azendoo vs. Certinia PS Cloud

I think Azendoo is suited well to small office tracking projects and tasks together. The shared projects/calendar use is helpful and can make work easier if everyone uses it in a similar manner. The ability to add things from other sources (Dropbox, Evernote, etc) does make it a useful platform because you can integrate other things into the app well. The visibility and shared spaces provide good accountability and follow up for work being done.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Software Updates - The azendoo interface is constantly being updated with new features which are helpful to our organization. For example, they just rolled out the ability to assign subtasks, so that we don't have to manually update the assignee on each step of a large, multi-step task.
• Email Notifications - azendoo provides complete customization over the amount of notification emails you receive. Some of us prefer to be emailed with each update made within a task, whereas others prefer just a once-daily notification email.
• Levels of organization - azendoo provides many tiers of structure within the platform, making it easy for us to layer levels of detail for a single project. For example, at the workspace level we can define where our teams "live" on azendoo, and at the subject level we can categorize projects for tracking purposes. With the new addition of subtasks, we now have an additional layer of organization which helps us keep track of where a task is at in its lifecycle.

Incentivized

• 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
• FinancialForce PSA support is outstanding!

• Despite being integrated with Google Calendar, this integration presents some inconveniences, so working with them together is not very convenient.
• It requires fairly stable internet access to avoid a slow connection with your platform.
• When performing searches, it must be done within the limit of work since otherwise no results are found.
• Its cost can be high but I think it's worth it.
• It is necessary to introduce it to the team slowly so that they can adapt to the software and thus get the most out of it.

Incentivized

• The product is still maturing as a full featured PSA tool. The feature roadmap is compelling but is still being built out.
• Tool is ideal for managing a services business. It is not yet a project manager tool.
• Limited reporting
• Maturing change order process
• Limited integration to back-end financial systems beyond Financial Force Financials. We use Netsuite.
• The underlying SalesForce UI is constrained and can be keystroke intensive at times
• Limited archiving of historical data

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.

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

We have maybe had 1-2 outages over 3 years.

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)

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.

It was fine.

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.

azendoo is a different tool, meant for a different project type. While it's a good program on its own, Evernote ultimately had all I needed as a single employee/student is the only person within my workspaces. I did not need to network and as such, I did not find it applicable. Later down the road in a shared office, I might feel differently.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• azendoo's integration with Google Drive has been valuable to our organization, as we are heavy users of Drive. We've been able to seamlessly attach documents to tasks which has been very helpful from a collaboration perspective.
• Training new team members - It's relatively easy to get new team members up-to-speed on what's going on in the department, as they can just log into azendoo and catch up on all of our existing projects and things coming down the pipeline.
• App - azendoo's mobile app has been great for keeping up with progress on items while many of us are out of office or working away from the office. The app has a great user experience and is much easier than keeping tabs via email.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized