Aptean Discrete Manufacturing ERP Made2Manage Edition 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

Overall, this is the best ERP I have used. I have used QAD, SAP, and Plex in other jobs but this is by far the best software I have encountered. As long as you have an IT professional that can customize reports, the sky is the limit with this program. The newest update did kill the look and made it more modern but the user-friendliness is still there.

Overall this is a very useful and powerful ERP that we could not run the business without, although it could be simplified and have more visually appealing aspects

Norscan Instruments Ltd. is an Electronics Engineering and Manufacturing company with about 30 employees. We have a relatively large number of products, most of which are small volume. We had to support our existing products for at least 10 years (or more), and many of the products were customized for each customer. Most of our products have circuit boards, which can have hundreds to thousands of individual components, along with multiple sub-assemblies - which make Bills Of Materials (BOMs) very complex. Back in 1997, we were looking for an ERP system that could tie our accounting, purchasing, product bills of materials, and labor reporting all together. At the time, all of these existed in their own software, or databases and spreadsheets. It was imperative that the system be able to handle multiple levels of BOMs and Routings. After looking at a few systems, it became apparent that there was a significant effort required just to evaluate these systems to measure performance against a set of requirements. At the time, we did not have any resources available to do this, and there was a local VAR that sold, integrated, and supported Made2Manage (M2M) locally (which was M2M's model then). The pricing fit our budget and we went ahead and purchased the system in 1997 with a target of going live in the start of 1998. The version at that time was based of Visual Foxpro. The implementation was a bit bumpy at first. Our system was the first for the VAR, and actually we were one of the first companies in Canada to use M2M, and there were a number of things that were not Canadian-ized. M2M was very quick to make these changes in the software. Our VAR designed many custom reports for us (wrote full code) that we later found out wasn't really necessary, as the "canned" reports in M2M can be easily tweaked to suit most companies needs. This is an important factor for future upgrades as custom reports may not function if there are database changes with the upgrades. The entire staff was trained, and like any new system, there was some hesitation, duplication of work, and many errors. This is why we ran M2M parallel with our existing systems for a few months before going live. Something that I don't think would be acceptable in a larger organization. We persisted, and were completely ready when it was time to go live. In general, M2M is fairly easy to use. The GUI is straight forward, and has had major improvements over the 15+ years we have been using it. The majority (if not all) improvements have come straight from the users themselves, and as more and more customers purchased M2M, the feedback just became better. When there are issues, M2M support team is there to help. Unfortunately, the help usually takes longer than the user wants, as usually something will go wrong and you need it fixed immediately. Most problems usually are resolved within 24 hours. As a user since 1998, we have build up a lot of in-house expertise, so to be fair to M2M, when we call for support, it's usually due to a very complex issue - usually requiring a second level or higher support person. We have purchased additional add-on modules (advanced reporter, production scheduler & shop floor manager). For accounting/finance, I don't think you can do without the Advanced Reporter. It makes writing custom financial reports a breeze. Our MFG personnel really like the addition of the Shop Floor Manager. It allows for each individual or work center know what they need to work on that day, what the status of materials are for the job, and an easy way to enter in their labor. Over the years, we have continually changed processes in order to obtain better quality and margins, and M2M has been an important tool in order to gain the type of visibility needed for both Quality and continuous improvement. Today, we still don't use all the features in M2M, but we are always looking at those features each year to determine whether it makes sense to implement into our business or not. Over the years, there have been quite a number of people who have gained expert knowledge about M2M (outside of the M2M staff), and as such there is usually a pretty good knowledge base in the forums. I would certainly recommend M2M to anyone in our line of business.

