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Manufacturing execution system for production

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ION Reviews

Overall rating

4.0

/5

28

Rating criteria

  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7.93/10

Reviews by rating

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Pros and cons

It is good now with the potential to be great. I have had a very good experience with the First Resonance team and believe they are an excellent team to work with.
The FR team is amazing and truly helpful. Highly responsive and very intimate with the software.
Very responsive and amazing customer support. Ion has also helped us create a tool that can aid in data capture far better then we were doing before.
Making tables and formatting is pain staking, image editing is lacking, weird bugs.
I was extremely disappointed in the customer service from the team. After receiving our trial, we tried to create new procedures but did not have the proper roles assigned to us to do so.
Ion fills gaps that I have been struggling with my whole career.
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28 reviews

Recommended

MS
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Mark S.

Printing, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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Why we like Ion

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

Organization. No annoying people bothering me

Cons

Complexity of the product. Annoying reviews.

PB
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Prashanth B.

Aviation & Aerospace, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Good product with potential to grow

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

Home UI is easy to understand. Easy place to keep track of completed and in-progress work.

Cons

Lack of ability to link different runs which could help move from one run to another without the use of going back to the run table.

DY
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Dmitriy Y.

Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Initial sw trials

Reviewed 3 years ago

Manufacturing builds, procedures.

Pros

Easy to start and create procedures. Basic traceability process in place.

Cons

search function. Trace non-confirming materials.

WY
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Wilson Y.

Aviation & Aerospace, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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Reliable Robotics - Avionics

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

Procedures and Runs. I like how we are able to have a common location and format for these things.

Cons

Parts creation and list. It's clunky and I would rather we have unique pn.

SC
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Shane C.

Defense & Space, 11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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This Software Has Great Potential

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

I like how easy it is to create new runs and procedures, as well as the usefulness of the runs. I also appreciate the how receptive to feedback the team is and how quickly they implement changes to make the software better.

Cons

My biggest complaint is that there is no way to view the history of a part. We often make an assembly, use it, then strip it down to use the parts elsewhere. When we try to go back to see where that part had been used in the past, there's no way to find out.

MH
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Mia H.

Aviation & Aerospace, 501-1,000 employees

Used weekly for 6-12 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend4/10

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It's an okay start

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

Very clean look. First Resonance has also been extremely receptive to feedback, even for new features that can take a while to implement. It's clear that this software is in it's early stages, but getting feedback and responding to it is a great wat to improve.

Cons

There are soooo many improvements need to make this software productions ready. The instruction editor is still pretty annoying to use when incorporating images, ordered list, and any non-basic formatting needs. I wish there was an option to create a field that can take multiple inputs. I have never tried to used the part tracking and traceability in ION, but from what I have seen it does not look ready to go. I wish the devs did more controlled roll outs of improvements/changes. Sometimes, I feel that things are rolled out really quickly and result in a lot of glitches upon implementation.

BG
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Ben G.

Airlines/Aviation, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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A good product with a lot of room to grow

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

The interface is simple and the software is generally pretty easy to navigate. Creating items and procedures is smooth and I can generate work orders with no problem. The First Resonance team is responsive and updates are dropped frequently, so issues that I might have one week may get resolved the next. Always nice to wake up to new functionalities and have an evolving UI.

Cons

The filtering is not great. Creating items or work orders is easy enough, but going back and finding work that was done previously is not an easy task. At the moment, this generally consists of scrolling through long lists. The search bar also is a little inflexible and queries have to be precisely defined, otherwise, it's back to scrolling through a long, long list. It's also not apparent what's going on in the backend of Ion and it's easy to mess up links among different items that are linked (i.e. it is pretty fragile).

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Charlie G.

Aviation & Aerospace, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Ion is a powerful manufacturing workflow tool with a very bright future.

Reviewed 3 years ago

Even where Ion has rough edges, it is far superior in usability and feature richness to the competition. In the months we have been using Ion the robust feature roadmap has been borne out. Every update increases usability and functionality, though sometimes comes with some workflow changes. I can unreservedly recommend this software. It is good now with the potential to be great. I have had a very good experience with the First Resonance team and believe they are an excellent team to work with.

Pros

The traceability, work instruction, and issue ticket modules work together well and provide the needed functionality. The Ion team is highly responsive and actively adding features. They provide real time support on both bugs and usability concerns. The technician facing interface is highly functional. Setting up and scaling the software instance is easy. The First Resonance team makes export control compliance easy.

