NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.
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Planview Portfolios
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Planview Portfolios is an end-to-end project portfolio management and enterprise architecture management tool. It includes two components: Portfolio and Resource Management and Capability and Technology Management. The platform is available as a cloud-based or on-premise service.
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
I work as a Hospital Manager and in our hospital we need various equipment and advanced machines that can diagnose the best and give us the best results so that we can analyse the patient's best possible condition. Getting new machines and types of equipment is not an easy task we need so many planning the funds for the projects and implementation of those machines can become challenging part if we don't have a proper roadmap of resource management, funds, vendors suppliers, etc. Here Planview Portfolio smartly computes the all data counts all the variables and gives us the best roadmap to follow it is very useful to get crucial projects in organizations. If the organization doesn't have multiple projects or they work in a monotonous way then this tool might not be the best option for them.
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.
Capture potential opportunities using the Requests Module and analyze and rank these opportunities via lifecycles and promote (dispatch) approved opportunities into Projects. Information captured during the request process automatically get transferred to projects.
Robust schedule management; time reporting; resource management and financial planning and management
Risk and Issue management controlled via robust lifecycles.
Extensive reporting capabilities via SSRS and Power BI Dashboards and delivered to users via tiles in Project and Portfolio views.
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.
this is the area I can see Planview Portfolios is very much lagging behind. If you see Atlassian, they are having a robust API information and using that we can securely access the necessary information based on the role. I think a similar kind of approach need to done in Planview Portfolios as well.
User Information and Resource information is separate. Expecting that, during the User creation, when a resource is linked, automatically all the basic fields should be populated with the values, also if a person is having an User account there is no way for that person to know that what User role that he/she is having. Also none of the reports covering that details.
Automation - It's mentioned using the UiPath some of the Automation has been done in the User creation but don't find any necessary document for better understanding.
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
We have been a Planview customer since 1999 and have seen it grow and mature as a tool. We have looked at other tools and have found that PV continues to meet our needs and is easy for our resources to use. They work to stay up on the project management industry and the direction it is going, keep on on current technology so that we can work more effectively, provide excellent customer support and have great pricing for what they offer. We can purchase only the modules we need versus buying a tool where we would only use a portion of the functionality.
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.
I feel it is very difficult to use, and very limiting and of over complicated in it's basic project management basic functions. In my opinion it is over engineered to the point of un-useful
We are long time Planview users and its availability is only limited to our internal SLAs for nightly backups. I have never experienced any unexpected or prolonged software downtime from Planview itself.
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.
Consultants are knowledgeable and friendly; it is easy to build relationships with the support people you work with and they learn how best to help you. The vendor is continuously looking for honest feedback about their tool and they use that information to design their product roadmaps
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
Always have a pre-implementation meeting or conference call with Planview to ensure all are on the same page, disclosure of all and any customization (including reports) and plan for support after implementation of a specified amount of time with the assigned implementation resource. And document everything
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.
Odoo, like this platform, has allowed us to efficiently organize our projects so that they can be prioritized by importance, to know which is the most urgent, in addition, it has also allowed us to assign work in an organized way among our collaborators, and their reports have allowed us to improve.
It has improved Resource Management. We now consistently represent resource available-to-promise against operational commitments, other projects, q-end commitments, vacations, etc.
It has improved our quality of forecasting. We now model project changes and future requests against available time and resources ("what-if" scenarios).
It has improved our strategic focus. We now manage our projects from a program/portfolio point of view to ensure we are resourcing company strategic initiatives.
