General Consultant Discussion

re: Ascent Business Systems - SVC Management I was contacted by email by a company with the following issue(s): We are a Mas200 user for 20 years with 75 employee's servicing, repairing, renovating and also have a retail showroom selling all our products commercially and residentially. We have been using the same Service Package and POS that sits on top of Mas. These 2 packages are not current with Mas, with the POS package having some issues. I am frustrated with the whole Mas situation of waiting for the packages to keep up with Mas AND having to go thru massive testing and major upgrade each 3 years or so. What I think their biggest issue might be is their use of Ascent for service management and they say it is not upgraded to 2013? Does anyone have experience with Ascent on 2013 and can provide feedback on the Ascent upgrade? This company may have some customizations that Ascent did which could also be driving their desire to seek alternatives. I believe they're also looking at Netsuite and other options.

Ascent has consistently had a good chunk of unhappy customers. I think the only two decent field service add-ons are JobOps and MSI Data. If a company does manufacturing and then service, JobOps is their first stop. But for distribution companies (like this one), MIS is probably first to check out. They did a demo for 90 Minds last April. I had an extensive discussion with them at Summit last year, too. We haven't done a deal with it yet, but we are looking for one. MSI has their service app separate from MAS (they also integrate with Macola, TomTom and Viewpoint.). They use Bob Richter's MAS integration engine (In-synch) to handle the integration, including IM and Pricing. The advantage of this approach is the same service app gets beat up by customers in a number of the ERP situations, and as long as it's handling the modest integration touchpoints to MAS, there isn't an issue. It also means that MSI is pretty independent of Sage 100 upgrades. Here is the recorded demo: http://bit.ly/1mv76t4

Thanks Jerry

As far as I know, Ascent does not currently support 2013. We have sold 3 copies in the past 5 years. One customer left to another reseller. One moved off Ascent to a service package written on the SalesForce.com platform. The third is still using the product but is stuck on Sage version 4.4. We are having preliminary discussions of re-implementing Sage 100 and moving to ServicePro from MSI. Ascent has some new offering called SVCForce coming out soon. They haven't provided any details so I don't know what is up. However, if something big doesn't happen soon, we will move our last customer and drop Ascent from our product mix.

Thanks good info. I think these people are hoping there's some magic wand to get them around Ascent and it sounds as if there's not.

What could that Magic Wand look like? It's all integrated into Sage 100 data tables and code. The reality, as you know, is that to make his really bad headache go away he must migrate to something new. The most work would be out of Sage 100 completely. Moving to MSI would be far less; I suspect they can switch over and still use Ascent for a couple months, transitioning out. When all out, then upgrade to 2013. From a selling perspective, I always work on getting the prospect to start imagining where the improved financial/customer performance can come from. If he can't think of anything, I leave it be.