Cons

The GUI can be very clunky on older modules. Minor program errors are not uncommon while working in the tool. Data entry from our PDM system is very manual and time consuming. The lack of strong mobile support is a significant opportunity for the software, but a frustrating omission at the moment.

TH
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Tim H.

Defense & Space, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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The future of manufacturing is bright

Reviewed 3 years ago

We were decently early adopters with Ion and have seen the software grow into a more and more powerful toolbox.

Pros

Ion is going to revolutionize the field of work instructions and inventory management. The support team is knowledgeable, helpful, and easy to work with. While working with the team, it feels like they're part of your internal team when finding solutions within Ion.

Cons

The price seems to be a little aggressive for the software when compared with alternatives. The per user price keeps the software from being fully adopted by the company to find solutions of their own.

CC
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Chris C.

Defense & Space, 1-10 employees

Used weekly for 1-2 years

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Great quality for such a young company

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

The software simplifies, and improves the quality of our procedures with simple click-based movement through the procedure when your hands are busy

Cons

There are still some minor bugs that could be worked out that are expected with a new software.

JC
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Jasmine C.

Industrial Automation, 51-200 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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The MES That Evolves With Your Manufacturing Needs

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

I really appreciate the attention to detail the First Resonance Team devotes to customizing our Ion interface. The clean interface, seamless procedure integration, and run/issue capabilities are only a few if the features that make my team work fast and efficiently. It did not take much time for the team to integrate Ion into our day-to-day start-up life, and more importantly, grows with us as we scale-up production.

Cons

My current struggle with the software is something I know the First Resonance team is working on already - the import parts feature. If we could possibly have a verification tab or import history implemented to the software, it could possibly help minimize the confusion relating to whether or not a item line was imported correctly. I will relay an addition to this customer request to the Ion support.

SN
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Sohil N.

Machinery, 51-200 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Easiest way to set up a production workflow

Reviewed 3 years ago

ION has brought great value to our company. It's very easy to use and set up. The customer service is amazing! The team really listens to your feedback in order to improve the product. If ION can't do something you need right now, it will likely get added or there is a sufficient work around. Highly recommend using ION!

Pros

ION is super easy to set up! You can get running with it within a few days and immediately make an impact on your production workflow. Having your work instructions directly in the software and not in some other system is a huge benefit. The ability to track the as-built BOM and collect data during the execution of runs is extremely valuable.

Cons

There are some edge cases and bugs that still need to be sorted out. There are some features that are lacking like in app reports, but there are good workarounds until they get a chance to implement it. Consumption of material for 3D printing applications needs to be improved.

LO
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Lars O.

Aviation & Aerospace, 11-50 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Ion fills gaps that I have been struggling with my whole career

Reviewed 3 years ago

I have found that documenting my processes has generally slowed me down, we need to figure out a better way to use Ion in the prototyping and R&D stage.

Pros

Ion is a unique tool that solves a lot of problems that have been bothering me my whole career, writing procedures, releasing them, revision control, and tracking data related to the as-built product. I love that First Resonance is highly responsive to user requests and help, and has the vision to help companies just like ours make manufacturing process control easy.

Cons

I wish FR did a bit more testing on new features before pushing them to beta groups. I may as well have access to FR's Jira if we are going to be writing bug descriptions that often. A good mobile experience will dramatically increase the effectiveness of the software, as well as more/improved hooks to import BOMs from a design.

ZA
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Zack A.

Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, 51-200 employees

Used daily for 1-2 years

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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Up and coming MES solution

Reviewed 3 years ago

Ion has been a real partner for us and is very responsive to our feedback.

Pros

I love that this is a simple, cloud-based solution for manufacturing execution, that DOESN'T have too much bloat!

Cons

A lot of the core functionality is there, but I'm wishing for some usability features like better organization and filtering of runs, better tracking for different workcenters, and some "quirk-reduction" as there are a lot of little things you just need to know how to do or how to massage the system.

JV
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Jaime V.

Automotive, 51-200 employees

Used other for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Ion is a must have!

Reviewed 3 years ago

The FR team is amazing and truly helpful. Highly responsive and very intimate with the software.

Pros

The software is the highly useful for config tracking, mfg documentation and build tracking. It is the bridge between manual tracking and an expensive PLM system.

Cons

The product was not the issue, it was the timing that was not right.

NR
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Nick R.

Aviation & Aerospace, 201-500 employees

Used weekly for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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The future of manufacturing systems

Reviewed 3 years ago

Great software and support, will be rolling it out across the organization over the next year.

Pros

Great UI, intuitive design, responsive team consistently rolling out new features, first in class integration platform.

