventative actions taken to address quality related issues. Customer and vendor returns are tracked through the financial system. Demonstrate the financial impact of your corrective actions using the trend analysis features. Perform cost/benefit analysis by tracking costs related to your quality management processes. M1's Quality Management solution provides you with an extensive suite of tools and capabilities necessary to cost-effectively manage quality issues while streamlining manufacturing and ERP operations and facilitating collaboration.
Time is a valuable commodity and M1 Estimating & Quoting functionality allows you to be quick and responsive to your customer's request for quotation. Add materials to your quote without ever having to add them to your part master! Engineer parts on the fly or copy the bill of material (BOM) and routing from other parts, quotes or job templates. Attach drawings, certifications and specification sheets to provide production visibility to critical documents. Quickly review material estimates, subcontract services, overhead and labor requirements such as hours and rates. M1 will transfer all details directly from the quote to the production job order. M1 Estimating & Quoting functionality reduces the time and effort to quickly and effectively send quotes to your customers and provide superior customer service!
Ratio of reviewers by organization size.
awful
nothing they promise you what you require and do not fulfill any of it awful company avoid we have lost of £60.000
support and management are hopeless
Where to begin. Too many clicks to get the job done, errors out & spins, on a fairly regular basis, unable to drag routing steps in web version- have to click on the up/down arrows and hope it keeps moving the same routing! When you contact them, it’s almost never initially their fault. Then they say OHHH it is an issue on our end.
That you can get on via any computer anywhere
Too many hassles and wasted time. Poor C.S. in that it’s almost never their fault, when most of the time it IS their fault.
Nice concepts. Unfortunately, M1 falls apart in the details. Support is fine, the problem is that M1 doesn’t make sure everything works! Email integration for creating M1 Calls that we promoted during the Sales pitch? “That feature doesn’t work in V9 (the latest version)”. Mobile Inventory Web App is giving an error? “Oh, I’m getting it also. Let me submit this to development”. Next release comes out and still isn’t fixed. Want to delete a line from an inventory count? No can do, M1 has blocked it. Want to customize M1 yourself? Sure, M1 has a design studio that makes customization easy! Too bad it has zero documentation. Am I being to harsh? Yes, I lied, design studio actually has 1 page of documentation. Let’s move on to reports! M1 has a lot of great reports, like the supply demand report that will tell you the all the demand for a part—except when the part is used in a kit. Sold a kit part? Don’t use the supply demand report. Does ECI care? “The report is functioning as designed”. Want to update the job traveller report or another report with a barcode? No problem! You just need to delete the barcodes because M1 didn’t include the barcode dll they used in the report. Do you like working with ancient ttx and accompanying sql files in Crystal Reports? You are in luck! About half of M1’s reports use them. I’ll end with the next example. You can assign a country to an organization that is perhaps a customer or supplier—maybe you want to know how much product you sent to a particular country. Great, just type in the country. “United States”, sure. “USA”, sure. “US”, sure. “America”, sure. Put whatever you want, put “United States” for one Organization and “USA” for another. M1 doesn’t care, after all it is just a text field with no dropdown or search or anything. Oh! There is another country field and it has a dropdown for selecting the country code? And it is standardized? Don’t worry, M1 only uses that field for getting rates from Fedex Express.
Can make your own fields and ui and add backend (ish) code.
They don’t make sure their product works.
We are a small manufacturing business since 1993. The use of M1 has accompanied our products according to many part ID’s and programs. I have used the Accounting portion for 15 years . When I have encountered any technical or in need of directions, I have always received a technician’s help with ease and exceptional customer service skills. It is a complex software only for those who have endurance and patience to learn. Once implemented it is very useful for our particular manufacturing company and the possibilities to expand are endless.
Although in a demo this software shows well when you get down to the nuts and bolts it’s very flawed. Support is the worst. They focus on work-a-rounds and close your case. They closed 60 cases on us and promised when we switched to V9 they would be fixed. Not even close. I showed them where and how the quote would forget to include shipping costs in your part costs and because I was the only one to find it, they won’t fix it. I guess they prefer to let all the over used lose shipping cost and not even know. Purchased V8 and was told as new versions came out the system would update without any fixes to your custom code. First version change to V9 and they want $30,000 to covert our custom code. Salesman was right there every moment when we were buying the system for 2 companies. Let the first problem pop up and he wanted NOTHING to do with it. Purchased mobile software for tablets in 2014 with the promise of how awesome they will be and not 6 years later, they still don’t work. The basic framework/concept is incredible and shows so well but falls apart in practice. No matter how enticing it looks, keep moving, you will hate it after a year of so, actually before it’s implemented. Yes, worst decision I have made in my carrier. 40 years and made my share of mistakes but M1 takes the cake. Forgot the one part where V8 has this habit of stalling on screen change, I timed it sometimes at an average of 3-6 seconds of doing nothing but as long as 20 second. This list is long and disappointment frequent. Support is non-existent, they typically know less than you and only want a closed case. If something doesn’t quote correctly, they call it working as designed. “Try the Ideas Portal” but nobody is reading it and it’s been a month since anything was added. Enough said, just bad news.
