Avanti Slingshot Print MIS

Powerful MIS for digital and large-format POS businesses

Commentaires : Slingshot, and the Avanti professional services, redefined many of the ways we run our business so that we’re more profitable and positioned for growth.

Avantages :

Avanti helped us refine our processes, helped us reduce waste, reduce operator downtime, and accurately price our products. We’re now more efficient in just about every aspect of our shop and we expect the integration with XMPie will help expand our business.

Inconvénients :

Like any good product, it takes time to get things perfect. And time is hard to come by. Not a 'con' rather more a reality.

Detailed and Precice software, but also very cumbersome and granular

Commentaires : It was fun and awesome to see it all work, but super stressful and tiresome to set it all up.

Avantages :

It is very detailed. And has a lot of info that can be stored and potentially used to help complete the job

Inconvénients :

Because there is soo much details and minute info, it became a huge project to simply set it up. There is simply too many things to set up. Things that regular employees at a printshop wouldn't know how to set up.

Avanti Slingshot - first year use

Avantages :

It seemed to have everything we needed. Integration with current software, job review and scheduling, able to capture time and materials. Gave us budgeted cost vs. actual cost. Many other features that we not intended to be used, but may be implemented in phase 2 or 3 of configuration.

Inconvénients :

LOTS of things could be improved! This suggestion would be a major overhaul, but here it is; instead of multiple modules/screens to go to to evaluate ONE job - why not go to ONE job and see (or have access to) the other modules from within that record. I hate having to jump around from module to module to find information or take action in some way.

Good application for our company

Commentaires : We are in a pretty good place now, however, the beginning was rough after going live. We felt like the product was too new and had endless bugs to work through.

Avantages :

the potential to be the top application in the market. I like that you can run it in any browser.

Inconvénients :

I like in our previous MIS that we could clean, purge, archive and manage the data to keep the server running better. We would like to use change orders one day. The full connectivity to accounting is not there yet. It needs some levels or options to be considered by the customer. The one option that we were presented required a completely new philosophy that didn't work for us.

Tiziano Colussi

Commentaires : It was a little painful for the first 3- 6 months but once the system is understood--its very powerful and efficient.

Avantages :

Very efficient system when learning curve is completed. It still presents challenges even if system is understood.

Inconvénients :

Learning curve is long and because I was not trained--and had to teach myself, I had to ask a lot of questions in the first few months. Still run into challenges but the Avanti staff have always been there for support and 95% of the time the issues are resolved. Takes time to understand all the modules and move through them easily. Find there is a lot trial and error. Never was able to get answer on why jobs when closed and shipped still appear on my job list. I don't understand why I can't take them off my job list somewhere in Avanti so they don't appear on my job list excel file.

AIIM Streamlines business with Slingshot

Commentaires : On boarding the newer MIS system was a large undertaking culturally. Avanti was able to provide the necessary training and resources both onsite and offsite.

Avantages :

Modular based and scaleable which helps internally adoption rates. Software is evolving rapidly and is always bringing new features and functions to the systems. Adoption of these features helps us streamline business processes and production tasks which show on the bottom line

Inconvénients :

Estimating layouts and modeling would benefit from AI in the future. Slingshot job tickets can be overwhelming in the amount of information provided to production.

Decent experience. Not very user friendly

Avantages :

Once I got used to the technical language used and how to navigate around, it became a pretty efficient tool. Glitches occur, as with any software, but are fairly seldom.

Inconvénients :

It seems that the developers were likely not every day users. The technical terms used and the steps taken to complete tasks aren’t the most intuitive. Also, sometimes it seems that more steps than necessary are involved in certain tasks, such as shipping.

Grow business without adding resources

Commentaires : We are the biggest proponent of Avanti Slingshot. Their support and responsiveness is exactly what you need when you make an investment in a software system like this. They’re with us all the way. As far as the support team and the training goes – above our expectations. Other companies ghost you once the ‘sales cycle’ is over. Since we signed on with Avanti the training, support and software development team listens to us and continues to improve on the system to better serve our needs.

Avantages :

We realized our ROI within six months due to informed business decisions based upon detailed project profitability, fast, accurate and consistent estimates, and reduced miscommunication errors.

Inconvénients :

The Slingshot dashboards are pretty but need more robust widgets.

Much needed large format MIS

Commentaires : After a number of years evaluating various MIS for our business, the Avanti Slingshot was chosen as it best suited our needs. It helped us streamline our processes and positioned us for further growth. It eliminated hours of administrative work enabling us to focus our customers needs.

Avantages :

The system is very user-friendly. The team of experts and developers are always willing to listen to suggestions and continue to enhance the product. In recent years the updates and additions have become more frequent which is a plus. The User Conference is an event not to be missed.

Inconvénients :

Like any other software, it does not suffice to all our needs. However I would not categorize it as a negative. It hard to please every user.

Good solution with outstanding expertise and support

Commentaires : Excellent

Avantages :

Lots of well thought functions, scalable

Inconvénients :

Annoying small bugs related to Web based screen layouts and interaction French is only partially available for shopfloor and some forms (claims to be multi-lingual)

Perfect MIS tool for our company

Commentaires : Open system with tight integration to several third-party solutions, like our existing web-to-print software. Their XML loader quickly generates detailed packing lists for each order. Accurate and thorough material cost tracking and detailed accounting processes.

Avantages :

Managing hundreds of orders for individual customers used to require 5 people. Now it can be done with one, which frees us up to keep growing our business without adding excessive staff.

Inconvénients :

Performance (speed) of software is an issue but does continue to improve.

Avanti Classic is a friendly and robust system

Avantages :

Classic is a very user-friendly and robust system. I like the way Avanti continues to take input and upgrade their product. I just went to their User Group Conference where Avanti users and developers all came away with a lot of great ideas to better use and improve the system. The whole team at Avanti is excellent to work with and they really make working with them a valued partnership.

Inconvénients :

There are always potential drawbacks to software but at the moment my system is very stable and robust.

Makes fulfillment profitable

Commentaires : The Avanti team was remarkable. The professional approach helped my people feel comfortable with the entire implementation and go-live.

Avantages :

Reducing time to administrate allows us to focus more time serving our customer base. Definitely helping make fulfillment more profitable. Slingshot’s automation and structured workflows eliminated the breakpoints we had with our previous MIS system. It reduced the fulfillment workload from 10-15 hours/week down to less than 2 hours per week! Automation and structured workflows that route tickets directly to the warehouse. It means that floor employees can quickly pick and pack without having to think or stress about it. A contract module that automatically creates invoices for contracted charges (i.e. # of picks, # of orders, warehouse storage). The system significantly reduced our end-of-month invoicing activities.

Inconvénients :

Currently the focus on the development team is centered around bug fixes rather than features, however I believe more resources are still required.

Customer Service

Avantages :

I like that the software is easy to learn and to navigate through. I was able to jump in with little bit of online training that i receive.

Inconvénients :

I don't like that it feels a slow when creating estimate and i wish that i would be able to email my CSR team an estimate directly from there.

We had a bad experience with them and I know we are not the only ones

Commentaires : They will nickel and dime you all the way through the process. They don't have a training manual so when you forget how to do something, they are going to charge you $200/hour to tell you again. They have an okay product but you will pay through the nose and will easily spend 6 figures to get up and running. You are also going to pay a minimum of $1,000 a month for support and Tech support is never available when you call in so you will have to wait until someone emails you back. The company is understaffed and too small to service their accounts. I think there are better options like PrintVis. I would recommend a SAAS model versus writing a big check and hope that you are successful.