I am no expert on databses, but have experienced bad ones and consider E-Mat at the time of purchase to be the best of the bunch in terms of specification, flexibility of both the database and the company in supporting it. Our IT department were happy with the system and so far I do not believe it has fallen over yet.We have used E-Mat for over 18 months now and I am quite happy as an EBME manager with the product, I do not dabble with databases anymore, I just use them.
Moving to E-Mat was a very good move for us, data transfer was painless but as the old database was corrupt the old adage of "rubbish in, rubbish out" applied. We asked Barwick to include an extra box labelled "surveyed". This enabled the technician to check the data entry when they had the equipment infront of them and correct if necessary - if we then reviewed equipment details we knew if the surveyed field was completed the data was accurate. This is just one example of the flexibility of Barwick/Ascribe.
At a recent user meeting I met other E-Mat users and although there are always some issues I was quite impressed with the setup, certainly contact Zoe if you think you have a problem. Ascribe were genuinely asking users for direction on how they could improve their product for the users - how many others really do that? Also the message came loud and clear that one size does not fit all, individual bespoke changes will be considered and, providing they are reasonable can be implemented, sometimes at a cost, sometimes not.
We are also paperless. Each Technician has a laptop and accesses E-Mat via a wireless LAN.
If you want any more information please do contact me.
Regards
Mark Grimshaw
