Hello All,

Myself and my colleagues currently investigating our options on hire management software.
We have been looking at the usual Hire-track, Sirius Pro, and a few others.

The one software package that's currently standing out to us is Protonic's easyjob 4 - Protonic website.

I was wondering first of all, who is using version 4? and if you're a user how are you getting on with it?
Any pro's and con's people might have experienced...
What is their support like?
and/or any other information/suggestions that could help us make the right decision...

Please forgive me if this has already been covered (I did search around first).

As we are mainly a production company, software that can manage - staff, logistics, stock, sub-hire & communication is crucial.
Optional CRM & sales would be good, but not fully necessary.

The one thing that's gripping me at the moment is that if we make the wrong decision, we might be faced with more of a burden than a helper.

Thanks in advance - any help will be greatly appreciated.

We're been running EJ4 for about 3 weeks now, and this is the second time I've installed EJ in a rental business. It rocks. For instance today we took a call to help another hire co out with a replacement machine to cover one of theirs that had died. It took me about 2 minutes to create the job, assign the kit and print the paper work out while the courier waited to sign it out.

One of our staff has been using an alternative mentioned earlier up till joining us in august, and says that he far prefers EJ to the previous system he used.

We recently visited one of the Uk's (possibly Europe) Video rental company. We asked what they're running, and the they said currently a couple of systems in the various branches, but that in the long terms they wanted to take all the branches and European offices onto EasyJob. Which made me happy, because if they think it will work for them, then it gave me confidence that we should have no issues.

We run it on a Server which we then access with a mix of Macs via Terminal Services and PC's as straight clients. There's typically about 4 machines that are accessing the system. The server is a 2GHz Dell Optiplex desktop with Windows Server 2003, and about 2GB of Ram, so nowt special. I did have a fright the other day as the HDD was complaining of being full, and it was the EJ DB that had taken over the drive. I ran a back up, and this shrank the DB down and returned about 30GB of space.... I might move the DB to a separate HDD in the future.

In terms of your questions-
Support- usually very quick, and they speak good English. Where necessary they have remoted into the system and sorted issues for us, but those issues only arose because I screwed the DB by doing something foolish to it.

Reports- The stock ones are good, but you'll probably find that you'll need to spend sometime tweaking them to your satisfaction. This can take a while, but they appear to be improved from V3. Once you know what your doing it is very quick and easy to edit them too.

Sub hires- Very easy to deal with. Book the items to the job, then once in the Project tab hit the Subhire button. This then goes through a few steps to let you assign the overbooked kit, select the Hire co, then create the sub hire job.

Comms- the Freelance tool looks quite good in terms of being able to send out 'alerts' when there are jobs available to the usual freelancers. I've still not fully got my head round adding and using contacts in the Addres book, but I've not had a huge amount of time to play with it.


The business Information Centre is great for getting stats on the business side of things, but as we only have a month or twos back info on there we haven't got a lot of data yet. It's also good for looking forward to the coming year as we're booking stuff in for next summer, so it gives and idea of the work and cash flow.

Am I glad we bought it? Yes. It's already saved us time, and made the company more efficient. It means we can all see what's happening and manage it well. It has sped up the time taken to get a quote out, and means we can now manage the kit better. As far as I'm concerned this alone os worth the price.

I too was nervous that we might be heading the wrong way, but combined with our experience now we own it, and the thought that one of the biggest video hire co's reckons it's worth the price have settled my mind.

Regrets and things I'd change? I'd have bought a Barcode Printer and Scanner to label everything as we did the inputting. If it ran on a Mac, I'd be near perfect.

Hope this helps.
Pete.

Firstly, Thank you so much Pete for taking time to write all that. It's really helpful.

All of what you said backed up my thoughts, and what people have already told me about the software.
This is starting to look like the package for us...



A few other quick questions...
Q1: You say the DataBase took over the drive. Could you shed some light on how this might have happened....(im just curious, as it might happen to me) surely a database of that nature wouldn't fill a drive - would it?

Q2: As we work from two different sites. One being our main warehouse, the other a production office in the Midlands, where we only keep a small amount of equipement stock (as most of it is sub'ed in) -
we were looking at seting up a VPN connection to a server, in other words treating the production office as another terminal. (I.T. isnt really my expertise) I'm assuming this will work on the standard 5 user licence? or should we be looking to get the multi branch version? (this really is about budget for us)

Q3: would you reconmend buying the barcode printer & scanner from Protonic, or does the program suport most types of printers and scanners...?

