Spire

"Frustrations with maybe some hope or who knows"

Overall: After a few months we were thinking we made a mistake going to Spire and will need to switch again but they did come out with the costing reports which gave us some hope. Now its been over 6 months and we are back to where we were in Feb thinking we will have ditch Spire again since the costing reports and bill of materials are not working and Spire has not given any commitment to address these concerns or not. If they could add a function or tool that would allow you to collapse all then expand all or just collapse all for all the bill of materials in inventory or select a range of numbers that would help to allow the costing reports to be used without spending hours / days going thru collapsing and expanding the bill of materials 1 by 1 to know how its being reported / costed. The fact that sub-assemblies don't get automatically updated is another concern since if you don't go thru each part that is using that sub-assemble and do the toggling it will never get updated, built right or costed properly. Basically way too much of the functionality / reports of the bill of materials is based on the toggle status of a bill of material and the only way of changing that status is 1 by 1 which is very non productive and going backwards in time.

Pros: Searching and navigating around is very easy.Migrated from Business Visions Easily

Cons: The newly added costing reports that they added was a great sign but they initially were calculating the cost wrong of sub-assemblies, still don't total sub-assemblies cost up just pulls from last built so the numbers on the report do not add up to what it has for a total for that sub-assemble. The report goes off the last toggle status that bill of materials was saved at. So depending if its expanded out or collapsed it will give a different cost and the only way of knowing is going into each and every number to figure out the status and then set it according before running the report. If you change a bill of materials of an item that is used as sub-assemble in various other parts, that change is not updated in those parts, you manually have to go to each part, collapse all and expand all to force the update of that bill of materials for that sub-assemble item otherwise it will be built / costed wrong. It should force changes thru the system or at least make it an option to allow that.Also the lack of commitment / communication from Spire if they will add needed functionality or not is very frustrating too.

"Let Down"

Overall: We started off good, now we are seriously talking about changing already after 2 months of use. The most disappointing thing is that when our rep/reseller brought up our very legitimate concerns / needs with Spire, he was told that no one wants those features and to basically pound sand. We even offered to pay for the development of the costing reports. In the meantime he started looking through the community and several other partners brought these same concerns up over a year ago and continue to bring them up. The saying that if Business Visions can do it, Spire can do it is not true at all.

Pros: Searching and navigating around is very easy.Migrated from Business Visions Easily

Cons: Impossible to do a costing report of a manufactured item without physically building it and you have to mess around with toggling the bill of material to expand all components so it costs properly, which the toggle all feature does not work. You can not select multiple parts to cost / build, you have to do each part separately. Coming from BV, Spire lacks allot of basic function in terms of reports / costing. You can not print and email and invoice at once you can only do one and then have to go back an open it to do the other one.