Likelihood to Recommend In this case, CF is the best of the 'OK so far' category in my mind. NONE of the software available today gets close to a truly effective, user friendly GUI and functionality set. I have used 7 different systems over the years, with the top 4 big names having the largest hours operating. Most have less functionality, others are severely overpriced and under featured. Still others are so complicated you need an entire IT department to implement them. Contractor Foreman does much of what it does the absolute best for the money, meaning this is probably the best value for construction management software I'm aware of. I believe I can say with confidence, that if CF does it, it strives to do it well, and continues to strive to get it better. Picking a feature or two that excels is rather pointless in a company with that outlook. THAT is a company I can get behind...
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Estimates Project management Lead management - tracking where they are in the funnel and having web lead automatically pull into the system. Read full review 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! Read full review Cons Some of the modules like checklists and forms are confusing and hard to use some of the training videos or versions of an old outdated version of the software Would like to see a more efficent way of creating a submittal log generated from a specification book Read full review Release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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Eliminated the need for our team to log into multiple systems to do their jobs which aligns to our Lean approach
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability Desktop interface feels complex to new users.
Read full review Reliability and Availability In 5 years of use we have never experienced an unscheduled outage.
Read full review Support Rating I rarely give anyone a 9 or 10 rating for service. The main reason for this rating is Contractor Foreman's dedication to improvement. To be completely frank, CF has fallen down on their tech help with me several times, but I am an exceptionally difficult user to service as I tend to use a product up to it's limits and want more. CF has actually addressed these wants several times (after waits that seemed interminable, but were actually pretty damn fast in the reality of software development)
Read full review Alternatives Considered I've used
Buildertrend and Conconstruct near daily for a little over 10 years. They were both pretty solid. But the price kept going up without much value being added to the software. As they grew, they didn't upgrade with the growth, so the sites became slower. Contractor Forman has all the functionality of the others, and several other tools that they don't. There are several tools our company doesn't even use yet that look great. It's not perfect, and the learning curve due to its increased capability is a bit of a challenge. But overall, it is superior in every way that mattered to us, and more affordable.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment We don't have to double enter our job information anymore (estimates, bills, labor hours) to show employees what they need to see. Specific access within Contractor Foreman does that for us. It's taken us longer to learn how Contractor Foreman works within itself than we thought it would, so implementation is taking a little longer than ideal. However, we have been learning a lot along the way about the easiest ways to use the workflow that Contractor Foreman has. Read full review 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 Read full review ScreenShots Contractor Foreman Screenshots Projector PSA Screenshots