Framework, concept, design
So flawed, no support, management more interested in their goals and really don’t care how it impacts your business. Very expensive…..
Its been a hard archaic and brain damaging road of unreal promised user-friendly expectations. A money sink bummer!
Hard to say.
Reports and Dashboard
Very poor performing software, this program has lots of bugs especially in the purchasing side, really it is not suited for larger companies like ours, support is a waste of time, expect this program to crash.
Hard to say, maybe the colour
Faster, less bugs, better support, more protection of data.
The software shows well. But when it comes to actual performance it does not act as documented. What makes life worse is the complete and abject absence of support of any kind. They should not be selling their product commercially. We worked for 2.5 years to get support none came. Then they actually billed us as if they had provided help.
This product reminds of the old CA model. Buy a product, cut all staff, marketing, engineering, and keep trying to sell. No support no maintence
Complete lack of support.
Do not buy this software in Australia - Dishonest business practices and terrible support
They installed the core system for one company to test, then couldn’t get their optional modules to work, but still performed the agreed work to customize our installation (and charged us)… then finally gave up trying to get THEIR optional module to work in version 8, and told us that we had to upgrade to version 9 to get those modules to work.
Then after we upgraded to version 9, they said that version 9 now no longer supported that optional module, or the custom work they had already been paid for.
We have been promised repeatedly by their support team and management that they would fix the issues and get this up and working as soon as possible. Please don’t fall for these lies like we did.
Instead of trying to fix anything, their support department literally just $1’solved’ all of the 30+ support tickets in their system on with the same day with the message ‘SOLVED: This function or a component that it relies on is no longer supported’ with no option for further discussion… no refund for the optional modules or custom work we had done… and then they have the hide to say that they need to get us to sign off and accept the fact that they can’t make that company work before they even install the core systems for any of the 6 other companies.
Their sales team made a really good pitch, then went radio silent the moment we signed up, and quit 6 weeks later.
Based on their pitch, we engaged them to provide version 8 of the core system seven companies, and a couple of optional modules for a couple of those companies, and a few custom modifications, we were assured this would be straight forward and ready to use in 8-12 weeks.
It has been over 2 years and they been unable to even get one of those companies up and running as per the our agreement with them.
The worst part about this experience? Everything that happened after they had our money…
In all of my professional life I have never before experienced such intentionally dishonest behavior in a professional setting. Deciding to use ECi M1 has been the worst business decision that we have ever made.
If you are in Australia, or if you intend to rely on the Australian support team, I cannot urge you strongly enough to stay away from ECi M1. They have repeatedly proved themselves incompetent and dishonest.
ECi M1 should be considered for an award for the world’s worst product and service.
It is true that no product is perfect but it is difficult with M1 to find what is worth the investment. But the least likeable factor is the service by ECiM1 - it is appalling to say the least and that is after 3 years of using it - you are left in wonderment that they are still in business every time
M1 is a very visual ERP system that helps us manage our manufacturing and engineering operations. We have been able to do significant customization without a programmer on our staff.
M1 is incredibly visual; whether you prefer traditional forms or spreadsheet views, you can customize the navigation and data forms with ease. Search features are robust in the spreadsheet style views. M1 is also fairly flexible for customization regardless of programming skills. We can easily add fields to any module and forms can be manipulated to match our information flow. In our business every order is a custom order yet the straight forward manufacturing module makes planning and scheduling simple. Dashboards on the start screen are great to monitor daily activities. While most ERP implementations require significant work, the visual nature of M1 really helped us keep the project on track. The M1 implementation specialist spent time to learn our business and specific information needs. 9 months running and we are very happy. We have added several additional modules since the implementation and have linked M1 to our sales tax service provider. The suite of included reports are handy, though they need some customization when you start up. Export to Excel is very easy. We added Spreadsheet Server option to really increase the capability to share data with Excel.
At times customer service response is a bit longer than we would like though once they are working on an issue, they are great at resolving. Some of the included reports are fairly complex yet require customization in Crystal Reports. Best to have some working knowledge of Crystal reports. Some modules in M1 are not consistent with others - probably different programmers or different schedules for upgrading - however that slows the process just bit when you move module to module.
Our salesperson took the time to understand our needs that convey those to our implementer so that we hit the ground running and had our processes worked out before we went live.
Ease of use throughout the software. It was easy for our staff to pick up their core functions and we have continued to built from there each day.
No real complaints, maybe quicker introduction of new features.
Logical sequence of steps from the time an order is placed to the final shipment of the products. User friendly. Important data easily retrieved.
Well suited for manufacturing companies. Allows you to structure the bills of materials the way you want to manufacture the product. Bills of materials can be structured to allow for the appropriate flow of material and accurate costing.
Forecasting needs to be improved along with the scheduling of sub-assemblies.