Notion aims to present users with an all-in-one workspace — for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, from Notion Labs in San Francisco.
$5
per month per user
OpenAir PSA
Score 6.1 out of 10
N/A
NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.
Notion is good for a plethora of use cases. The templates that it offers give just a few established pages for common uses but these are some of my favorites:
Kanban board: we use it a lot in my company to manage tasks and meetings
Note taking: whether in a professional or academic environment, Notion is well suited to take notes of everything regardless.
Software documentation: the "code" component to insert code snippets is perfect for creating tutorials and documentation for software development.
Finance control: I use the "my finances" template to have a proper following of my monthly transactions, which allowed me to be more responsible with my money.
Inventory management: Since I own multiple peripherals and general equipment, being able to have a portable inventory of all of it that includes their original value, warranty length and current state has been perfect to know when clean, maintain or straight up replace everything.
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
Team Collaboration. In Notion's software is the ability to see precisely who is working on a project and where. This eliminates any confusion when on calls or when working on the same project simultaneously. It is easy to tag co-workers to precise moments and build conversation streams.
Text Coding. When transitioning text from our Notion ideation and drafting boards to our website backends, the coding holds on all of the text.
Organization. Whether it's utilizing a "pin board" set up or nestling pages within pages, it is possible to keep everything organized and easy to find for every member of your team.
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.
The increase in integrations with third parties will always promote the adoption of the platform in companies.
Personalization with logos and corporate colors sometimes makes the difference when selecting a tool in a corporation.
Having multiple functionalities for working in manufacturing companies and with devices developed by third parties encourages other companies to select Notion as their flagship tool to offer implementation packages under alliances that favor its use.
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.
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
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.
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.
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
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 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
Trello only has the Kanban board feature and is great for task management, while Notion has a vast array of features, is easier to use, and has a more visually-appealing interface. I choose to use Notion over Trello due to its increased versatility and greater customization capabilities.
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.
