Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Premier Construction Software

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

Incentivized

Jonas is well suited for the construction industry and for trades that work in construction. The functionality and features are set up to streamline the processes that take place daily, weekly, and monthly. You are also able to manage the big picture and track your company's information for multiple years, making it a scalable software. Our administration and project managers can streamline work from the field to the office through Jonas and we feel that is one of the biggest benefits to Jonas

Incentivized

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Job Dashboard gives you a great summary of that job at a glance. I can even pull direct reports based on the fact that there are drill-downs.
• I can go right to the receipt with the GL report drill-down capabilities.
• Workflows make the product accessible from anywhere for approval when I have people on the road.
• Dragging and dropping reports to in AP will then go to documents under the job it is attached to.

Incentivized

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

• Workflows could be more customized
• Invoice and Subcontractor portals could be easier to use
• Blanket changes across jobs when a policy/template is changed

Incentivized

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

Using Premier Construction Software is intuitive. Most of the modules work the same way, so once you learn to use one, the others come easily.

Incentivized

The product has been reliable.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.

Incentivized

Jonas Premier has some of the best support we've received in this business. Whenever there is an issue or question, we receive a response in a timely manner and get follow up as well. We have never had an issue getting something resolved and our feedback is always taken into account

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

We came away from Sage 100. We looked at Computerease and Foundation among a few others. These two were looked at most seriously.

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized

• Jonas has positively impacted our Accounts Payable and Receivable department by making tracking and processing organized and streamlined. Previously we were having to track invoices and payments through emails and various formats. We are now able to connect each AP or AR invoice to the job and subcontractor, keep track of the billing due dates, and have all the paperwork generated from Jonas.

Incentivized