Cheers.
Chris

Any other thoughts form others welcome...

No worries. It helped me to hear of other EJ users that are happy with it, and their thoughts on the whole system and how it stacked up to the competition.



It's about a 35GB HDD, so with the OS, and the DB that had run to about 32GB, it didn't leave much space. How or why it happened? I don't know. I do know I had the issue before, and that simply using the Server Manager tools to run a back up dropped it to around 500Mb. It might jut be log files or something building up in the month and a half that we're been running it as we've rebooted the system about twice in that time. Mental note made now to A)install a bigger drive, and B) Set up the server manager to run a regular back up Scheme.



I believe it's 5 consecutive Log ins, so you could have 100 different users, but only 5 can access the system at once. If you have 5 Users in two places, then the VPN option might well work, but will slow it down compared to straight network access. Whether to the point of being hard to use I don't know. A proper IT Guru might be able to suggest a better way of establishing a link between the two sites that might work better. There is a noticeable difference between using it on a PC and via Terminal Server, but something that is liveable with.



I think the ones Protonic sell are possibly a little steep. Similar products I believe will work fine. Any printer that can print onto the desired paper or film will do the barcodes, then I believe they are a bit more requiring about the scanner, but many of the USB ones will work apparently. Have the conversation with them, as they might be inclined to discuss pricing.

Thanks Pete, you're a legend!

No worries. Seeing as you have offices in Exeter and Nottingham, feel free to give me a bell next time your passing and drop in. I'd be happy to show you how the system runs and is to use. We're just off Junction 12 of the M5, South Gloucester.

I can also recommend Easyjob - been using it for a year now - very simple and clever software!
I also recommend the barcode labels those guys sell.

Awesome, Would you mind if I asked what your main market is? ie Video, Sound, Light, Hire, Production etc,
Have you come to any barriers as such yet, or found that it doesnt work for any/some uses?

Is there anything that stands out when your purchase a label printer from them? ie is it more integrated? etc

Thanks for your post

As one of the authors of one of the "other" rental packages, I'd be interested as to what functions sold EJ to you ?
I know it's cheaper than the competition, but that doesn't sound like your reason.

David

Just to clarify, We haven't brought anything yet. Were currently using the trial version with has no limitations except you can only do up to 35 jobs at a time. To be honest, 35 jobs is more than enougth for December period to trial it.

Things that are selling it to us are…
The price!
Ease of use, and ease of setup
The general look and layout of menus / windows
The depth of the program, there are a lot of powerful functions that are of use to us.
Powerful hire item managements, including workshop logging, PAT testing, costing etc
PDA integration - geat for out the van hires on-site using a Bluetooth printer.
Outlook integration.
Powerful database, on a good platform, easy to integrate into our existing servers (ASP.NET)
Easy Multi site management - great because we have two branches.
The one stop shop for quote/invoice/delivery note/etc
QuickBooks file exporting (pretty standard)
And the list goes on, those were just a few cool features that stand out in my mind.

To be honest all these features were included in most software packages...
But easy job is standing out on usability, ease of use, speed, PRICE, its powerful database and does everything we want it to.

Another thing that is important to us is the look and feel of the software. EJ is just really easy to find what you want to find. I can't really describe it, but other software packages just seemed to strain my brain with useless - I could care less information, and bad layouts. We found it hard on some packages to navigate around even the simplest of functions. On the other end of the scale, some packages didnt do enough.

I could go on forever. But if there is another package out there for the same money, with the same amount of users included in the price, which does a better job, I think we would buy that instead. I welcome any more considerations...

Lets also keep in mind that not all software packages are for everyone here.

Chris.

Terminal services would probably give you better performance than thick client over a broadband link.

Hi - not much more I can add to what Pete has already said but we have recently implemented EJ4 here at GLS. I spent the best part of a year reviewing the competition and really found EJ to be far and away the best bet. Dont want to get into some big product comparison thing but perhaps one of the most important deciders was that many of the other products seemed "old". By that I mean they have been out for ages, features have been bolted on here there and everywhere and the product just didnt seem slick. I visited them all at PLASA07 (all but one who were resting on their laurels so much that they didnt even turn up!) and even in the hands of a salesman didnt feel that they were as good as EJ which comes over as a new design which perhaps has the benefit of hindsight on the competition. The intergration with windows was also excellent, so many time saving features for free!

