EPM Live vs. Planview ChangePoint

I think EPM Live might be the right solution for a much smaller company, who does mainly business to business material sales. As a software company with a ramped subscription model and heavy use of Salesforce, it was not well suited to our business.

Changepoint is basic and would, therefore, work for businesses with uncomplicated requests, pretty straightforward workflows and willingness to work with an unsightly solution. It is basic, from the UI to the search option and the way the information is captured, which can be frustrating and counter-intuitive at times. It is relatively robust (i.e. I have been using it for almost 2 years and have not seen it crash once) but it does log me out when the system has been inactive for about 30 minutes - and I am only notified about being logged out upon clicking the Submit button, meaning many a line of text have been typed more than once!

Incentivized

• Fantastic project management features
• Cost and Resource management features more than paid for the software
• Social Collaboration tools improve communication between departments

• Changepoint has significant reporting capabilities, though of course, the data that comes out is only as good as the data that goes in. I enjoy being able to use the standard reports to understand exactly how much a project has cost us and to compare it to how much we are charging. This allows us to more accurately set our prices. Though we have not used the report designer capability, I understand that custom reports can be designed with relative ease.
• Changepoint has a versioning capability for changes made to user profiles in the system manager, which I find particularly helpful. As a non-power user, it is valuable to be able to see what changes I have made to various profiles so that I can troubleshoot a problem down the line.
• Changepoint has significant functionality well beyond the features that we are currently using, and for this reason, I think it is affordable and a good deal. Particularly if your organization is interested in dedicating the time and resources into using all of the features around project planning, resource allocation, etc., the price is well worth the value.

• This is a solid product. I do not have any suggested changes based on our experience. Cannot understand why there are any negative reviews here. The reviewer(s) must not have given the product a fair chance.

• We use Changepoint to manage the IS organization. I would like to see more advancement in order to do benefits management.
• I would like to see a capability where a project manager can build a very detailed work breakdown structure, but only require project resources to charge time and provide a task status at a higher level.

The product is just not fitting our needs so we are looking at other alternatives. The system has gone down 3 times in the last 6 months and was down for at least half a day, timesheets have duplicate tasks, and it takes too long to save and submit. When trying to process updates it randomly changes our dates so we have to go back and fix them, sometimes tasks are lost and the system is just very confusing and hard to manipulate

Incentivized

Sometimes the decision to renew boils down to an old adage "if it isn't broken don't fix it". Previous to moving to Changepoint, it was obvious that we needed a better project management tool. Projects we completed on time but the time zone difference between the teams and several iterations of back and forth caused a number of communication issues with projects. The difference is night and day.

It could be more intuitive and user friendly.

We get support when needed.

Incentivized

EPM was easier to use, with better and simpler UI. The product was also a great combination of price and functionality compared to other tools

Incentivized

Planview Changepoint helps us to understand our key customers enabling us to capitalize on every financial opportunity and helps us to forecast demand against the capacities required for new opportunities, and also it automates and monitors contractual terms and conditions. It gives us visibility into our employees' skills and helps to optimize resource allocation.

Incentivized

• We had to pay EPM for a solution that was, for our business, unusable
• We gained much needed experience in working with third party software vendors

• Employee efficiency has decreased significantly within our Project MAnagement team. The main causes are lack of logical steps/not user-friendly and the slowness of the entire program.
• Changepoint PSA has greatly improved being able to track budgets for all projects. Before this software, budgets were done manually by hand and cross-referenced with Accounting. Now, we can pull a report out of the system, as long as all parties entered their time and data correctly.