As a job shop providing - primarily - custom products to customer design specifications, we have small production runs and little finished inventory. But we have lots of costs! Our previous software was great for accounting but did little to address collection, assimilation or analysis of production data. We examined ERP software and decided M2M would answer those questions and, as a result, we'd be better able to move our business forward. We recently (Feb/Mar 2013) upgraded to M2M 7.01 (from version 5.6). Thankfully there are two versions - classic, which looks and acts like our older version; and .NET, with a sleeker appearance and more direct functionality. Most of our employees are very comfortable with the Classic version. The more adventurous of the staff use the .NET as often as possible, reverting to the Classic only when we get "lost" - or, on rare occasion, when there's a hole in .NET (and, yes, there are still a few). Management is enduring extensive training on 7.0 modules. Our philosophy is that now is the time to make corrections and adjustments to the way we do things. This version is quite powerful and more user-friendly, but it takes some getting used to. And we want to do it "right", or as "right" as possible. The online recorded courses have been instrumental in launching discussion and decisions. As a result, we are comfortable moving our employees into the more modern system presented by this version and out of their comfort zone(s). M2M personnel have been helpful, for the most part. We did not use a reseller (our first - and last - experience with a M2M reseller was less than pleasant or productive) but used M2M staff for the upgrade and install. Getting to the upgrade/install point was often challenging (like pulling teeth to get anyone to return calls) but it's been good ever since. We still have additional training that needs to be done, but before we'll bring that in, we want to be fully - as much as possible - conversant with the software so we can ask intelligent and meaningful questions and get the most of those limited training hours. Some improvements we like in .NET would be ease of changing data/data tables, better windows and customizable screens, having "favorites" very accessible, access to reports for minor customizations, planning and scheduling/CRM modules (although we don't really know how to use them yet), and quick and easy exports to Excel (some of us are spreadsheet geeks). There's undoubtedly some more that escapes me right now. Would we purchase M2M again? Well, we've invested quite a lot in this software, as we've been using it since 2001. We've learned that no system is perfect and it doesn't hurt that my staff has threatened me with bodily harm if I change at this point! We're excited with the improvements the 7.0 offers. There's more that we'd like to see upgraded but it's getting there, and we've learned (and will continue to learn) how to manipulate M2M to be the best it can be!

In 2006 the company I worked for was sold M2M as a ERP system that would make our business paperless (mostly) We killed more trees after installing it. The notifiers were less than helpful and most users stopped looking at them because the information was useless. When it came to digesting information in the system to make sense of what are actual inventory #'s were or job statuses we had to have a programmer write a script that pulled the info from M2M and redesigned it into something legible using Excel. He finally wrote the script to include BOM (parent/children) where used, pick tickets for each machine build or job running through our machine shop as well as parts orders. The features we needed were just not there. So they promised it would fix it in the next update, then the next one and next until we on 6.5 which crashed our network (some type of bug) The field service module which was purchased as an addition did also not work as promised. All BOM would have to be loaded in order to create a service case, then create a sales order or work order from there.

Since we went live July 1, we are still getting acquainted with the software. Overall, we are satisfied with the functionality and believe that it is a good fit for our type of business. We manufacture large positioning systems used for welding and other applications. Some of our products are of a catalogue variety and others are engineered to order. M2M's use of job orders that tie everything together for tracking and cost analysis is going to be a big help to us. We are using the ERP system and Advanced Scheduling at the present time. We have created a few Advanced Reporting reports using preexisting sphere,s and one sphere that we created. Except for some training our implementation consultant provided for financial reports, we have to learn how use Advanced Reporting on our own because the trainer has not been available. We decided before our conference room pilots to delay implementation of the configuration and CAD link software. The implementation process was handicapped by version 7 software bugs. It was awful! We had to surrender hours of consulting time that we paid for because of the issues we encountered while doing our conference room pilots, and had to delay portions of the work while hot patches were installed. We required more consulting days because of this. Our consultant was not up-to-speed on the version 7, and needed to go back and forth between Classic and the net versions. Our users trained using the version 7 training videos. However, they would need to use version 6 videos because ones for version 7 were not available. We had decided to write procedures converting version 5 Word documents to have version 7 screens shots. There were so many problems with version 7; it seems crazy that it was released in that condition! We were told that the software had been beta tested and had been used for a year by some number of users. That doesn't seem possible. It was not possible for our field sales group to go live with the rest of the company because response time for a remote user was extremely slow - 15 minutes or more to get a report to display. It was a big surprise. We had implemented a dedicated server for M2M in accordance with Aptean specifications. It turned out that we needed to invest in a dedicated server for our field sales group. We have not completed our month-end close for July. There were numerous problems with data that slowed the process. We experienced some issues with the transfer of work orders and sales orders. In some cases, the wrong selection was made in the setup. From our training, we seem to taken away how to process basic transactions, but we didn't take away a good understanding of the transactions. We knew the steps but without understanding what was happening when made them. This created some problems for job orders and purchase orders carried forward from the old system to M2M. Our closing was hampered because we didn't have certain reports needed to tie out transactions to support GL values. Not having been trained in the use of Advanced Reporting meant that we had to stop what we were doing, and figure out how to create them ourselves. Vanessa was able to help with the financial reports, but was not so helpful for ones requiring the use of spheres. The old quote, "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play." comes to mind. Any benefits that we may eventually see from using the software has been overshadowed by the difficulty with version 7 and training issues.