Cons

Some robust features found in similar enterprise systems are not yet available.

AS
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Acacia S.

Aviation & Aerospace, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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ION as a new user

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

This product is very easy to use. I believe when we roll this out to more of our team, it will be straightforward. Questions to the ION team are also answered promptly and all requests seem possibly to enact.

Cons

As a newer user, there is not too much I have found to be unlikable at this time. The only thing that poses a challenge is the need to refresh a purchase order after placing it, instead of it updating real time as I edit.

NN
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Nahush N.

Airlines/Aviation, 501-1,000 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend6/10

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First Resonance ION review

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

I love that First Resonance takes our feedback and continuously updates their software to match our needs. it is also intuitive for the most part which is a bonus.

Cons

The software can be quite buggy sometimes which is understable as it is still indevelopment. Would be great if the changes suggested get implemented into the datagrid structure soon. The datagrid will quite likely be the most used feature across the company and it needs to be solid.

JL
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Joshua L.

Airlines/Aviation, 11-50 employees

Used daily for 6-12 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Ion review

Reviewed 3 years ago
Pros

Extremely intuitive software that's helps our company keep track and manage workflows

Cons

Ion has a hard time rendering images and would benefit from an API that could allow users to automate specific tasks.

ET
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Eli T.

Aviation & Aerospace, 51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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Still in development with great promise

Reviewed 4 years ago

The heavy focus on data and metrics, and features like Trace, showcase Ion's value to quality as well as manufacturing departments.

Pros

easy to begin using and customizing. The development team is responsive and value and use your suggestions for bettering the program.

Cons

As it is still in development, some features do not exist and others are not fully fleshed out yet.

IS
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Ian S.

Airlines/Aviation, 201-500 employees

Used weekly for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend7/10

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Ion User Review

Reviewed 4 years ago

Ion has done a really good job at providing us what we need when we need it. Very responsive and amazing customer support. Ion has also helped us create a tool that can aid in data capture far better then we were doing before.

Pros

Ion has great features for developing work instructions fast. It is very easy and intuitive to use. I like the data field collection option that Ion gives you which helps better track the data inputs that need to be captured when executing processes. I also think the nested step functionality is great and helps organize the work instruction a lot better in addition to the dependencies functionality.

Cons

I feel that some of the data field validations are not fully developed. Min/Max values can be mistakenly entered and in result the operators using the work instruction may not be able to capture process data correctly. There are often bugs when new tools are released and although these are usually corrected pretty quickly it slows down the operators when performing work. Editing functionality when creating work instructions could use a lot of improvement.

CH
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Christopher H.

Airlines/Aviation, 201-500 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend5/10

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In Work, but looking good so far!

Reviewed 4 years ago

Simple enough to use for wide applications of work instructions.

Pros

Simple, easy to use. The options for QA checks are very feature rich and very useful.

Cons

Some strange UI things, but nothing serious. They will be worked out in time.

GD
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Grant D.

Aviation & Aerospace, 11-50 employees

Used weekly for 6-12 months

Review source

Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend9/10

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Ion Review

Reviewed 4 years ago
Pros

Very responsive customer service. Intuitive software, and easy to implement into our workflow.

Cons

Since the software is still being developed, there are a lot of areas of improvement, so capabilities can be a little lacking at first. The team at First Resonance however is very receptive to recommendations, and implementations occur quickly.

WC
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Wade C.

Airlines/Aviation, 501-1,000 employees

Used weekly for 6-12 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend10/10

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Clean, intuitive, feature rich, and constantly improving!

Reviewed 4 years ago

The team is very supportive, blazing fast response time, and it has greatly improved our shop floor activity tracking.

Pros

Easy to deploy and get acquainted with. Integrates well with our developing company process. Feature implementation, changes and fixes are extremely fast.

Cons

Some functions are not super intuitive, but are still maturing. Not a major con but a function of a developing software platform.

RJ
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Robin J.

Aviation & Aerospace, 201-500 employees

Used weekly for less than 6 months

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Overall Rating
  • Value for money
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Customer support
  • Likelihood to recommend8/10

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First Time Ion-User

Reviewed 4 years ago

Using Ion to dictate certification workflow is proving to work very well with our accelerated timeline. We have faith that the integration continues to flow as easily as it has been so far.

Pros

This is my fist time working with work-instructions software and I found it very easy to learn and to integrate with our developing manufacturing processes.

Cons

Incorporating this software with all of our other software was challenging but the Ion team is very helpful and responsive.