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Smooth transition from QuickArrow.
October 24, 2012

Smooth transition from QuickArrow.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Enterprise Edition Suite

Overall Satisfaction

  • 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.
  • There seems to be a lot more work in getting numbers correct. For example, we have a forecast report that we’d run out of QuickArrow, based upon calendar bookings - a feature that Quick Arrow had, but OpenAir doesn’t focus on that much. If I put 5 days on calendar for a specific resource, the forecast would automatically adjust. In OpenAir, it doesn’t support the same calendar view - it is not as automatic. You have to do booking on the calendar and adjust the rate and be specific about code that I was using, else the numbers would be inaccurate. The report is not automatic. It has to be cached every night. In QuickArrow, you could see changes automatically.
  • Had to do processes a little differently. There's more effort in QA.
  • The biggest advantage is that we haven’t had to change our processes - we wanted to replicate what we were doing in QuickArrow.
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.

Product Usage

230 - Internal consultants – 150
Partners – 50
IT/back-office – 30

Partners’ needs are very similar to internal staff. They access the same interface. They don’t require anything different.
10 - We have distinct administrators for North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and in the U.S. are organized by BU.
  • Time tracking/ timesheet management
  • Project management
  • Resource management
  • Professional services dashboards
  • Project accounting

Evaluation and Selection

QuickArrow
Oracle PAC professional services automation tool.
SAP PSA product

Our stated corporate technology direction is moving towards SAP long-term. Open Air is a stop gap for us. It was the easiest transition from QuickArrow since NetSuite acquired QuickArrow and time was of the essence. As such, we never really deep dive evaluation of Oracle or other PSA tools. We also felt that OpenAir was a robust package.

At this point, integration to our CRM or general ledger/accounting systems were not super high priorities, so long as the package had the long-term capability and APIs that would allow us to integrate. We didn’t have any integration with Quick Arrow to our CRM or GL.

SAP also has a PSA product but again, since time was of the essence, we didn’t do a deep dive. We are at least 2.5-3 years out from looking at that piece.

Implementation

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.
  • Vendor implemented

Training

  • Online training
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.

Support

Whenever I have had a problem, they come back with an answer. There have been very few times where I’ve had to follow-up on a trouble ticket.
Yes - We are on Gold customer support package which gives 24/7 coverage with a 2-4 hour response SLA

Reliability

We have not had any outages.
In Quick Arrow, I was able to look up skillsets, get answer in <5 secs. In OpenAir it takes longer – 15-20s.

Integration

  • We would like to integrate to our financial system, Oracle PAC.
Integration with financials is critical to report information across all BUs and for invoicing customers. The lack of integration to our CRM is not such a big deal for us. We don’t have integration with our financial system today but we have the ability to do so with APIs. If we were to switch to the Oracle PAC module, the integration to Oracle Financials is already there with workflow automation. We would like to avoid integration work.