November 13, 2015
Resource & Project Management Dream
Usability
10
TrustRadius
NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/ct/lr/ZQ18QI5FOG7C.PNGNetSuiteResource & Project Management Dream2015-11-13T18:25:33.510ZNetSuite OpenAir PSA is used for time and expense tracking for non-consulting resources for non-billable work. It is also used for high-level resource and project management for consulting resources for billable work.,Time Tracking
Expense Tracking
Resource Management
Deliverable Management
Reporting,N/A,10,Keep track of open deliverables
Report on trend data
Keep track of resources/ employees
Manage schedules,,1500,3,Time Management
Expense Management
Resource Management
Project Management,Supplemental HR tool,Unsure,10,Yes,Product Features
Product Usability,Not much would change. Reporting and ease of use were the key factors.,Implemented in-house,No,Change management was a major issue with the implementation,User acceptance
Migrating good data from the old PSA,10,Self-taught,10,Yes. Yes.,8,No,Some - we have done small customizations to the interface,No,10,I can't recall any specifics but when we first implemented NetSuite, the team in general was great. Our PSO consultant went above and beyond even when the installation services were complete. It was a great and a positive experience overall. Eric Cheung was his name I think.,Reporting,Schedule Exceptions: Time Off,Yes,10,10,10,9,NetSuite
SalesForce,N/A,File import/export
API (e.g. SOAP or REST),10,Take your time to map out carefully and try to anticipate the full scope of which you might need the data content from OA in another system today and in the future.,10,10,I can't recall.,Be flexible and honest about how you plan to use the tool.,No,Easier reporting,Not sure,NoRachelle Felix-BlackmonOpenAir -- Energetic, open-minded leadership; Most flexible PSA meets our detailed needs2014-01-13T18:46:07.821ZNetSuite OpenAir PSA is used by our Professional Services Organization globally. We utilize the tool for all modules: reports, reporting dashboards, project tracking, time & expense management, SFDC integration, finacial integration. It allows us to track project milestones and deliverables, utilization, project profitability, etc. The information in reports is "actionable" and allows us to implement corrective steps appropriately.,OpenAir demos really well and NetSuite prefers early consultation to be product-agnostic. They encourage clients to share specific needs they require in a PSA application. They then take on the ownership of making those configurations and setting up the application to be successful (per your requirements) from the start. Take time to work backwards in preparation for implementation. Outline the reports you need, then identify the specific value fields needed to create the desired outputs. The OpenAir consultant can then educate how this will be accomplished within the application.
As legacy QuickArrow users, we were encouraged to implement OpenAir because it's the natural migration path. OpenAir made transfering our data easy with minimal adjustments. OpenAir helped us recreate our legacy reports using the appropriate new field values. While not every report could be replicated, we came "close enough" for our business needs.
When you inquire if OpenAir can do something, the reply is always "Yes." The application is so flexible (almost too flexible), which makes fielding executive managment requests much more easy than within our former application, QuickArrow.
The integration with Salesforce.com saves us a significant amount of time as we set up similar projects leveraging pre-created templates. After working with our references (more-so than our OpenAir consultant unfortunately) we were able to tailor this configuration to meet our needs perfectly. While this took a bit of technical collaboration on our end, this was an easy way to reduce our day-to-day manual effort.
OpenAir dashboards allow executive management to have the information they need at their fingertips. They can tailor the dashboard reports to reflect their KPI interests and access the reports when they need them 24/7/365. While this takes a bit of effort to set-up a good starting point for all interested executives, the education enables them access information independently vs relying on reporting specialists or administrators for report outputs. As an administrator, take time to invest time in this area, as it empowers others and reduces reporting requests.
OpenAir reviews enhancement requests often and they can be incorporated into the product quickly. When negotiating our contract, they were missing a have-to-have criteria element. Upon our contract signing, the product supported our criteria fully. When talking with other OpenAir customers, there are multiple examples supporting this strength!
NetSuite conferences are fully of energy, offer great key note speakers, and offer opportunities to have conversations with OpenAir, open-minded leaders. This group is focused on the customer experience and are eager to hear (and best of all incorporate) customer feedback. This dynamic team is full of energy at all levels of the organization. A very genuine company where anyone would be proud to hold a role.,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.,10,The Salesforce.com / OpenAir Integration reduces project creation manual entry effort by 50%, leveraging pre-created project templates.
The resource scheduling takes longer than within QuickArrow, as there are more clicks involved to set up scheduling specifics and double-checking your work. Accurate schedules make or break our utilization, so we are OK with spending time in this area. OpenAir does offer a feature to transfer a pre-created schedule from one resource to another. This is our favorite time-saver, specifically helpful when back-up employees are needed to cover for leave on complex projects.
