Astea Alliance Software

Astea Alliance is a full featured field service software that covers almost every need you may have. It can be customized to an organization's particular needs and procedures, and integration is available for a number of back-end systems. While it is full featured, it can at times be overwhelming to learn if you try to implement everything at once. Best method is to start with the basic feature set, and add to it once you are comfortable. Astea continues to work on making the software more customizable by the end user, but there are many things that will require the help of the developers at Astea. This is discouraging as the hourly rate is high and can get very expensive. It would help to have someone on staff that is tech savvy and has some programming knowledge including being well versed in SQL. Overall, you will be hard pressed to find something you need that Astea Alliance won't be able to handle, either out of the box or through customization. Proper set up and implementation in the beginning will go a long way.

Pros

The software offers a full feature set and can be used in a number of industries. The mobile component allows real time data entry from the field for instantaneous feedback.

Cons

Because it is very comprehensive, it can be overwhelming to learn. One step at a time is a good philosophy. There are also many things that will require assistance from the folks at Astea, and there is usually a charge for the assistance which can get quite expensive.

Great support always timely and helpful know their product

Pros

It’s very comprehensive and performs a great deal of background checks in terms of warranty claims takes out a lot of manual work

Cons

Takes a while to understand the backend of the software as an admin is is a little complex

No major issues at this time.

Pros

Flexibility and Astea support. Leader is the service space

Cons

BI reporting needs a lot of work to become a leader.

We have been able to simplify our processes and grow our business by adding Field Engineers without the need to add overhead.

Pros

The capability of the system is very good. There are many features we have yet to take advantage of since we implemented.
The capability and flexibility is what I like most.

Cons

The advantage of having a lot of capability is that it takes time to uncover all of it's power. It's strengths are also it's weakness.

Great tool

Pros

Easy to sort through owners or agents.
I use it to find job numbers when I know which agent is working on a job .

Cons

For some reason I am not able to sort ticket numbers from high to low or low to high.

Painful to get started, but, provides great insights into service events. We were not able to fund a dedicated implementation team which was not clearly communicated prior to purchase. Four years into our implementation, we are finally getting the ROI we had hoped.

Pros

Flexibility
Informational retrieval
PM batching
Exporting features

Cons

Mobile (we need to upgrade to 14.5)
Core reporting
Certain modules navigate differently
Upgrade complexity

The service module in ASTEA covers all scenarios you could have in workforce planning, billing, invoicing and inventory management.

Pros

Workforce planning with the dispatching console in ASTEA is a very self-explaining tool.
A perfect visualization of the workorder status, travelling allows to plan highly efficient.

Service Contract Setup is extremely flexible. Once set up, pricing is completely automised.

Cons

The system speed is someties very slow. Especially in Australia.
The pages are sometimes overloaded with fields and buttons that are required in only 10% of all processes.

The Astea team has been good to work with and are always looking for new advancement ideas for the system.

Pros

Astea is a good system to dispatch and schedule “break fix” service calls.

Cons

The system is not great at scheduled maintenance and inspections.

Dispatching functionality plus overall service management are excetpational however typical sales functionality is lacking.

Pros

Very functional and higly configurable and supports our overall service operations

Cons

Too many configurable functions makes it slightly difficult to setup and utilize

Coming from an organization that had an outdated service platform...ASTEA has been amazing. We are able to manage customer information, technical information, logistics, and call routing all from one place.

Pros

ASTEA Alliance allows for multiple options and good functionality when it comes to meeting the needs of our business. We are able to quickly implement changes and give our field personnel additional features to meet internal and external customer needs.

Cons

We had some bugs initially when upgrading to a new version. The support for the resolution of these issues could have been faster.

Pros

Customization and scale ability make this a very flexible and capable program.

Cons

Some functions are overly complicated requiring too many "clicks" to accomplish a simple task.

MANY features and capabilities - AWESOME! But there's way too many steps required to complete necessary tasks.

Pros

MANY features and capabilities. More than I as a user will ever need.

Cons

There's way too many steps required to complete necessary tasks.

Pros

What I like most about this software is that it increased our productivity and allowed us to track our customer calls/issues as well as our installed equipment.

Cons

Least likable quality is when one experiences errors within the software, the explanation is not always clear to resolve the problem.

I have worked with many companies, but nobody has provided the exceptional support that Astea has. Our project manager is extremely dedicated, and their development team has been able to create customizations that we were told by others was not possible. They have always been able to help us quickly, and resolve any issues we have had.

Pros

The Astea Enterprise product is a huge leap in automation for our company. The advanced workflow application saves our team members times as we can automate tasks that our team would normally do manually. The customization support allows us to set the application up in a way that is easy for our team members to learn.

Cons

The only complaint I would have is about the new Manager Workbench. It is rather slow, and missing some features for our dispatchers to properly use it correctly. This is a new feature so I am sure that Astea will be adding more options soon.

Overall, I would recommend this product to other businesses. It is a great tool to track employee hours, material prices and so much more relating to jobs.

Pros

I like all of the information that is available related to each specific job. We use Astea Alliance for "break-fix" or "service" jobs, which are smaller jobs. I working as an Accounting Specialist and I bill several of these jobs in Astea every day. I enjoy being able to see location information for the project, the price of services and material, all of the actions that have been taken during the lifetime of the project, etc. We also use the attachment function a lot to provide backup documentation for the project.

Cons

My least favorite part about this software is that the search functions can be a little finicky and you have to be very specific with what you are searching for when using the search function in Astea.

Pros

Can be very good to businesses who are documenting service tickets but for large scale companies, I would not recommend due to reliability.

Cons

As stated above, there was some reliability issues with the software. It was down quite often and we had to enter in all of our documentation again and it was a hassle. For a serious large scale usage, I would recommended another tool

Workforce management and scheduling/dispatch in a single system of record has reduced costs in our organisation.

Pros

Ease of configuration and customization (e.g. the ability to easily add fields and functions the service order UI).

Cons

The lack of ability to create user generated reports across different (e.g. combine data from service orders, activities and checklists).

It was a great exercise in what not to do.

Pros

The software has some features that could make it a huge asset to business. It offers multiple modules to cover a variety of scenarios and processes for daily business.

Cons

The product was unreliable and and could not perform to a level that would benefit our organization. Customer service was poor, and excuses from Astea were plentiful. It was a painful experience that we devoted a huge amount of resources to with no return on our investment. We ended up resorting to a different software.

The benefits of Astea include real time inventory, Field Service accuracy, and a solid view of the customer activity.

Pros

Astea Alliance is easy to use and provides a full picture of the customer and all activities. The mobile application has made the field service function fast and easy. Astea team is easy to work with and very helpful.

Cons

I feel it takes too long to get a customization through the process. Would like to see a quicker turnaround time in changes made to the software.

Pros

Astea has some powerful background processes that has allowed us to reduce order turn dramatically and reduce inefficiencies dramatically. The data held in the background is solid, which has enabled more accurate reporting.

Cons

Occasionally the service processes running on the server will run away with themselves, leading to RAM bottlenecks that degrade server performance. Records can lock the user updating them into the service order and not release them correctly, leading the record to not be usable before an Administrator has intervened.