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OpenAir PSA

OpenAir PSA

Overview

What is OpenAir PSA?

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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Recent Reviews

OpenAir does the Job

5 out of 10
November 11, 2015
Incentivized
We use OpenAir for time-entry and project management/accounting purposes. We are a services organization, embedded in a software company. …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 18 features
  • Task Management (15)
    8.0
    80%
  • Resource Management (15)
    7.5
    75%
  • Budget and Expense Management (14)
    7.5
    75%
  • Timesheet Tracking (14)
    7.0
    70%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

What is OpenAir PSA?

NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Features

Project Management

Project management software provides capabilities to streamline management of complex projects through task management, team collaboration and workflow automation

7.3
Avg 7.5

Professional Services Automation

Features that support professional services organizations

8.6
Avg 7.4
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Product Details

What is OpenAir PSA?

NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes resource management, time management, and billing capabilities. More specifically, it allows an administrator to create projects and book resources for them, populate tasks with assigned resources for their completion,create billing and revenue recognition rules for invoicing clients, track time and expenses across events and projects, create custom time ranges to match fiscal periods, report project benchmarks on key measures and build summaries and use charts to visualize results. It also integrates with Microsoft Project.

Pricing is variable though a free demo is available. 24/7 live support is available to help with implementation, and paid courses and consulting are also available.

OpenAir PSA Video

In this demonstration, learn how OpenAir provides billable services companies with powerful analytics reporting and dashboards for project metrics. Liked this video? Check out these! ○ https://youtu.be/njaTr6rYVOY ○ https://youtu.be/vkrFdtcdpu4 ○ https://youtu.be/jt225uEH14Q...
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OpenAir PSA Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.

Planview ChangePoint, Certinia PS Cloud, and Zoho Projects are common alternatives for OpenAir PSA.

Reviewers rate Invoicing and Integration with accounting software highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of OpenAir PSA are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(49)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-4 of 4)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Rachelle Felix-Blackmon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
NetSuite 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
Reporting was a big factor when choosing this system. It was very important to be able to leverage the data being submitted by 1000+ resources and leverage it to tell us something useful about our company.
Project Management (14)
34.285714285714285%
3.4
Task Management
100%
10.0
Resource Management
100%
10.0
Gantt Charts
N/A
N/A
Scheduling
N/A
N/A
Workflow Automation
N/A
N/A
Team Collaboration
N/A
N/A
Support for Agile Methodology
N/A
N/A
Support for Waterfall Methodology
N/A
N/A
Document Management
N/A
N/A
Email integration
N/A
N/A
Mobile Access
80%
8.0
Timesheet Tracking
100%
10.0
Change request and Case Management
N/A
N/A
Budget and Expense Management
100%
10.0
Professional Services Automation (4)
50%
5.0
Quotes/estimates
N/A
N/A
Invoicing
N/A
N/A
Project & financial reporting
100%
10.0
Integration with accounting software
100%
10.0
  • Keep track of open deliverables
  • Report on trend data
  • Keep track of resources/ employees
  • Manage schedules

We used to use QuickArrow which went end of life at the end of 2009.

We were forced to move onto another platform; which was a good thing since QuickArrow did not fulfill all of our business needs.

Ease of reporting was a HUGE thing for my organization. NetSuite OpenAir PSA has certainly come a long way with their reporting and we use it everyday for multiple purposes. I don't have many use case scenarios with other PSA systems to describe why NetSuite OpenAir PSA is better aside from my experience with QuickArrow.

