NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.
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 …
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 …
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
Manager
Chose OpenAir PSA
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.
Microsoft Project Server was a very complex solution and often unflexible. We needed something less complex but with power and chose OpenAir.
Verified User
Vice-President
Chose OpenAir PSA
OpenAir was the most complete solution and was strong in all areas.
Verified User
Executive
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
Director
Chose OpenAir PSA
Oracle PAC professional services automation tool.
SAP PSA product
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
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.
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
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.