Pace User Feedback

pcmodem

Registered Users
We are looking at Pace and a few other MIS systems. I would like to get good and bad feedback from Pace users only. If you don't feel comfortable posting publicly, you can send me a private message.

Thanks,
Brian
 
Re: Pace User Feedback

I would recommend you investigate other options for an MIS system. Pace is an excellent example of what early print MISs looked like. It's database infrastructure is clunky and finicky simultaneously. It is touted as being browser-based, which it is, so prepare for page expiration, page refreshing, and waiting for searches to be returned (partially due to the fact that the server that comes with Pace installed is ancient). The system can, and will, be customized. Unless you are a sheet fed lithographic printer who produces numerous large jobs and also keeps very little data about your customers, there will be a lot of customization involved. Pace offers customization programming for the reasonable price of $200 an hour.

Pace's estimating module will undoubtedly require a good deal of customization. We have a variable cutoff digital press that required 10+ hours of custom programming simply to be able to estimate, never mind getting it to work in production tracking. Additionally, prepare for long delays in service and implementation. In an attempt to keep the organization lean, every Pace employee is constantly overbooked and difficult to get a hold of. The organization is comprised of individual employees working from home, and no one communicates with anyone else, so get used to explaining the same thing to numerous people. Since you have to pay for the system up front, and service payments begin immediately, there is no motivation on Pace's part to help you implement the system.

If it sounds like I'm displeased with Pace, I am. I spent a year and half with three FTEs trying to implement this shoddy, dated system and came out with nothing. Much of the functionality I was promised during the sales process was revealed to be impossible six months into the implementation (ability to store links to art files, communication between the Pace system and our inkjet system, ability to use price list and estimating simultaneously, divisional breakdowns, etc.). Many of the employees are friendly and helpful, but do not communicate with each other and rely on dated manuals. When it became apparent that the system was not going to deliver the promised benefits, we cancelled our contract and have moved to a mix of different MIS systems for each division. I will point out that we specialize in two very specific, very different types of printing, envelope and label printing. It is conceivable that other types of printers might need much less customization. If you would like more information feel free to contact me, I'll be happy to provide it.

Thanks,
Andrew M. Boyd
 
Bump.

We are also investigating the Pace System. We are a commercial printer, utilizing in-house digital presses (running Fiery controllers), in-house offset litho, wide format, high volume B&W, etc. We would be utilizing several modules of the system for a company-wide, multiple location MIS.

Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks
 
If you are purely digital or mainly digital be sure to take a look at Presswise.

I looked extensively at just about every offering out there about two years back. Most of the sales reps are ready and willing to over promise and sell you the moon. There is a big difference between what a system can do 'out of the box' and what a system can do when you build it and customize it. There are limits to the levels of flexibility with these off the shelf solutions and you have to be willing to conform to them.

It gets maddening hearing people claim that the product is crap because it doesn't work in some particular super-customized fashion that they choose to run their shop. If you want to the efficiencies of a computerized system you must conform to the computer. If you aren't willing to conform to a truly systematic approach to then you should stick to paper and pen or turn the keys over to a sales-broker and get out while you (still?) can.

If you are going to go tango with EFI I advise one thing: make sure you have a contract explaining how long they plan to continue development and support of the platform. I heard horror stories when EFI bought Pace and dumped/halted development and dramatically cut support of other platforms suddenly.
 
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If you are willing to spend the price on Pace there are alot more solutions out there , shop around! Avanti / EFI / all have their own solutions.
 
We purchased ePace in December of 2009 and started our set up in March of 2010. It took that long to get a server in place that would work, get an implementation team together to help us and get started. We did set up until November 1st, then went live--with an implementer on site. It is now June of 2012, and we are still not set up enough to be able to use epace functionally. We continue to use 2 systems to reconcile. With each new upgrade, we have about 25 hours of work to get our system back to the way it should work, as they make huge changes, which they don't tell you about until you upgrade and something does not work. We have worked with upper management at EFI and Pace to solve some of these problems, but we are still not satisfied. We too were sold a "Package" of modules, promised it would work the way we expected, and when we went live, the things that were "Selling" points for us, were no longer available in the version we were using. They "Upgraded" and took out most of what we wanted. To make it worse, we also went with DSF for our W2P. DSF works fine for the most part, but the integration with pace is horrible. You can collect a customers credit card information, but it won't process and provide payment info to epace without a ton of manual intervention. How is that helpful?
Enough of a rant. If we had to do it over again, we might have waited for the newest version of PrintSmith to come out, and just upgraded that (that is our old software, which we were really happy with, just not the W2P portion). Now that we have purchased epace and went through 2 years of set up, they tell us DSF is compatible with PrintSmith, although who knows if the integration with PrintSmith is any better than epace.

Service is a joke, with lots of emails that tell you nothing, no follow up, and most of what we consider "Bugs" become enhancement requests, which we can have fixed if we pay? I thought that was what we paid a monthly service fee for, but who knows. However that being said, no one has great service.

We looked at Avanti, but it was too limited for our shop, which is a mix of digital and offset, mailing and fulfillment.

Hope this helps.

Kristie
 
wait another 6 months or so, theres a lot of companys working on this complex situation at the moment, I dont think anyone company has properly nailed it yet, someone will come up trumps with good software vs good pricing soon.
 
We have spent over a year with Printmis, i would suggest to printers DONT PAY until any confident MIS provider has the advertised system up and running!!, printmis will never work as advertised
 

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