Anyway - we spent a further 6 months formatting data having recently gone through the delightful excercise of sticking on tens of thousands of barcode labels!!! This brought us to August this year when we were finally ready to try the product.

What I did in the end (and Id very strongly recommend this) is to pay EJ to import and tidy the data for us and then send over a trainer to do the install, teach those of us that are implementing it and do the basic set up to get it up and running. Their charges were very reasonable and the kick start it gave us was immense. We are now running it in tandem with our existing system and will switch over to it 100% on January 1st! Having their chap in our office was particularly useful in things like modelling complex objects. By way of an example take the commmon old bar of 6 parcans. It is a single hireable object but comprised of 7 items. When you put it in a job you want it to appear on the picklist as a bar of 6 not as an IWB and 6 Parcans. Also, you dont want those parcans to appear on the available "single parcan" stock count as you might not want to dismantle it just to hire them out! What about when someone needs to relamp it to another lamp type?! So as you can imagine complex objects are, we found, like iceburgs! They look simple enough but they can give you a headache when you actually try to set them up! Having an expert on hand for a few days was really handy and I think we've got over those issues without a problem.

Hope that is of some use!

Ian

Awesome!

You guys have been most helpful.

I think my hunt is comming to an end and im closing in for the kill...

(the kill being....thousands of barcodes and a load of staff hours implementing it)

Thank you sooo much!

I'm currently working on the implementation of EJ4 in a belgium based rental and production company, and struggling a bit with arranging the load in and load out procedures on the barcode scanner software ... ( I can't seem to find any documentation on the use of the scanner system )

Now I'm considering asking the management for some assistance of the protonic people; however I would like to figure as much out myself as possible.

I received from my colleagues a little folder with printed version of the pdf document on the website ... however this tells not much about the other features, such as usage of the barcode software on the pocket pc.

If there is someone who has this documentation, please send me a personal message.

We evaluated a few packages the first time I implemented Easyjob in 2005, and found it to offer exceptional value for Money, great support and as IanGLS says, the interface seems more intuitive and in keeping with more modern software. When it came to doing it again in 2008, the same held true, and so we trialled it, the Staff loved it so we took the plunge as it still offered the same cost effectiveness.



We actually are running the software over Terminal Services in the office, then when out of the office we use a No Machine Client to provide the link from our Server to our mobile computers. This works well, being as fast in the office as out of it....

Ok, I could not resist, and have downloaded EJ4, and have an incredibly basic question.

How do I set up who I am? Company data?? I can see in reports etc how it comes out, but cant figure out how to get it in.

Twenty five years in IT and I cant get past step one

Hi,

I just tried to look for answer to your question, but can't seem to find this setting. I have printed out a database scheme and had a fast look in it, but didn't see where it was.

The next time I see or hear someone of protonic I'll ask them how that is fixed

Struggling my way up into the rights system since we are a production and rental company and don't want our production and account managers to mess around in the inventory

And the answer is...... you cant.

The company name and address and stuff is part of your registration, so trial users dont get to set that. That is what $2,680.00 US gets you, plus you can do more than 35 simultaneous jobs.

If it seems to be too good to be true, it probably is.

Which is a real $%^&, as after a few hours playing I think this software really rocks. Its a bit wierd, but once you get past that its really very good indeed; it has "depth" - you go looking for a bit more and its there in spades. I completed my first proposal tonight, a tiny job, but as I discovered more coolness I kept going back. Having a bit of software that knows that when you send out a light desk it may need a manual and will need a mains cable and a case and it adds it all up and makes it neat in the order one wants by using categories in my order (not alphabetical), how cool is all that. And for $0 its truly amazing value.

So, the answer to my question is you go into each report you want to use and change it manually using the on-screen designer. Or maybe a global change on all the .ejt files replacing things like Text=CompanyInformation.Name1 with Text="Acme Inc" would be the answer. Maybe I'll give that a bash tomorrow, but its 00:30 my time now, so a Zebedee needs to be done.

