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Does anyone in here have hands on experience with ...
# bundles
d
Does anyone in here have hands on experience with FieldAware? Any reviews/advice/pointers would be much appreciated https://www.fieldaware.com
m
Lots of experience with FieldAware with NS the last two years. Would be happy to chat about this
Overall the product is really good and helped our company immensely. There are some challenges with the fact that FieldAware develops the web and mobile apps, but another company, DKD, develops the NetSuite bundle.
d
Hi @matt_fuss - thanks for that. We've had the same thought - originally had expected on entity to be involved... anything in the implementation to look out for? We're looking to migrate two companies, both of whom have field service engineers...
are those challenges in the day to day operation or were they challenges you face in the implementation stage?
m
Hi @david.cashin - After implementation it’s been pretty smooth. A lot of the issue were things being “lost in translation” with the FieldAware professional services person communicating to DKD. I’ve now started working directly with DKD which has been a more effective way to communicate issues. FieldAware works with several ERPs and is a standalone product, so they’re not totally focused on NetSuite. I was able to solve some of the process issues myself by building workarounds in NetSuite, but support tickets do seem to drag out for a long time with FieldAware if there is an issue.
Fortunately we’re pretty skilled internally with NetSuite, but if that’s not the case with your company, it can be a challenge relying 100% on FieldAware and DKD.
Overall, I’d recommend them as their tablet and mobile product is really good. The integration and any customizations is the challenge, which is pretty typical, I think. There were a few competitors that looked decent a couple years ago, but not as feature rich as FieldAware. Although, other firms may be better when it comes to the NetSuite side of things.
d
Thanks @matt_fuss that's brilliant info - we've been trying to unpick the various "interested parties" involved in thos project and had decided they DKD were probably the key player - being that they undertake the FA integration with heir own product.
were the "workaraounds" you mentioned - are they specific to your processes or something more generic that you were surprised by the lack of?
thanks again
m
One that comes to mind is the lack of customization for Work Order confirmation emails. FieldAware has a PDF that can be generated and emailed to the customer directly from the FieldAware system. However, you have 0 ability to customize this template for your business. So I basically repurposed the Sales Order transaction form to be the “Work Order Confirmation”. Now NetSuite sends this PDF instead of FieldAware.
d
ok, sounds like fun!
m
Another is related to the lack of bi-directional updates to field service address locations. You can generate field locations from the addresses on customer records, but once this is generated it cannot be updated from the FieldAware app back to NetSuite. So you’re essentially maintaining two address records per customer address
d
...ok, I'm not sure I see our field engineers updating addresses on anything but a very occasional basis - although I see your point - seems like a fairly basic thing to leave out
m
There is some funky behavior relating to how records update on FieldAware transactions in NetSuite. Basically every job update made from the NetSuite requires the custom record to reload itself several times and with a temporary status (like processing). This makes it particularly frustrating when you’re trying to build triggers based on before record load/before record submit type situations.
I think it’s really important to be extremely clear about your processes in the initial BRD. I thought we were very clear, but as we learned more about how the bundle worked with NetSuite, we had to modify some processes on the fly during implementation. This is where the challenge with having a less experienced professional services person from FieldAware came in. They weren’t all that good with communicating best practices for NetSuite and matching them with your business process. FieldAware can do a lot of things in so many ways- but it fell onto my team to tease out these details more than I expected it to be.
d
ok, understood - thanks a million Matt, I'll take that back to my team and I think we'll start with establishing that DKD are our go to entity when it comes to the integration
m
No doubt! Happy to help. Feel free to reach out anytime if you have any more questions.
d
almost certainly will!
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