Item: PG Forsta HX Platform
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Confirmit is used across several departments in my organization as a primarily tool for the purpose of collecting human resources related data, primarily through surveys, which involves surveying all the employees of our client, broader groups based on market sample, or targeted groups, such as Leaders/Executives. Confirmit acts as a medium for us to hear voice of people.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Confirmit has a great data collection module. It's easy to setup a survey.
It's scalable, you can collect data for millions of participants over the short period of time.
It's very very stable, robust, trusted, and known platform.

Cons

The Reportal feature has great potential, but is not there yet.
Reportal needs to be easy for users to use and to setup reporting sites for clients
The data model that reportal v16fp is based on, doesn't really meet the needs for a large data set, and is not as robust as the data collection side of the product.
So, you can collect millions of data points, but when it comes to reporting on that data, it's not really the best reporting engine around.
It is, however, a great tool with great potential, and have seen some great work by Confirmit on the UI side for end users using the reporting site.
It's analytic capabilities seem to have increased recently with a variety of pre-defined analysis available as part of the package.

Return on Investment

Data Collection side of it is great, efficient, and easy to use.
Reportal side of it is equally inefficient, need specialized skills, and also slows down the process.
It's quite expensive and while the data collection side of it justifies the spend, Reportal really lowers the value proposition.

Alternatives Considered

IBM SPSS

IBM SPSS, when I used couple of years back, was robust tool as well. However Confirmit is certainly easier to use as compared to IBM SPSS. IBM SPSS at that point didn't have any online reporting platform which was one of the positive points with Confirmit when we selected it over IBM SPSS.

Likelihood to Renew

They really need to turn-around their reporting system; that is one of the basic needs for us.

Likelihood to Recommend

Scalability, Requirements feasibility, Confirmit Support Model

Product Usage

Users and Roles

125 - Consulting Operations

Support Headcount Required

4 - IT, Server Administrators, DBA Admins, etc.

Business Processes Supported

Employee Research
Market Research
HR Research

Innovative Uses

Used reporting system for different purposes, as like Help Desk Management
As a Scheduling system, not just as a survey system

Future Planned Uses

Project Management tool platform

Evaluation and Selection

Products Replaced

Yes - IBM SPSS. IBM SPSS at that point didn't really had an online reporting system and that was a great need for us which Confirmit was able to deliver.

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation
Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Third-party Reviews

Product capabilities (Reporting)

Evaluation Lessons Learned

Ask more about Support, add some SLAs around support, etc.

Implementation

Implementation Rating

It's very very costly to get one done from Confirmit, especially Hardware Installation.

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house
Professional services company

Confirmit helped us with initial installation of software, etc. and trained the users.

Implementation Phases

Yes - Server Installation
Basis Product Development
User Training

Change Management Lessons

Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - It was more of a product change for us, Confirmit brought in lot of great features and our clients were quite impressed with the transition and new cool features that they were getting with this transition.
There was definitely a learning curve for users.

Implementation Issues

Learning Curve
System Installation & Re-installation - quite an expensive process

Support

Support Rating

Not so impressed with the support.

PG Forsta HX Platform Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Good followup Support understands my problem	Slow Resolution Problems left unsolved Not kept informed Escalation required Difficult to get immediate help Support doesn't seem to care Slow Initial Response

Premium Support

Yes - We utilize premium support, but it's barely premium, they still have turn-around of few hours and days to "respond". They are not so great with managing patching defects, there is no way to roll-back and patching fixes have to go through a cycle which takes couple of months to get into production.

Bug Resolution

Yes - Absolutely not. Too slow.

Exceptional Examples of PG Forsta HX Platform Support

I think exception from their point, when our clients were getting frustrated they arranged for someone from their consulting to get on to call with our clients and explain why they are not able to resolve the issue and also explain their architecture a bit, which was helpful, but it took lot of time to get such a resource on phone.

Usability

There are challenges, but it's usable and in most cases acceptable.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using	None