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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Agentforce Sales
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Salesforce' Agentforce Sales (formerly Salesforce Sales Cloud) is the company's flagship CRM platform. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in.
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 …
I wasn't involved in the initial purchase decision so I don't know what else we evaluated, but I imagine that we selected OA because we selected NetSuite and OA integrated well with it (same product family). We've been hearing a lot of good things with Mavenlink and will likely …
Previously we used a custom application running on top of Oracle ERP. One of the reasons we chose OpenAIR was because it was covering our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management, much better than the custom app. In addition we got other features like: …
Netsuite is a better and more scaleable solution for our agency as we have grown from just a few employees in 2001 to nearly 100 employees today. Netsuite helps us track expenses, time reporting, getting approvals on large purchases, project management from a personnel …
Our team found that OpenAir has better, increased functionality than other project management programs. Instead of using multiple softwares for time tracking, expense reports and project management, OpenAir combines all three into one. Using one tool instead of three saves us …
It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the …
We were handling concurrent project in multiple counties with multiple currencies. Netsuite handles multicurrency well. This was essential for our global operations. Because of this we chose OpenAir over Clarizen.
We came from a QuickArrow envirnoment, so going to OpenAir was the path of least resistance and it hit all the requirements. We looked at Financial Force and Changepoint. Financial Force was very intriguing because of the Salesforce platform, but not all our users are on …
Microsoft Project Server was a very complex solution and often unflexible. We needed something less complex but with power and chose OpenAir.
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
I was not on the selection team that chose OpenAir. However, as I mentioned in my previous comments, I feel that OpenAir is a great stand alone PSA solution. For OpenSymmetry, we outgrew OpenAir and needed a solution that seemlessly integrated with Salesforce.com CRM data. …
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
I have evaluated Clarity, ConnectWise, SAP, and Tenrox solutions. From my perspective, judging against our internal have-to-have and nice-to-have criteria, they do not offer the level of flexibility and detail our organization needed to continue to support our current service …
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
OpenAir was the most complete solution and was strong in all areas.
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
Oracle PAC professional services automation tool.
SAP PSA product
Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, …
Over the years, I’ve helped many people move from different sales solutions — like Dynamics, HubSpot, and Act, which was one of the first ones. I’ve supported a lot of organizations in moving from those platforms to Salesforce.
So I've evaluated, implemented Microsoft Dynamics in the past. I've used Oracle CRM solutions. I've used Daylight, which is a very niche CRM system the last couple of years. And I've evaluated a variety from Legacy Microsoft Ones to Zoho and Sugar when making implementation …
Actually, we have not. By the time I joined my company, we already had Sales Cloud. It was already there and the decision was made. I'm sure that there were other small companies that the upper management team evaluated very quickly, but they came to a decision very quickly. I …
Raiser's Edge, CSING. Those are the primary ones. There's no competition at all. I mean, in terms of tracking duplicate contact, I mean contacts ability to be secure and provide the right access for different levels. Salesforce was able to do that. Oh yeah. Yes. Whereas the …
We have used HubSpot and we have used jojo CRM. So the customer who cannot afford the licensing model of Salesforce, jojo CRM is a very good platform and another for assembly level, hub Spot does the work as well.
Salesforce is magnificently more robust and functions much better when managing complex sales cycles with multiple individuals and products. With simple sales cycles and few products, Excel is a strong contender.
Salesforce CMS stacks up as a Customer management system because it has a more user friendly snd intuitive interface. The UX is better and more modern. It can be customised and extended. There are always learning opportunities and updates for the system so it keeps on …
Salesforce more so compliments these products, rather than stacks against them. We don't have any products similar to Salesforce CMS, so in lieu of that, these are the products we were using that mesh the easiest with Salesforce CMS in terms of proceeding through the …
In my opinion, Salesforce CMS is the most complex of these offerings, and probably the most complex platform of its kind. It was selected by another stakeholder - I would likely have chosen something less expensive and more intuitive to use. The robust feature set is amazing, …
We used the Catalyst product of Totango. It was not great as it was hard to navigate, and it did not offer any reporting capabilities at all, nor did it speed up our day-to-day tasks.
I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.
In the end, I think we can always make it fit — and that’s one of the powers of Salesforce. Because of its flexibility and wide range of possibilities, you can really make it work for almost any need. The key, though, is to make thoughtful decisions upfront and plan carefully how you set it up. If you do that, you’ll end up with a truly flexible and effective system.
We had a specific process down pat with QuickArrow and wanted similar functionality. It gave us that and more.
It has a lot more reporting functionality than QuickArrow. There are hundreds of options for layout, what is reported, etc. I haven’t played too much with those reports yet. We more or less just replicated reports I had in QuickArrow. We needed the professional services/transition team at NetSuite to help me. There are too many options at this point. I imagine we won’t use all of those reports. Quick Arrow had a lot less.
Mobile Capabilities – There wasn’t a mobile concept for QuickArrow. OpenAir has been beneficial for iPhone users for time sheet submissions. There is no app for Droid users yet. There are not a lot of users out there, who really know how to use it yet. Managers are not using the app for dashboards/reporting, etc. The field has been pretty quiet but they do really like the mobile app feature. They like not having to go to laptop to enter their time. That’s all we require of them – just time entry. We ran into some glitches - some of the time sheets submitted via iPhone did not get to the tool itself. That happened in one instance. I made QA aware of it. I am not sure what the resolution turned out to be.
The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?
I’d say the only thing that can be a bit tricky — and I know Tableau helps address this — is that sometimes we’re limited in how deep we can go with the data in terms of reporting. It would be great to have a bit more robustness within the app itself. However, we’ve figured out our workarounds, and overall, I think it’s a fantastic product — which is why I’ve been working with it for 23 years.
We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
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.
All in all, it's a great product that use all day, every day. It's aesthetically pleasing overall and specifically provides information in a clean, concise way. It's easy to manipulate and seems to play well with the other products I use such as Pardot, Gmelius, and our company's proprietary data system. It increases my efficieny in my admin tasks so I have more time to focus on revenue-generation and account management. It's also easy to use from everywhere where it be on a university campus, in a hotel room, one of a million Starbucks, or at home
All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:
Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:
Live and historical data on system performance Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats Best security practices for your organization Information on how we safeguard your data
For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon
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.
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.
I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
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
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.
We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
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
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).
Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, especially in terms of customization and achieving business objectives. That’s where Salesforce Sales Cloud really stands out in comparison to Odoo.
It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.
It helps us achieve our objectives, especially now with Agentforce — we can get more insights to help our sellers sell more. It’s really nice because it’s almost like you can use the standard part of Salesforce to train your agents and teach your sellers how to improve their sales. So that’s really nice.
