The customer success team was generally responsive and professional throughout our implementation. Jameson, in particular, stayed engaged for a very long implementation period and continued trying to solve problems as they arose.
Netstock also responded promptly when issues were raised, and their leadership ultimately offered additional resources, reporting support, and further training in an effort to help us extract more value from the platform.
The issue was never a lack of effort from the individuals assigned to our account. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
The biggest issue was the gap between what we believed we were buying during the sales process and what the platform was ultimately able to deliver in our environment.
We are a manufacturing/distribution company running Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Our ERP has some complexity around units of measure, assemblies, BOMs, and purchasing logic, but I would not characterize our environment as unusually complex for a business of our type.
The implementation became an extremely long process centered around data validation, extract modifications, configuration changes, and repeated questions about whether the recommendations could actually be trusted.
Roughly nine months into a twenty-four-month agreement, Netstock was still describing us as only then beginning a six-week “Active Use” phase prior to onboarding completion. Netstock also stated that earlier sessions should not really be counted as true Use Phase sessions.
That is very different from the implementation experience we believed we were purchasing.
We also encountered product limitations that were material to the way our business operates. These included issues involving fractional units of measure and BOM conversions. At one point the system produced an obviously unusable recommendation with approximately $27 million of model value for shrink wrap. Netstock worked on fixes, and some issues were attributable to decisions or changes on our side, but the cumulative effect was that our users lost confidence in the recommendations.
Once users stop trusting a planning system, adoption becomes extremely difficult.
That became the central issue for us. At approximately $2,400 per month, Netstock needed to provide a meaningful improvement over what we were already able to accomplish internally with Excel, Jet Reports, and direct ERP data. It never cleared that bar.
We were also billed throughout the extended implementation. Netstock acknowledged in writing that its own technical backlog and staffing situation contributed to slower delivery, while also correctly identifying areas where BCW contributed to the complexity.
We continued trying to make the product work well beyond the point where confidence had started to erode because we genuinely wanted the implementation to succeed.
Ultimately, after concluding that the platform was not going to become a meaningful part of our procurement process, we asked Netstock for an early commercial exit. We did not ask for our implementation fee back. We did not ask for a refund of subscription fees already paid. We simply asked to stop paying the remaining term for a product that had not delivered sufficient value for our business.
Netstock reviewed the request multiple times, including with senior customer success and finance leadership, and declined both an early release and any financial compromise. Their final position was that they were not permitting customers to exit contracts early given current economic conditions.
That was particularly disappointing after such a long and unsuccessful implementation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.