Please know that when considering all the PSA solutions out there, an application is only as good as technology. It's up to you, the admin, to configurate it to meet the needs of your business. Technology alone is useless...take time to become educated and share those details with internal stakeholders. Make wise decisions and document them. We believe OpenAir is the best PSA on the market, when compared to competitors in 2013. Good luck making your decision, working backwards from reporting to achieve the best success.,,9,Implemented in-house,8Verified UserIf you are a complicate company then you need a complicated software like NetSuite.2015-03-14T21:42:40.058ZWe implemented Netsuite OpenAir to replace using our previous project management software. It is currently being used only for managing the professional services projects implementing the product being sold to the customer. Our previous system was not collaborative nor in the cloud. With quite a bit of configuration we were able to sync much of our project workflow with our current Salesforce sales process for post sales implementations. This helped our post sales team to report on the real time status of implementations and followup with up-sale opportunities.,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.,OpenAir has a very dated interface making it unappealing from a look and feel standpoint.
Much of the placement of features seems unintuitive. OpenAir is feature rich but more thought could be put into their user experience.
OpenAir generally just feels complicated for the first month you use it. To perform certain administrative tasks you have to navigate to unintuitive places. I'd like to see the administration more centrally located in its design.,3,Linking of our Salesforce to post sales professional services.
Real-Time post sales project status.
Linking of our professional services and billing systems for time and resource management.,,Timesheets
Tasks
Creating users,Custom fields
Changing what is displayed on a particular layout
Permissions
Managing Users and hierarchies,2Verified UserGreat product, but UI needs a facelift.2012-11-27T21:45:11.989ZUsed by entire company for time and expense tracking. Then the Services and Accounting teams used the tool heavily for day to day management of both projects and financial health.,Integration between various modules is seamless and they complement each other well.
Resource management and planning.
Project planning and monitoring in terms of traditional project management metrics.
Reporting and dashboards were flexible.
From time sheets to customer invoicing, the workflow for approvals and reviews worked great.,The interface could use improvements from a usability perspective. It needs a bit of a face-lift. For example, setting up reports is cumbersome and time consuming.
It needs to increase flexibility for more advanced resource booking assignments such as recurring bookings.
Configuration by department would be ideal. For a company that adopted the solution across the board, some of the configuration options wouldn't work for some departments which required compromises and in some cases we are not using some of the features Services would have desired.,10,We increased our utilization in Services from 90% to over 100% using the resource management tools.
We reduced our backlog/queue time for starting new projects from 2 months to 2-4 weeks. With greater visibility, we were able to better plan our staffing needs for short/long term needs.
We had greater visibility for project managers in regards to the monitoring of contracts from an invoicing perspective resulting in increased billings and reduced time to get invoices out the door.
Given the integration of the solution, there was access to time off requests as well as company holidays (especially for co-location/countries). It allowed us to have greater visibility to ensure we had the proper staffing levels and were able to maximize our time and material opportunities over any period.,FinancialForce PSA,Mavenlink,Projector PSA,9,100,2,Resource planning and forecasting for financial purposes as well as defining our upcoming staffing needs.
Visibility into our utilization for booked business as well as sales opportunities.
Complete integration for customer invoice generation using approved time sheets and then getting the information to Quickbooks.
Project planning tools and metrics for project managers.
Workflow for approvals of resource requests, time sheets, expense reports and invoicing.
Revenue recognition and financial planning.,We've been able to use project stages to segment our product license contracts so that we can track invoicing, renewals and profitability.,Tracking sales opportunities for resource and financial forecasting.,,Price
Product Features,Ensure to speak with other clients who've used the PSA solution and understand their pros and cons after the fact.,Vendor implemented,No,Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled,Internal process changes and adoption.,9,In-person training,9,9,I would recommend using an outside consultant to implement it. One that understands your business and can spend that 1-1 time with you to ensure the implementation is seamless and successful.,No - there is no facility to customize the interface,No - we have not done any custom code,There is an advanced function available for creating custom fields and calculations that can be used for reporting purposes. This is a very powerful tool that can help provide you the information you might be need for project analysis.,No,10,Yes,Project tracking
Time and expense tracking
Resource management,Reporting can be a little clunky to setup and figure out which reports to use for different situations.
Integration isn't seamless.,Yes,9,10,10,9,Quickbooks,Salesforce.com,File import/export,3,Speak with customers/references who have integrated to exactly the same system. Understand what went wrong and any gotchas.,9,7,Tiered pricing structure with a per seat license fee.
When we negotiated year one, they agreed to honor the price only for one year. Once renewal came around, they had an increase that was substantial. In retrospect, we should have pushed harder to have that price locked for a longer period of time.,Ensure that renewal has a cap on percentage price increases.,Improved UI.,No,NoVerified User
Unspecified
OpenAir PSA
32 Ratings
<a href='https://www.trustradius.com/static/about-trustradius-scoring' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>trScore algorithm: Learn more.</a>