Edited to note: I should say I've never used any hire software before, so I dont know if Easyjob is comparitively the mutts knuts or utter junk. So when I say "it rocks" that is my non-comparitive opinion.

I was going to post and say that the company details are linked to the registration, so that they become populated once the product is registered.

Your experience pretty much sums it up. It is very easy and fairly intuitive to use. Other products that we looked at weren't so. I think it rocks for the £1500 we paid for it!

Their support is great- we're moving the server tomorrow, so getting the database re-activated isn't much hassle.

Only real gripe is that it has to run on a Microsoft Server.

Hi

Reading all of this has been helpful. We have purchased the software but am a little lost as to where to start with the set up. Does anyone have an implementation plan that has worked well.

Thanks

Or experience is that you almost have to start the wrong way round. So if you use sub-hire suppliers, put their details in before you put the kit it. Then the most important thing is to get all the the stock in correctly. For accurate weights and volumes you'll need to weigh and measure the kit, and if you need to prepare carnets for non European work, then the country on origin is also important. Fairly accurate values for sub-hire, purchase and sales are also important, as EJ will use these for the basis of calculating ROI and suggested rental rate if desired.

You then need to decide on how you want your equipment catagorised- this will appear on the reports you send out such as quotes, so it needs to be both good for your use and able to be shown to your clients. So for us we have things set up such as:

Source Equipment
|->DVD
|->VHS
|->DVDCam

Doing this right will make searching easier for tracking down equipment when you want to add it to a job.

When it comes to putting the kit in that lives as a package (so for us a 10K Barco Projector lives in a flight case with a remote, 4 safety bonds, 4 rigging clamps and 5BNC to VGA adaptor - described as 'Parts List") put the items in first, the projector last so you can the add the 'parts' to the main item. This means when you put a CLMR10 on a job, it automatically adds the case and parts list items to the job. If there are optional items, it's also worth putting them in first. So with the projector we have a range of 5 lenses that you might need on the job. These are listed as optional items, and again having them in before you add the item, means that you only need to go the the item screen once to add the parts list items, optional items, sub-hire suppliers and alternative items.

When adding items to a job, use the * as a wild card in the search boxes, so if your searching for a Barco Screen Pro II, you have to type the name exactly, or you can use *Screen and it will find all items with the text in.

Hope this helps.

Pete, when you note that for a projector it comes with a case, do you have the case categorised as a case, or the same as a projector, more specifically, how does it print out?

vixcs,

I'm currently doing an implementation, I'll be making some documentation on how we will implement it; and put it into ppt or word file when my notebook arrives. Afterwards I'll try to strip down company information and try to make some sort of easyjob manual for implementations.

I haven't figured the barcode system yet, at the moment the software on our pocketpc doesn't respond on barcodes of items ( which it did earlier this week ).

Concerning the case with an appliance; I make only a flightcase item from the moment it's possible to seperate them ... some of our products never leave the case, so I put the item barcode on the item. For FOH-racks or FX-racks we have packages which can have extra items coupled to them.

The only problem now is that we have both a rental company and a production firm, who should operate seperately, but they have been creating sites in EJ which is completely wrong ... so I'll have to make my way up with that issue

I'm now designing and modifying reports since we'll probably have them in 3 languages (nl/fr/uk), so this will take some time

The order of which I planned the implementation :

1. Create categories and sub-cats + pricing schedules
2. add items + rental inventory + weight + dimensions + purchase pricing + devices
3. add addresses : customers, suppliers, service companies, staff, ( syncronised with our accountancy software ( with db triggers + stored procedures ) )
4. cleanup database + add consumables ( earbuds for in-ears, gaffa, batteries, fog fluid, co2 bottles , ... )
5. design reports ( quote, invoice, preplist(internal use), packing list, return list(internal use)
6. add the projects + jobs which return after the starting day of implementation
7. rights : this is my biggest problem : is it possible to grant a user the right to print only 1 kind of report ( our guys in the workshop don't need to know how much our customers pay ) ...

So I have 1 question: is it possible to grant a user the right to print only 1 kind of report ( our guys in the workshop don't need to know how much our customers pay ) ...

Those running trial editions: it appears you can do a global search and replace on the report files (*.lst) to put your own corporate identity details in. However its not gotcha-free. Should anyone need to do this, ask me how...

A concurrent post has been automatically merged from this point on.



