Cube vs. Projector PSA

1) The budget process. In QBO the budgeting capability is non-existant, unless you like manually typing in every scenario and not being able to budget by class. Cube houses my budget/forecast scenarios & lets me view and analyze by my company's preferred data points; department, GL account, vendor, & sales campaign. I'm able to run monthly budget variance reports and plan for the future with ease. 2) We've begun using Cube to help analyze profitablity by sales job. We've never had such easy access to this type of info in the past, so this is a benefit I can directly attribute to Cube. 3) We're beginning now to use an integration with our payroll software to work on headcount planning and payroll analysis.

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

• Push/pull information across any Google Sheet or Excel workbook.
• Budget at a much more granular level (by month by account by the department by vendor).
• Custom mapping to allow for multiple cuts of the same data.
• Bulk range selection within a workbook.

• 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!

• Limited to 8 top line dimensions. Although you can bring in as many attributes of data as you want, but I would really like Cube to increase top line dimensions to 10.
• The ability for cross level interaction within multiples cube would be a major plus once implemented.

• 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.

Desktop interface feels complex to new users.

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

Cube was just a lot easier to use than Vena. We took some time to look at Vena as well and while their product was impressive, our organization was not yet there. We needed something we could implement quickly, and in today's day and age I think that is a very important quality to have. Start up and early stage companies do not have the luxury of implementation teams and massive IT resources so Cube was a huge help.

Incentivized

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.

• It has decreased the amount of time it takes to build reports by days
• I can rest easy knowing the knowledge is accurate and there is no human error
• I have been able to create more reports than I ever dreamed of with the new time and ease of use

Incentivized

• 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