HI Everyone,

 

I have been researching alternatives to CASH (Mentor RBS).

 

Here is a list of my research so far - feel free to add / edit / comment.

 

 

http://www.mentorbs.com/utcfs/Templates/Pages/Template-66/1,8070,pageId=75501&siteId=408,00.html

http://www.pcdata.co.uk/html/alarm_master.html  

http://www.advancedfieldservice.com/industry_sectors.aspx

http://www.connect2field.com

http://www.redzebrasoftware.com/demo/

http://www.tesseract.co.uk

http://www.myservicemanager.com/cctv-security/

http://www.pdasolutions.co.uk/index.php?q=faq

 

 

ps. CASH's monthly fee seems high - has anyone had any experience of getting a discount on this?

pps Please feel free to share with us any other tips/hints that you would consider now you are using the solution you have in place.

we write our own, if you have the time then id advise that as it allows you to customise it to you rather than work to the system

We are currently trialing our own web based software and so far it works very well. The developer will be selling to other alarm companies. The software should work with any database we use AM, we print the jobsheet in HTML upload it to the website and it emails directly to the engineer on the jobsheet. The jobsheet can be tailored to you exact requirements

We were tempted to do this - even within a Salesforce / SugarCRM framework but got too scared to do it because we're not software people and really don't have the time to be doing something that we're not pros at, even though the benefits of having something just for us is highly important - sometimes you need to sacrifice by focusing on what we're good at.

 

We have built software in the past but never again - I guess we're not really good at managing these things.

 

Plus if there are companies out there whose bread & butter is to do this every day of the week, we thought that they can't be that bad or they wouldn't be in business...

 

Here's a question though, what did CASH and the other systems not do/provide, that you needed?

The developer will be selling to other alarm companies. The software should work with any database we use AM,

3rd party interface = hissy fit ?

3rd party interface = hissy fit ?

Nah print as HTML the developer then finds the bits like -customer name- address- type of call ect ect and puts them in the right place, the software even takes the engineer name off the jobsheet so it knows who to email works perfectly. 

 

Here's a question though, what did CASH and the other systems not do/provide, that you needed?

They dont provide it cheap enough

Amen to that!! (staring down the sharp end of a £15k investment)

 

But then there's something called opportunity cost....

 

Realistically I don't think I could build a CASH replacement for less than £15k.

 

The biggest downside I can see is that I can't get into it and start tweaking it to the way we want to use it (fair enough though).

 

Does your in-house system take in all the alarms info from the ARCs as well as have tablet integration for the Engineers (which would be something else to code)?

We are getting Cash installed in three weeks we got a good few £££ of original quoted price.

We have a really fancy software. 

 

As engineers we carry PDA which carry the jobs and then office can add or remove jobs from us as were on the road.   Then we carry Laptops which has ever alarm manual we every maintain and install plus all customer information for each job we go to.

Does said fancy software have a name?