It doesnt look like EJ4 supports this degree of granularity, theres just one checkbox on the user profile to set print report yea or nay, but... each of the reports is just a file in a shared directory:

\\server\ej4data\reports

So if you are running a system with "proper" windows security you can put permissions on the files and use group memberships to prevent the use of inappropriate reports. Its ugly, as in if you try to use a report you dont have access to the error box pops up. Depends how desperate you are I guess

Hi David,

That was the only possibility I had in mind That's the way we'll do it probably then ... thank god we have a good windows server environment.

Thx,

PS: I don't know if there are any Benelux companies represented here, if so, and you use EJ, please drop me an e-mail at g.heyse@phlippo.com ; I would like to visit companies who use EJ on a daily basis and want to see how it's being used.

Hi Guys,

Well its been a long process but we are making some headway to getting our kit into the proggram, I have come up against a problem and am hoping someone might have some ideas to help..

...we have a large truss stock, some of which over time has become damaged, so I have entered a type say H40V L250 in as an item and then added all individual pieces as devices as we wish to track these as individual pieces, but now I want to be able to note the damaged peices so they do not pop up as part of our rental inventory but are still in our warehouse - any ideas how I do this....and keep them in the inventory but make them damaged or unhireable?

Any ideas on getting around this will be greatly appreciated.

vicki

Couldn't find an "official" way, but one way would be to send the buggers out on a (very) long term free hire!

Make sure the all truss is in with each piece set up as a device (Master Data>Items>Devices) Once it's in as a device you can then create a workshop activity for the device. If you leave the workshop activity open, then the device won't be able to be loaded onto a job, and I believe it counts out of the 'On the Fly' checks when in the items view for the job. There's also options to put against the workshop activity which will let you analyse the cost and effects of the damage that is sustained.

First let me say I, this is my first post - So Hi.
Second, I'm releaved to see people singing the praises of EasyJob as we have just purchased it and I'm having a nightmare setting it up (Not hellped by the lack of documentation by Protonic). I was begining to think that we had made a huge mistake perchasing the software, even after a year long serch.

Anyhow, the thing im struggling with it getting easy-job4 to talk to my PAT tester (seawood Suppernova)
I have spocken to Tec Support and they told me that I needed 'Patlite' to import the data from the machien, and then import that data in to easyjob. Iv loaded said software(vertion 1.1) but still can not import the data.

Has anyone else managed to get a PAT tester to talk to EasyJob4?

That's the one thing we've not done yet..... Sorry I can be any more help.

The set up can be a ball ache, but get it done right and you'll really benefit.

Yeah, we've just installed it to give it a go but the documentation in the 'help' of Easyjob 4 gives you a pdf of a (not great) manual for Easyjob 3! Ho hum, such is life.


We'd be interested in hearing how/if you manage this; we've got a supernova plus (I think) and although it's not essential for us at this stage, knowing that it's possible and any tips would be useful :-)

My colleague has imported some of our data (there must be a quicker way of doing it!) so I've started playing with it over the past few weeks, in between doing other stuff, and trying to get to grips with it without spending hours and hours at a time with it...

Have a look at this post in another thread wherupon the poster declares, for EJ v3, that

.

Maybe a PM may help you out?

Hi,

Next problem, I have been trying to play with the reports to give us the ability to start ghosting this along side our very slow paperbased system but am having problems. Does anyone know what proggraming info I need to put into the report program to give me the info on a packing list, at present I can not get the list of equipment to translate into this document? Also has anyone else had bar code problems and know of a solution, at present if I try to print my barcode inside easy job it does not line up with the printer and drops the logo so am having to go into the lable and report program every time I print one - very boring indeed and not very time efficient, I do wonder if I have missed a setting somewhere?

Lookign forward to some possibel answers, thanks.

Vicki

Hi

I'm continuing this thread so we don't have dozens of Easyjob threads going on at once. I wonder if anyone can help please, specifically with packages and the display of items?

We're using EasyJob 4.0 more now, and when it works for us it works well. We've got over many of the teething problems and item data input so are getting into it.

My query stems from the use of packages; I've put together a few packages of small amounts of lighting gear that often goes out together. However, they often act as the basis for a hire - rather than just the package itself. I can edit the numbers of items in the 'items' screen with no problems, but my issue is with the display of it all; on the summary tab, it insists on keeping the package items together (regardless of whether I've supplemented the hire with other things). This also propagates through to our report and printout.

