Item: OpenAir PSA
Rating: 4
Author: Bryan Parry

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Besides the top layer or 2, our entire PS org uses OA for time tracking, invoicing (with NS), forecasting time & revenue, and staffing. This org, plus our subcontractors is around 450 active users. A number of our critical processes tied to billing customers, tracking project progress, etc relies on OpenAir. We also do a lot of reporting (which I head up) out of OA with regards to utilization, billable hours, non-billable hours, etc

Pros and Cons

It does the very basics of a PSA tool (time tracking, connecting with NS for invoices) relatively well, but the UI still leaves a lot to be desired.
The integration with NetSuite is easy and fluid. This is the main pro of OA.

The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?

Return on Investment

Lots of dissatisfied users. We have been discussing purchasing a new system for the past 3 years but switching costs are high.
If your needs are uncomplicated and very basic, OA can satisfy your needs.

Alternatives Considered

Mavenlink

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 be evaluating them this next fiscal year to replace OA.

Support Rating

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.

Key Insights

Do you think OpenAir PSA delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with OpenAir PSA's feature set?

Did OpenAir PSA live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of OpenAir PSA go as expected?

Would you buy OpenAir PSA again?

Other Software Used

Medallia, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Workday Human Capital Management

Likelihood to Recommend

Our users complain about many aspects of their workflows within OA and the tool is not flexible enough for me, as part of the Admin team, to accommodate their requests. Reporting allows you to get the info out of the system, but except in rare circumstances does the reporting display in a useable way in OA. I recommend to pretty much everyone to export their data to a PivotTable friendly-format (which is something that doesn't happen by default but must be selected on each report individually) and then use pivots to display the data how they need it.

Not a flexible platform - terrible reporting UI - would not recommend for anything beyond PSA basics

Overall Satisfaction with OpenAir PSA