ION 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
Integrations
User Reviews

Overview

ION

4.0

(28)

Pricing

Pricing available upon request

About ION

ION is a manufacturing operations platform developed by First Resonance. It is designed to help modern manufacturers streamline their operations, improve efficiency, and ensure quality control. Here are some key features and aspects of ION:

Real-Time Data and Analytics: ION provides real-time insights into manufacturing processes, allowing users to monitor and analyze data as it happens. This helps in identifying bottlenecks, optimizing workflows, and making data-driven decisions.

Traceability: The platform offers robust traceability features, ensuring that every part and process in the manufacturing chain can be tracked. This is crucial for quality control and compliance, especially in industries like aerospace, automotive, and medical devices.

Collaboration and Communication: ION facilitates better collaboration and communication among team members. It integrates with various tools and platforms, enabling seamless information flow and coordination across different departments.

Integration with Existing Systems: ION is designed to integrate with existing enterprise systems like ERP, MES, and PLM. This ensures that manufacturers can leverage their current investments while enha...

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ION Pricing and Plans

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Free Version

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ION Features

Popular features found in Manufacturing Execution
Forecasting
Inventory Management
Order Management
Production Management
Quality Control
Safety Management
Supplier Management
Supply Chain Management
Traceability
More features of ION
API
Automated Scheduling
Barcode/Ticket Scanning
Bills of Material
BOM Creation
Compliance Management
Cost Tracking
Data Collection
Data Import/Export
Data Visualization
Document Management
EDI
ERP integration
Estimating
For Manufacturers
For Small Businesses
Inventory Tracking
Item Management
Kitting
Maintenance Scheduling
MES
Monitoring
Multi-Location
Performance Metrics
Production Scheduling
Product Lifecycle Management
Quality Management
Real-Time Data
Real-Time Monitoring
Reporting & Statistics
Resource Allocation
Scheduling
Shop Floor Management
Third-Party Integrations
Workflow Management

ION Integrations

NetSuite

QuickBooks Enterprise

Teamcenter

Jira Workflow Steps for Slack

Duro

Bild

See all 11 integrations

ION User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.0

Ratings Breakdown

21%

61%

18%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

3.9

Value for money

4.4

Customer support

4.8

Functionality

3.5

Charlie G.

Verified reviewer

Aviation & Aerospace

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Reviewed June 2021

Ion is a powerful manufacturing workflow tool with a very bright future.

Even where Ion has rough edges, it is far superior in usability and feature richness to the competition. In the months we have been using Ion the robust feature roadmap has been borne out. Every update increases usability and functionality, though sometimes comes with some workflow changes. I can unreservedly recommend this software. It is good now with the potential to be great. I have had a very good experience with the First Resonance team and believe they are an excellent team to work with.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The traceability, work instruction, and issue ticket modules work together well and provide the needed functionality. The Ion team is highly responsive and actively adding features. They provide real time support on both bugs and usability concerns. The technician facing interface is highly functional. Setting up and scaling the software instance is easy. The First Resonance team makes export control compliance easy.

Cons:

The GUI can be very clunky on older modules. Minor program errors are not uncommon while working in the tool. Data entry from our PDM system is very manual and time consuming. The lack of strong mobile support is a significant opportunity for the software, but a frustrating omission at the moment.

Wade C.

Verified reviewer

Airlines/ Aviation

501-1000 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed July 2020

Clean, intuitive, feature rich, and constantly improving!

The team is very supportive, blazing fast response time, and it has greatly improved our shop floor activity tracking.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Easy to deploy and get acquainted with. Integrates well with our developing company process. Feature implementation, changes and fixes are extremely fast.

Cons:

Some functions are not super intuitive, but are still maturing. Not a major con but a function of a developing software platform.

Reasons for choosing ION

Team Support, Cost, Functionality, paradigm change compared to historical and monolithic MES systems.

Reasons for switching to ION

Software was very limited in functionality, did not include many of the functions required for our MVP, and the team was not willing to customize.

Mia H.

Verified reviewer

Aviation & Aerospace

501-1000 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Reviewed June 2021

It's an okay start

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

Very clean look. First Resonance has also been extremely receptive to feedback, even for new features that can take a while to implement. It's clear that this software is in it's early stages, but getting feedback and responding to it is a great wat to improve.

Cons:

There are soooo many improvements need to make this software productions ready. The instruction editor is still pretty annoying to use when incorporating images, ordered list, and any non-basic formatting needs. I wish there was an option to create a field that can take multiple inputs. I have never tried to used the part tracking and traceability in ION, but from what I have seen it does not look ready to go. I wish the devs did more controlled roll outs of improvements/changes. Sometimes, I feel that things are rolled out really quickly and result in a lot of glitches upon implementation.

Ben G.

