C3 AI Platform vs. Projector PSA

For consultants like me, who are not interested in generic LLM's with very deployment costs and payback times, industry specific applications are essential. We are time-bound to deliver value to our clients whether it is improved productivity or revenue uplift, and for this particular reason C3 AI Platform is a particularly good choice.

We think Projector PSA is a great tool to track and manage people in a professional service environment like management consulting. This system is easy to set up, easy to understand and should easily suit the needs of smaller and medium sized firms. It may be less appropriate for firms that rely very heavily on project management through another system (like MS Project) or firms that rely very heavily on a sales pipeline tracking system. While still very much possible to use, you would (I believe) have to do some re-keying between systems

• Projector is a very well designed tool for project management. It has allowed us to eliminate a number of auxiliary tools for project timelines and WBS for the vast majority of our projects.
• Time and expense entry is intuitive and quick for our staff.
• Our forecasting and resource management capability has improved greatly with Projector and allows us to grow our team efficiently with minimal additional administrative burden.
• Reporting is extremely robust. It does require some time to really get a handle on the full functionality of the reporting tool, but once you do, you can get almost any kind of report you want out of the system!

• Release management process needs to be improved. Currently no facility is provided to test the impact of new releases in a sand-box. This introduces business risk if there are interfaces into Projector PSA as part of it's use in the business.

We have been using this tool for a year now and find our use of it continually evolves and broadens. We are also very excited about the overhaul that's under way and feel many of the improvements being put in place will help make us that much more effective and efficient. The Projector team is also very responsive and collaborative in terms of user feedback and improvement suggestions, which helps us know they will work hard to help us get what we need out of the tool.

I’d give it 7.5/10. Its model-driven architecture is powerful for scaling enterprise AI, at pace but it definitely needs some heavy-lifting. The platform can be hard to grasp initially and the steep learning curve, makes change management very important. The framework can be a bit rigid for industry agnostic developers used to flexible, open-source tools. It is excellent for data orchestration but is not as lean as some of the low-code competitors.

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.

C3 AI Platform offers much faster deployment through pre-built, industry-specific apps, and comfortably beats the others when it comes to time to deployment and scalability. Palantir on the other hand requires heavy custom engineering. C3 AI Platform does lack the open-source flexibility of Databricks and the cloud native scale of Vertex. I would prefer C3 AI Platform for turnkey enterprise solutions, but for other use cases it can be a bit more complex vs the other three due to its "back-box" environment.

We did pursue Quick Arrow another tool that was similar. We found that be in inflexible in use. Projector allows a lot of flexibility in setup. Our organization has very specific business processes and we were able to set up Projector to work with those processes. Several other systems we tried were not as flexible in allowing set up to our needs.

• Even in the small time that I stayed to see Projector PSA reporting I saw ROI projections become more realistic. There was real data to analyze that proved we were spending way too much and charging way too less on some projects.
• Although employees were not used at entering their hours, this single reporting improved operations management and validated employees concerns that more people were needed to manage workload
• Project proposals were more realistic because they were driven by real data.
• Decision making overall for the department became more efficient and effective

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info