1500
Admin and PSO
3
HR
  • Time Management
  • Expense Management
  • Resource Management
  • Project Management
  • Supplemental HR tool
  • Unsure
Yes
QuickArrow
  • 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
We used NetSuite PSO services which made the migration process a lot easier.
  • Self-taught
Yes. Yes.
In some cases, we had to change our business practices to work with the tool's functionality.
No
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface
No
N/A
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
I haven't used it personally but many of my consultants who are on the road 80% of the time use it for time and expenses.
Very easy to use.
  • NetSuite
  • SalesForce
Not sure
  • N/A
N/A
  • File import/export
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
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.
I can't recall.
Be flexible and honest about how you plan to use the tool.
No
  • Easier reporting
  • Not sure
No
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
NetSuite 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.
Our company requires us to track a large number of detailed project milestones, leverages complex invoicing scenarios, and reporting outputs that have calculated fields. We described our complex scenarios to various vendors when searching for a PSA solution. Every competitor talked a good talk, but when we asked them to demonstrate how the scenarios would be handled inside the application (not powerpoint screenshots), they all fell short with the exception of OpenAir. Specifically when compared to SAP's PSA solution, OpenAir won hands-down due to fast implementation, quality and timeliness of support, flexible configurations, scheduling capabilities (yes, even as a weakness, this still beat competitors), and overall user-friendly/straightforward design. We have a one individual supporting the product globally full-time, and a coordinator supporting the product half-time (20 hrs/week).
  • 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.
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 offerings supported by QuickArrow. Their sales individuals ‘talk a good talk,’ but when reviewing with current clients on each application, their feedback paints a different picture. OpenAir solution provides the configurations, flexibility, robust reporting, executive dashboards, and improvements our organization needs to continue to our current service offerings. The solution offers functionality that can be leveraged when putting together future, more scalable, service offerings. OpenAir is the natural upgrade for current QuickArrow clients. Sales individuals provide honest feedback and when reviewing with current clients, they praise the organization, product, support and overall client experience. They cite that enhancement requests are reviewed and often incorporated into the product quickly, offering many examples in support of this claim.
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.
  • Implemented in-house
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We 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.
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.
Project Management (14)
66.42857142857143%
6.6
Task Management
80%
8.0
Resource Management
80%
8.0
Gantt Charts
90%
9.0
Scheduling
80%
8.0
Workflow Automation
80%
8.0
Team Collaboration
80%
8.0
Support for Agile Methodology
70%
7.0
Support for Waterfall Methodology
N/A
N/A
Document Management
50%
5.0
Email integration
60%
6.0
Mobile Access
40%
4.0
Timesheet Tracking
90%
9.0
Change request and Case Management
50%
5.0
Budget and Expense Management
80%
8.0
Professional Services Automation
N/A
N/A
  • 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.
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.
  • Timesheets
  • Tasks
  • Creating users
  • Custom fields
  • Changing what is displayed on a particular layout
  • Permissions
  • Managing Users and hierarchies
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Used 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.
While the solution wasn't perfect and had some areas of improvement in regards to the UI, it was still a solid application that did help us achieve our overarching goals. The integration between the various modules is key to provide a clear ROI once implemented.
  • 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
OpenAir was the most complete solution and was strong in all areas.
While the solution could use a few improvements here or there, overall, we were able to achieve what we need: a complete integrated solution to allow us to effectively manage and operate our professional services business.
100
Every person in the company was required to use OpenAir. We licensed all the modules, so everyone was required to submit time sheets and expense reports even if they were in an Administrative/Overhead role within the company. The professional services department more heavily used the solution since they used the tool for project management, resource planning and reporting, but it was still adopted by the entire organization.
2
Strong technically and very comfortable with computers/software HR/Finance representative Services representative
  • 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.
Journyx
  • 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.
The primary thing is ensure that you take the time to gather the input of the key stakeholders before configuration so you can minimize changes after the fact. In our case, one of the key stakeholders was "too busy" and it did end up causing rework and additional configuration costs. In particular when it comes to data migration, you need to ensure the proper due diligence is done so that you start out with a clean plate.
  • In-person training
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
There is a lot of flexibility available in OpenAir. There are a few features that are limited, but overall, I see it as a robust tool that enables you to flex it for your individual business.
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
We had premium support for the first 2-3 months to ensure we had the resources we needed to help us get over the hump of how to use the tool. But once we overcame the basic day to day processes, it really wasn't necessary so we did not continue that service. Additionally, their normal support was responsive and quick to respond when we did have a question/issue.
They were responsive and knowledgeable. We had access to a single point of contact and we could contact him via phone/email as needed. It was very convenient and it made it easy since that person was already familiar with how we were using the solution, our configuration, etc.
Yes
It was provided to product management for triage, however it was not resolved.
  • 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
Solid user interface for time and expense tracking. For expense tracking you can take pictures of receipts to tag to your expense report to go completely paperless. Then when invoicing the customer for reimbursement, these can be included, so very convenient.
Aside from Reporting, where there is some room for improvement, the usability is overall very strong. In Reporting, you can get the job done for the most part, but it might take a lot of creativity to get there.
Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.
The system up time was reliable and that was never anything we ever had any concerns/issues with.
The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.
  • Quickbooks
Quickbooks - highly integrated to generate our customer invoices. It wasn't as difficult as we thought, clearly the vendor had done this integration in the past so it was relatively painless.
  • Salesforce.com
They do support this integration, however, we just haven't pursued it yet.
  • File import/export
We attempted to integration with Salesforce but were never successful in getting their consultant team to set it up. After several months, we gave up. We had an integration with Quickbooks online which was working for several months, and then one day was no longer supported with no notification to clients. I heard from another client who attempted the integration with NetSuite Financials and it took over 6 months with many Netsuite consultants in order to get it working. Integration is an area for improvement for them.
Speak with customers/references who have integrated to exactly the same system. Understand what went wrong and any gotchas.
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
No
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