It has been a very stable system for us, especially after upgrading to 7.50, then 7.51. We are running it on a Hyper-V 2012 R2 server which is shared by the 2014 MS-SQL database. The physical machine is running all SSD's and speed has not been an issue. We run it on Windows 7 and 10. Overall, we are able to effectively run the company with M2M and has become very routine for us. We have been using M2M since 2000 and version 5.5.

We are a 22 year old manufacturer of Cable & Wire Harness assemblies, with 50 employees. In the 90's we were using an $800 program, PCMRP to track our inventory, and Peachtree to do our accounting. In 2000 we decided to upgrade our system to a fully integrated management system and after several demonstrations, we chose M2M. Implementation was difficult and we almost abandoned the project, but in retrospect we were forced to change the way we do things and we are a better company as a result. As a job shop, BOM and Routing accuracy is critical in managing your operation, and variance reporting is used to refine your processes. The standard reports are informative, but we have also had to write our own reports and have paid to have some custom reports as well. We did not expect M2M to come with every report we needed, and we took the report writing classes which were helpful. We have hosted the San Diego Users Group, and are also members of the Los Angeles Users Group. We find these groups helpful, as other manufacturers sometimes have a better way to solve problems than a software company. We have upgraded several times from 3.6 to 4.0 to 5.1 to 5.6 and are now on 6..01. The next upgrade is to 7.0, but we are not sure we want to go to that, as it requires a different operating system; and these upgrades are tedious, expensive, and frustrating. Had we known then what we know now, we would have stayed on version 5.6, because 6.01 did very little for us and actually created some problems. The customer service module was much better on 5.6. We were recently awarded AS9100 and ISO9001/2008 certifications. The software does little to help us with that, although M2M has been suggesting they have a lot to offer for quality system management. That is just not the case. Since M2M has been sold or merged (twice that we know of) we find the customer support has declined in the last decade. Its harder to get immediate answers and it takes longer for tech support to get back to respond to your case. The good news is, there are some excellent people that we are privileged to know there, and we call them directly and get the answers. Some people have left the company due to the changes, but many of our go-to people are still there. So after 13 years, we are most definitely an M2M company. It works for us, we understand it, and we are comfortable with it. We would like to use it indefinitely, depending on the cost. We find the annual fees excessive, especially since support is not as good as it once was. The fact that they are offering to "lock in" a fee schedule over 5 years reminds us of health insurance skyrocketing.Hopefully this will not be the case. We want to stay with M2M.

We have been using Made2Manage for 15 years in a make-to-order, discreet, manufacturing environment. We have seen the product go through two acquisitions and mergers in that time. Currently, we are on version 6.01 which uses Visual Fox Pro 9 to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 database. Made2Manage is surprisingly feature-rich and has more functionality than most other ERP systems in their class. Certainly more than those I have worked with in the SMB market. However, the software's reliance upon Visual Fox Pro does leave it vulnerable to occasional database or report corruption which causes problems ranging from minor data loss to erratic changes in functionality and inconsistent reporting. Unfortunately, the quality of the product will never be where we need it to be until they can completely divorce themselves from Visual Fox Pro and do a full rewrite. Aptean touts their new version 7 as being a .NET based program, but one of their consultants told us that only the interface is written in .NET and that reporting and database operations are still handled by Visual Fox Pro, which according to Microsoft, goes completely out of support in 2015. Made2Manage support has been very difficult for us. They are hands-down the most lacking support organization I have worked with in my entire career. Most of the issues with the product are caused by database errors which can be found and repaired with a few simple SQL queries that search for duplicate or missing primary keys. Although, in our experience it can be extremely difficult to convince their technicians of the existence of erratic behavior, they have, on occasion, admitted to having bugs. At last count, our company had upwards of 17 open change requests dating back to as early as 2005 to address these issues. Most frustrating is the exclusion of custom reports from their scope of support. By and large, the vast majority of our issues relate to problems with spontaneous corruption in reports which can cause the same report to print and/or display in different formats or with different data at different times. This corruption is an inherent problem with Visual Fox Pro and is most evident to loyal, long-time customers like us who have been through several upgrades. However, Made2Manage support will not look at these issues without an additional customization fee which was quoted to us as $225/hr with a one-hour minimum. We found an independent consultant that only charges $100/hr and now regularly use him. He typically has the problem fixed in less time than it would take to open a case with Aptean.