Adobe acquired Neolane in July 2013 and later re-named the product Adobe Campaign. Adobe Campaign provides both marketing automation and marketing resource management functionality such as spend & financial management, workflow, and asset management.
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Certinia PS Cloud
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Certinia PS Cloud software is a cloud-based services solution that is built on the Force.com platform. It allows companies to manage professional resources, customers, projects and financials in one integrated services management application. Because the solution works natively with Force.com, it utilizes the same data for sales, services and finance on one system.
Multi-Channel Campaign Management: I have found Adobe Campaign to be excellent for managing campaigns across multiple channels, including email, mobile, social media, and web. Its centralized platform allows me to plan, execute, and track campaigns effectively, making it ideal for organizations with diverse marketing channels. For example, when I was running a campaign to promote a new product launch across email, SMS, and social media channels, Adobe Campaign provided me with the tools to orchestrate and track the campaign seamlessly. I could ensure consistent messaging and a cohesive customer experience across different channels.
PSA is great at capturing all the data you would need to accurately track and report on consulting projects. It captures project financials, calculates projected GM%, and (among others) allows for hourly tracking of employees, which breaks it up between billable and non-billable for utilization tracking to accurately understand costs. However, the user interface is tough to learn, and the stability of the data reporting functions is questionable. This tool would be great for smaller consulting shops that fit the standard contracting mold. If your business is fairly straightforward without a lot of shades of gray, you shouldn't have much trouble with the tool. However, if your business practices have a lot of exceptions based on clients, then you'll have a tall administrative task on your hands.
It allows me to capture leads through various sources, such as website forms or landing pages.
It offers a centralized repository where I can securely store and manage customer data, encompassing contact information, preferences, transaction records, and additional relevant data.
It provides robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
The biggest strength of FinancialForce PSA is that it's built upon the force.com platform, which means it is very easily customizable to our business needs.
Projects are easily created, as well as milestones and assignments.
"Actuals" (dollars and hours) are calculated automatically, and are easily reported on.
Resources are easily managed by using the Resource Planner
Adobe Campaign does not have a high enough sales intelligence to let us know which landing page format would be the most optimal for the proper development of our mass marketing operations, which in the long run would also help with customer collection.
Does not directly track the number of people who enter our website, beyond sending them automated messages depending on whether they entered a certain section of the site. This problem is important, because it does not allow us to get complete tracking results in that area.
The platform does not do social media marketing extensively enough to let us create dynamic evaluations on the results of interactions that are obtained within social networks, which creates a huge margin of error in our analytical results messages, and so we have stopped applying social marketing.
Once you go for Neolane you are a bit stuck with it, so we will most likely stay with Neolane. Cost of investment and training are the main factors at work here. We havesimply have invested too much in the product to stop using it after 2 years. That said, my score of 8 does not imply that the product is worthy of getting an 8 but reflects our willingness to renew. Given that upgrading to a new version will cost again a substantial sum, we most likely will keep using the current version we are on which is 6X.
There is another PSA software program that we have been looking into (DreamFactory) that could potentially replace FinancialForce PSA in our organization. Like FinancialForce PSA, it is cloud based on the force.com platform. Licensing is slightly less than FinancialForce PSA, and the Resource Management tool is far superior to FinancialForce PSA. With that said, our renewal falls in Q4 2014 and I don't foresee us implementing a new system this fiscal year.
Thanks to this tool we are taking more internal control of the creation and deployment of campaigns with less dependency on an ESP. We can pre-program marketing publications, being able to concentrate on the target audience. It helps me manage email campaigns with real-time tracking.
It is maturing and does what it does well although it is not fully complete.
Integration to SF is great.
Gives great visibility to incoming services projects and allows the staffing process to start on pipeline deals.
There are certain processes that take more click-throughs then needed so there are refinement opportunities around the UI.
The resource management screen and project status views have really matured since our original purchase, and while not perfect, allow business leaders to do their jobs.
Configurations vs. customizations. We seem to have to bring in an Apex developer to do a customization for changes I would think could be configuration settings
Most of the time it is fine. There are peak periods of usage where performance noticably slows down (i.e., Monday mornings when time is due and many reports are being run)
Although there is a lot of material available on the internet to answer questions, I still feel a lack of commitment and delay in the responses of the support, but as a whole, it leaves nothing to be desired. I believe that, in the great majority, companies sin in the desired support, but we cannot generalize. But this one, in particular, has a wide range of specialists and well-qualified management, but I believe that it is not so bad.
Every time I submit a new help request, whether it's an actual help request or just a question about FinancialForce PSA, I always feel that I'm receiving world class support. The support we receive from FinancialForce PSA is always very detailed and professional. There are some requests that take longer than other for the initial response, which is why I did not give a full 10.
Appirio did a good job, however, the user team didn’t know enough to make all the right configuration/customization choices. The team focused too much on replicating existing processes vs. reengineering them. In hindsight we should have had deep dive reviews at key milestones and enforced more focus on how the software would operate. We didn’t have access to true best practices expertise. In hindsight, a consultant from the outside would have been helpful to drive this.
As we tried to centralise the marketing automation platform within the enterprise, Adobe Campaign can plug into several instances of Salesforce.com for lead management queues. All other marketing automation platforms can only plug into one instance of Salesforce.com. Adobe Campaign was also able to handle the complexity and challenges of our enterprise data which are a result of years of legacy, mergers and acquisitions and data aggregation.
FF PSA is a robust Project Management solution that can be configured to fits any size business. We have tried several other applications and PSA so far has met and exceeded our needs. We run our day to day operations on Salesforce so having a solution that is native was a must have. PSA met that requirement and much more.
Not everything was great at all times. It was handled accordingly, pricing was reasonable for what was purchased. It was the best value on the market at the time of purchase.
Talking about profits can be subjective if you don't take into account the periodic variations between net and gross profit margins, but fortunately with Adobe Campaign, it is easy to notice these differences quickly.
Results have always seemed relative to us, as they vary greatly depending on how much is invested.
FinancialForce PSA has helped us improve our data tracking and allows us to get more granular about our financial information and performance.
PSA has given more tools and reports to individual contributors to take greater ownership over their own data, and has increased accountability across the organization.
PSA has added a fairly hefty administrative burden to individuals, project managers, and our financial team.
