Deputy vs. OpenAir PSA

[My own feeling on the subject is] that large teams will probably enjoy the features much more than a smaller team. [In my opinion] I would not have signed up with Deputy had it not been for the integration with my payroll provider. [From my point of view] the cost is not worth it for a small team. [I've found] it has a lot of features geared towards big teams and those are not things you can "opt-out" of from a cost/tier standpoint [as far as I'm concerned].

Incentivized

This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product

Incentivized

• Employee Scheduling - So straightforward and easy to use! Love the copy & past feature!
• Timekeeping - the App & Kiosk are perfect for employees to clock in and out in a matter of seconds
• Company Communication - the Newsfeed feature makes it easy to keep everyone up to date on company announcements
• Task Management - simple to use task lists help keep my team organized

Incentivized

• Netsuite OpenAir PSA is highly configurable and has a large ecosystem of assets to work with.
• Tasks are easily designed to automate processes in your business workflow.
• OpenAir is designed in such a way that it can communicate and receive information from external systems without having to re-engineer your systems to make them work if you are following standard business practice.

Incentivized

• Integration with various point of sale systems to pull sales data vs. scheduled and/or worked hours.
• Ability to "re-invite, " change a password or fix an employee-level account if they didn't set things up correctly.
• An easier way of loading all holidays or facility closure dates for the year. e.g. Google reminds you, Are you open for Thanksgiving this year?

Incentivized

• Compared to QuickArrow, setting up reports to reflect the data accurately seemed to require a bit more consultant time and collaboration. Getting the numbers correct is essential, so budget extra time for this iniative. We also learned that certain calculations can not be displayed in the executive dashboards. Ask these questions upfront to ensure your dashboards are complete for your needs (again, working backwards in the preparation stages).
• Compared to QuickArrow, NetSuite OpenAir PSA falls short in the resource management capabilities. UI, flexibility, and scheduling options all could be improved. This is on their roadmap, timeline yet to be defined. Scheduling is vitally important to our company and this is THE area where we feel is the applications weakest. However, the application does provide everything critical to scheduling and provided the elements we needed in order to be successful. We altered our scheduling process accordingly.
• During our System Administration 3 day online training, when a question was asked about detailed functionality, sometimes the trainer would share..."Yes, OpenAir has a configuration for that. Just inquire with your consultant and they can flip that flag in your instance." The responsibility for obtaining these special application configurations was placed on the System Admin [in training] to ask and to take notes. If your company needs the application to work a certain way, speak up and ask your OA consultant. There seems to be MANY flags that can be flipped in the background to allow for the system to meet your needs. My complaint is that these are not published, rather made available if one inquires.
• OpenAir is able to generate invoices directly and we strongly encourage using this feature to keep everything housed under one application. However, this did not work for our organization and we leveraged a financial integration. A bit of a pioneer integrating with Softrax -- the integration works well, however is quite fragile. We do receive appropriate support when needed, but would prefer the integration to be a bit more stable. We recommend integrating with their stated supported financial systems, as staying the course will likely net a more stable integration.

The basic functionality and overall efficiency it provides is enough to renew. I still would like to see improvements in reporting and leave management, but overall it is absolutely worth it to have the program. I especially like having remote access and supervisors scheduling and approving time sheets of employees

Incentivized

It all depends. We are still looking at moving our consultants to Oracle PAC, in order to get our financial systems in line (we use Oracle Financials currently). We are feeling a lot of pain with integration and segmented systems.

Ultimately,it depends on how much pain is felt there. OpenAir has given us a path to follow on from QuickArrow. I foresee either moving onto Oracle PAC by end of calendar, or staying on OpenAir.

OpenAir to Oracle integration is not easy. From a reporting and process perspective, there’s been pain from being in different systems

Deputy is user-friendly and easy to understand for users with basic to moderate computer knowledge. The Employee is simple and easy for employees to understand. Employees get push notifications when shifts are scheduled and can clock in and out easily directly from the phone or kiosk, or using the website. The only challenge we’ve had is the ability for management to assign leave to employees who have not yet requested time off.

Incentivized

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

Incentivized

We have never had a problem with deputy being unavailable

Incentivized

The system up time was reliable and that was never anything we ever had any concerns/issues with.

Everything is quick and easy

Incentivized

The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.

Every time I have contacted support they have answered my question within the hour and solved every problem we have had. They follow up to make sure we are satisfied with our results which has been great when we are busy and get distracted

Incentivized

As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.

Incentivized

It was super easy and quick

Incentivized

Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.

Did a great job of getting us up to speed with their online documentation.

Incentivized

We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them

It took me a bit to get all my staff input from our previous scheduling software. However, once all the information was there, everything went smoothly and we were able to start implementing Deputy right away. It did not take long to train my staff and have them comfortable with using the system.

Incentivized

It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that

For years we used TimeTrax systems but they were hard to use and required manual downloads of punches, networked setups, and we needed separate setups for each location. When evaluating cloud-based solutions we first tried TSheets, but the higher cost and lack of features made us choose Deputy. Our main complaint about the actual TSheets system was the IPads did not store punches when it first launched so if you lost internet it couldn't store the punches. When we were evaluating the system they were building a police station next door that resulted in intermittent internet outages and the kiosk app basically became a brick until the internet came back on.

Incentivized

OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks lacks the ability to show progress draws, approved changes, and pending changes on a given project where OpenAir excels.

Incentivized

We have gone from using deputy simply to schedule a couple of members of staff on coffee shop shifts, to also scheduling staff in the retail unit part of our business, to now also scheduling team days and having remote working staff start on schedule shifts to track their working hours.

Incentivized

Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.

• Hundreds of man-hours saved monthly that previously was spent on recording hours work.
• Holiday management is very clear and support fair treatment of staff.
• The 100% accuracy of timesheets is amazing. Once approved thousands of timesheets just land in our payroll system thanks to the export/import functions.

Incentivized

• It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
• Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
• It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.

Incentivized