As an example... I might have some 16A cable and a Mac 250 in a package, but then if I add some more items - say, a Mac 300 and a 32A cable - in the item summary the package and these extra items are displayed under the 'items' and 'package' headers independently (eg Items: 16A, 250, and Package: 32A, 300). What I'd like to be able to do is forget displaying the packages and simply list the items in order, together (eg 16A and 32A together, and 250 and 300 together) as if I'd entered the items manually.

Basically what I'm saying is that I'm using the packages to select a whole load of kit together for my convenience but once it's selected I don't care about the packages and want them to be displayed in a basic item list on the item booking screen. I'd also like it on the report form that I produce as if I'd done them all one at a time. Does anyone know how to do this please? (I can't get my head around the report designer, to be honest, to work out how to do this on the report - and the EJ manual is still v3 for the v4 software).

Many thanks

Peter

The quickest way to solve this, is when you click add package select the package then click 'OK', then when it prompts you on the 'Book Package' window, at the bottom of the window it offers a drop down box, which usually reads "Create New Group'. Select this so it reads 'Items' and it will plonk the kit into the default Items Group.

I think a lot of this can be sorted simply by using the 'Groups' Function in the items View as well. It is possible to create groups that then come out on the reports, for instance we may quote a job with some plasmas and projectors. I'd create a Group Called 'Projection' and one called 'Plasmas', assigning the bit to the groups as I add them to the window. These then appear on the report, with the kit listed under the subheadings:

Projection (<-Group Title)
|->Projectors
|-->LX380
|->Mains Cable
|-->16A-13A Extension
|-->13A-IEC
Plasmas
|->Displays
|-->42" Plasma
|-->50" Plasma
|->Support and Rigging - Unicol
|-->Unicol K Base
|-->Unicol Poles
|-->Unicol PLW Plate

This lets the client see what kit you've assigned where, and makes pricing easier to see, as it will give a Sub Total for Projection, then one for Plasmas etc. It also means you can add in extra kit, giving a new subtotal and making it obvious how this has altered the price.

To create and edit groups, click on the three dots between the Groups view drop down box and the 'Include Parts Lists' radio box. This then lets you add, edit and delete groups and rename them. You call also enable the 'Items Sortable' radio box to enable you to move them up and down in the listings, so you cables sit above the Macs etc.

Once you have created additional groups, right clicking over an item will let you assign the item to a group (and a whole host of other options such as Availability etc). Also adding a package will then give you the option to put the package into an existing group or create a new group.

The more I use easyjob the more I love it. It really does allow us to keep everything together in one place, and managing crew from the initial quote to booking them, scheduling people, P.O.s etc works really well. It's not perfect, but it's very close in my eyes! Most of this is learnt through trial and error, and pressing buttons to see what happens. It is also important to properly set things up, because then you can quickly substitute items through the scheduling board, or create a subhire to make sure a job is profitable before you quote the client etc.

Anyways, hope this helps!
Pete.

Marvellous, this is what I was missing and is just what I'm after (one wonders if the default can be changed...). Is there a way of de-packaging something that's already in a project, or should I just start again (if I can be bothered) to get everything in Items view?


Thanks; I'll look into it. We already have item categories so things come out being under 'cables' or 'adaptors' or 'projectors' or whatever; I think the groups thing just needs a bit of investigation :-)

Thanks for your help.

Sorry if this is old news but as a convert to EJ 4 for over a year now, hey do have their own very good forum, and the developers themselves will answer your questions.

see http://www.protonic-software.com

It's really easy- right click on the item and there will be the the option to 'Transfer to group'. Select that then you should be able to assign it to the 'Items' group, or any other for that matter. This assumes that you've either added packages or created additional groups.

HTH Pete.

Edit- Getting the right command in there.

Hi,

Hoping someone can help, I need to create a inventory deletion as we have lost some equipment, does anyone know how to create inventory deletion catergories so I can delete the specific items that have been lost? So far I have been doing this by scrapping items in the workshop screen, but I'm sure this isn't the correct way to do this.

I'm also having problems gettign any sensible reports out of the report maker, is anyone able to send me their template for printing an inventory of items list?

Thanks Vicki