Verified reviewer

Airlines/ Aviation

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Reviewed June 2021

A good product with a lot of room to grow

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The interface is simple and the software is generally pretty easy to navigate. Creating items and procedures is smooth and I can generate work orders with no problem. The First Resonance team is responsive and updates are dropped frequently, so issues that I might have one week may get resolved the next. Always nice to wake up to new functionalities and have an evolving UI.

Cons:

The filtering is not great. Creating items or work orders is easy enough, but going back and finding work that was done previously is not an easy task. At the moment, this generally consists of scrolling through long lists. The search bar also is a little inflexible and queries have to be precisely defined, otherwise, it's back to scrolling through a long, long list. It's also not apparent what's going on in the backend of Ion and it's easy to mess up links among different items that are linked (i.e. it is pretty fragile).

Sohil N.

Verified reviewer

Machinery

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Reviewed May 2021

Easiest way to set up a production workflow

ION has brought great value to our company. It's very easy to use and set up. The customer service is amazing! The team really listens to your feedback in order to improve the product. If ION can't do something you need right now, it will likely get added or there is a sufficient work around. Highly recommend using ION!

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

ION is super easy to set up! You can get running with it within a few days and immediately make an impact on your production workflow. Having your work instructions directly in the software and not in some other system is a huge benefit. The ability to track the as-built BOM and collect data during the execution of runs is extremely valuable.

Cons:

There are some edge cases and bugs that still need to be sorted out. There are some features that are lacking like in app reports, but there are good workarounds until they get a chance to implement it. Consumption of material for 3D printing applications needs to be improved.

Tim H.

Verified reviewer

Defense & Space

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Reviewed June 2021

The future of manufacturing is bright

We were decently early adopters with Ion and have seen the software grow into a more and more powerful toolbox.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Ion is going to revolutionize the field of work instructions and inventory management. The support team is knowledgeable, helpful, and easy to work with. While working with the team, it feels like they're part of your internal team when finding solutions within Ion.

Cons:

The price seems to be a little aggressive for the software when compared with alternatives. The per user price keeps the software from being fully adopted by the company to find solutions of their own.

Reasons for choosing ION

ProdSmart didn't have a US Engineering support team.

Ian S.

Verified reviewer

Airlines/ Aviation

201-500 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed July 2020

Ion User Review

Ion has done a really good job at providing us what we need when we need it. Very responsive and amazing customer support. Ion has also helped us create a tool that can aid in data capture far better then we were doing before.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Ion has great features for developing work instructions fast. It is very easy and intuitive to use. I like the data field collection option that Ion gives you which helps better track the data inputs that need to be captured when executing processes. I also think the nested step functionality is great and helps organize the work instruction a lot better in addition to the dependencies functionality.

Cons:

I feel that some of the data field validations are not fully developed. Min/Max values can be mistakenly entered and in result the operators using the work instruction may not be able to capture process data correctly. There are often bugs when new tools are released and although these are usually corrected pretty quickly it slows down the operators when performing work. Editing functionality when creating work instructions could use a lot of improvement.

Reasons for choosing ION

Easier to set up. Ability to customize our work instruction development and MES system with the First Resonance team.

Jasmine C.

Verified reviewer

Industrial Automation

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 12 months

Reviewed May 2021

The MES That Evolves With Your Manufacturing Needs

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I really appreciate the attention to detail the First Resonance Team devotes to customizing our Ion interface. The clean interface, seamless procedure integration, and run/issue capabilities are only a few if the features that make my team work fast and efficiently. It did not take much time for the team to integrate Ion into our day-to-day start-up life, and more importantly, grows with us as we scale-up production.

Cons:

My current struggle with the software is something I know the First Resonance team is working on already - the import parts feature. If we could possibly have a verification tab or import history implemented to the software, it could possibly help minimize the confusion relating to whether or not a item line was imported correctly. I will relay an addition to this customer request to the Ion support.

Zack A.

Verified reviewer

Mechanical or Industrial Engineering

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Reviewed May 2021

Up and coming MES solution

Ion has been a real partner for us and is very responsive to our feedback.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I love that this is a simple, cloud-based solution for manufacturing execution, that DOESN'T have too much bloat!

Cons:

A lot of the core functionality is there, but I'm wishing for some usability features like better organization and filtering of runs, better tracking for different workcenters, and some "quirk-reduction" as there are a lot of little things you just need to know how to do or how to massage the system.

Shane C.

Verified reviewer

Defense & Space

11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Reviewed June 2021

This Software Has Great Potential

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I like how easy it is to create new runs and procedures, as well as the usefulness of the runs. I also appreciate the how receptive to feedback the team is and how quickly they implement changes to make the software better.

Cons:

My biggest complaint is that there is no way to view the history of a part. We often make an assembly, use it, then strip it down to use the parts elsewhere. When we try to go back to see where that part had been used in the past, there's no way to find out.

Showing 1 - 10 of 28 Reviews

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