Descartes Forwarder Enterprise Suite Pros and Cons

We process air, ocean, and intermodal shipments and Descartes Forwarder Enterprise Suite (DFES) greatly assists our customs compliance for cross-border shipments. We additionally use DFES for our financial billing and accounting process, allow us to send invoices directly to clients, service providers and carriers. Typical administrative day-to-day activities include quoting, rating, booking of shipments, ETA's/ETD's of vessels (tracking is vital and it provides invaluable information). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When I first encountered the platform, I thought the process was complex and thought it would be a long learning curve. However, I picked up speed after the initial hesitance.

Customization process for templates for documents again, initially baffled me. But a little repitition and it was far easier than I had initially thought. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Software automates Denied Party Screening and enables operations and accounting and collections to be linked providing visibility to payment for freight release. It enables a lot of customization and ad hoc reporting. Reports can be automated to run daily etc. and tracking is integrated and provides visibility to customers through online portal. Wildly customizable. Customer support is prompt. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The hardest part of the software is the initial set up. To get basic documents to generate such as a bill of lading or work order or invoice etc. the templates need customization. also many of the tools are a bit unintuitive. I think they are just 1 generation away from a really slick UI that will make life easier for users. In its current state there are great tools but it feels more like database management than us user centric interface. There are some canned reports but the formating as PDF or Excel isn't always usable for further number crunching due to formatting. We have had to make our own custom reports which fortunately one can do. It lacks tracking based automations. We are looking forward to their implementation of tracking based data automation such as vessel sailing and arrival dates being populated from tracking data but this is still not yet possible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Enterprise Suite is easy for individuals of all technical capability levels to use. It is very straight-forward, and has a lot of additional modules, tools, and service areas that you don't immediately see when using it. Typically, if there's an idea of something different to try, it likely already exists in Descartes. I use the reporting functionality a lot, and the custom scheduled reports is a feature that has been extremely useful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Product support, specifically on the customer-facing and integrations side, seems like it could use some improvements. We are a small company with limited personnel resources, so we have to rely on our forwarder suite support for some of the more technical projects or tasks.

The interface is outdated, which is typical of such a massive, widely used product like this that's been a major player for so long. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Software is very easy to use. Currently training my wife and she is liking it too. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Global back end tables are not maintained by Descartes (Sublocation codes and PGA tables, for example)

There is no way to generate a paid invoice for customers that prepaid. This leads to lots of phone calls and duplicate payments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The simplicity of use within the software. Compared to other products within our industry, most users find it the easiest to navigate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Reporting has it's downsides and we often have to make use of outside sources to collect data needed. Loading of data within Oneview to get day started lags too long. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

finding everything in One view in one place is so helpful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

nothing it's all very helpful and i dont think anything is disliked. . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how easy Oneview is to navigate and use for operations, accounting, and reporting. Each tab is easy to find and the resources are great! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The one thing I dislike would be some of the visual aspects of Oneview such as the color scheme. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the most the reports and the softaware we are using for billing purposes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It takes time to customise what we need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Descartes/ITMR4 solution is quite robust and offers a lot of automation in reporting, billing, closing files etc. The support & Helpdesk availability are great and the staff are always there to assist when needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some of the system capabilities are limited to all or nothing set up. The Ideas Portal often doesn't amount to a result in ITMR4. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The BOL screen is laid out like it will be on the printed BOL so you can see if you miss something. Customer support is always right on top of any issues. It's very user friendly for everyday use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't like in Import where the year/make/model/vin wont appear on the 7501 unless you add it as a note. Also there are some reports I would like to be able to run daiy/weekly with out having to bug accounting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.