Certinia PS Cloud vs. eSUB Construction Software vs. Zoho Projects

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

If you are doing any sort of new construction, eSUB is a budget friendly option for managing the process. It's helpful for keeping track of submittals, RFI's and for foreman doing Daily Work Reports. It is not suited really well for plan management and scheduling. The modules for these are not well thought through. Also if you specialize in service work or projects that have short durations (i.e. 1-2 weeks or less), eSUB isn't the best option for you. It would take too long to set up a job vs the time it takes to do the job.

Incentivized

My work involves projects of 5-15 people with numerous projects running simultaneously. Prior to Zoho, I did not have a central location from which to view all project statuses at once. Zoho looks to provide this and also looks like it will deliver. I am anxious to see how our organization's use of it develops. At this time, I feel I am likely to recommend Zoho Projects because my organization has made great software decisions in the past so I have a level of trust already that the research has been done that Zoho is the best solution for our line of work.

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!

• It is built with subcontractors in mind. There are many PM software available but this one aims at the commercial subcontractor.
• It does a great job covering the basics of typical commercial work. There are areas that allow you to customize such as adding reservations of rights to documents.
• It can integrate with Microsoft quite a bit, we use this in our work every day and being able to export or sync data/calendars has been helpful.

Incentivized

• We use it to manage our sales orders as there are lots of moving parts which are necessary to get client orders done properly.
• I use it anytime I have a new idea I want to put into motion. As I can create a list for brainstorming, feedback, specific actions necessary in order to test and or implement the idea.
• Unrelated to business, it's a great way to plan travel in order to make sure you don't forget those important things like passport, flight arrangement, client meeting confirmation, and meeting prep as far as what specific documents or things do you need to bring with you.
• And since everyone is on the go and expected to keep up with work, the mobile/tablet app makes it a breeze to keep up, work on, and create new projects.

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

• I have no suggestions at the moment and if I ever do have a question, concern or suggestion, a quick email to eSUB gets a quick response.

Incentivized

• There is no ability to add custom fields in the "Bugs" module - for example, if we want to add fields such as Version Number.
• Reporting is not integrated - its a fairly expensive add-on.
• There is no easy way to track actual and completed dates for tasks - so historical variance analysis is not easy.

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.

I've reviewed about 8 other project management solutions and Zoho Projects is the best I've seen without being overly complicated. Zoho Projects keeps getting better! Recent new enhancements makes it even easier to navigate. There are new keyboard shortcuts that cut my time way down. The tools are very easy to use.

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

Zoho Project has been very user-friendly. As a small business, we have a diverse group of people with varying skill sets. This platform has been easy for our team to learn, implement, and succeed with. The mobile version is also very handy for our team.

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

Has not been down to my knowledge.

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)

Speed meets my expectations.

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 has been helpful whenever I've called. They have been able to walk me through solutions and even direct me to the right answer. There was only 1hr difference between time zones so this was manageable. If we experienced bugs, their IT department was helpful at remedying and they were always rolling out updates.

Incentivized

Although it might lack intuitiveness, once you get a hang of how Zoho Projects works, you can do a LOT. The impact good project management has on profitability is huge, and it has helped not only improve communication and coordination when working on a project, but more importantly have adequate tracking of time, due dates and potential bottle necks

Incentivized

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.

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

eSUB is not even close when it comes to the offerings that the others have. eSUB is a happy medium for the functionality it provides and is at an affordable price point that it doesn't break the bank. Other solutions are a lot more integrated into the company processes and procedures, which means more upfront investment to get the platform to go live. eSUB's simplicity makes it easier to roll out because it doesn't integrate with as many aspects of the business.

Incentivized

Zoho Projects provides a more limited set of functionality and customization options than other task/bug trackers on the market, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. It probably has 80-90% of the features of its competitors but takes about a third of the time to get up and running and realizing value.

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

• eSUB saves time as you don't have to type, print and send documents.
• I like to call it "set it up once, use it a million times" as once you set up a customer, vendor etc... you can use them across multiple platforms.
• It saves money as you don't need a pool of resources to manage a project due to its ease of use.

Incentivized

• We needed a system to organize our growing business, so anything was better than what we had, which was nothing.
• Recording time spend is a huge reason for using project software. It has made me aware of the tasks that are taking too long and where we are not being profitable as a company.
• It has kept our team accountable for what needs to get completed and when projects are not in motion or completed timely. It's helpful to know in order to get billing out faster.

Incentivized