Prophix - CPM made easy
Updated June 26, 2023

Prophix - CPM made easy

Joe Scheidecker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Prophix

We use Prophix for financial reporting and planning, We use DPM as well for fixed asset planning. All department heads and managers use Prophix for budgeting/planning purposes. We built an additional cube for tracking our chemical usage and expenses as this is one of our largest expenses.

Pros

  • Budget process streamlining.
  • Customer Support - top notch and responsive.
  • Once you get the hang of template creation and understand how Prophix cubes are structured, creating reports is a breeze.

Cons

  • Having their employees understand financial consolidations and how to accomplish it either within Prophix or our ERP, and ensuring everything ties out.
  • We've had some struggles with Implementation Consultants giving us bad guidance and costing us time and money. Stuff that was easily preventable and should have been caught ahead of time rather than after.
  • We have streamlined our budgeting process immensely
  • We have expanded our reporting capabilities exponentially with Prophix
We now use Prophix exclusively for budgeting instead of Excel. This has allowed department managers to obtain direct control and oversight of their budgets and visibility into real-time data to compare actual expenses to budget. The move away from Excel into Prophix has reduced our budget process substantially.
Data integration is complex but easier if you can write SQL queries. We have myriad data sources we use to import into Prophix - SQL queries, Excel files, text files, etc. Data Connectors are easy to setup once you've done a few. You can setup processes to automate the import of data which really is a nice feature.
Doesn't affect us either way
  • BOARD
We liked the Board product but were put off by a the tone of conversations with a few of their people. BI360 was too expensive for what we wanted. We chose Prophix because we really liked their people and they worked with us on pricing.

Do you think Prophix delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Prophix's feature set?

Yes

Did Prophix live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Prophix go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Prophix again?

Yes

Works great for budgeting and reporting. Most users use the web client because of the dashboard availability, which is great but also limited. I do look forward to Prophix expanding the dashboard capabilities in the future as there are many improvements that can be made, but they are off to a good start. At this point I would not recommend doing consolidations in Prophix.

Prophix Feature Ratings

9.2
Long-term financial planning
9
Financial budgeting
10
Forecasting
9
Scenario modeling
9
Management reporting
9
7.8
Financial data consolidation
6
Journal entries and reports
Not Rated
Multi-currency management
9
Intercompany Eliminations
9
Minority Ownership
Not Rated
Local and consolidated reporting
Not Rated
Detailed Audit Trails
7
9.0
Financial Statement Reporting
10
Management Reporting
9
Excel-based Reporting
9
Automated board and financial reporting
8
7.8
Personalized dashboards
8
Color-coded scorecards
7
KPIs
9
Cost and profitability analysis
7
Key Performance Indicator setting
8
Benchmarking with external data
Not Rated
9.7
Flat file integration
10
Excel data integration
9
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
10
BI Standard Reporting ()
Not Rated
9.3
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
8
Report sharing and collaboration
10
10.0
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
10.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
8.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
8

Growing with Prophix

Budgeting and Reporting are our biggest wins so far. I would definitely recommend having at least one or two 'super users' get to know the product inside and out so your organization can handle report building and troubleshooting most issues on their own. It also helps to have someone knowledgeable with SQL.
We use Prophix to track chemical usage and expense, as this is one of the biggest inputs into our final product (sales). This has allowed us to compare chemical usage among our three locations and identify trends over time. The visibility into this data has really helped us as we make decisions regarding chemical suppliers and chemical recipes at each location.
Our only hangup with Prophix (and I've implemented it twice at two different companies/industries) is that implementation does take longer than planned. To be fair, I think this is fairly common for any software project of this scope. As for the finished product and ongoing performance, we are very satisfied. Prophix is regularly making improvements to the software in terms of bug fixes, new capabilities and features, and they are almost always useful for us!

Using Prophix

We utilize workflow to streamline our budget process, and it works quite well. We use cell comments to communicate variances and worthwhile notes to management and other users. This feature has proven very useful!
We use Prophix report binders for distribution, allowing users to receive customized packages of monthly and other reports.
25 - Accounting, Production, Maintenance, Management, EHS
2 - We have two people who are well-versed in Prophix usage and can help with most troubleshooting.

Integrating Prophix

Integration is complete and well designed. As stated earlier, it helps to have someone on your staff who knows how to write SQL queries as this is the basis for data import.
  • Microsoft Dynamics GP
We input our financial and non-financial data from GP into Prophix. The data connections are well designed and Prophix has done countless integrations with GP so their staff are knowledgeable in this area.
  • none come to mind
n/a
  • File import/export
n/a
get to know SQL!

Using Prophix

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Slow to learn
Lots to learn
  • Monthly maintenance to time settings for reporting
  • Running reports
  • Creating data import processes
  • Designing and formatting reports, but this is not a unique issue to Prophix
Yes, but I don't use it
If you take the time to learn the nuts and bolts of the software, it becomes quite easy to navigate. For non-finance people, this may take more time and be an impediment to user adoption.

Prophix Reliability

We use Prophix for reporting in all our departments and across 3 sites and one management entity. This allows us to scale our reporting as needed and gives us exactly the data we need to make decisions and plan.
We deployed in the cloud. Prophix uses AWS hosting and uptime is over 99%. There are occasional outages and scheduled processes don't run due to them, but that's not a problem unique to Prophix. And that happens maybe once or twice a year.
We do have some reports that take a few minutes to load, or update when different member selections are chosen. In my mind, these reports are not that complex and shouldn't take that long. However, the vast majority of our reports run pretty quickly and processes run in a timely fashion. Prophix integrates with our ERP (Dynamics GP) but does not affect its performance in any way.

Relationship with Prophix Software

the sales teams I worked with on both implementations did over-promise a bit regarding timeframes for implementation, but the finished product delivers what we asked for.
Any issues we had were addressed and fixed in a timely fashion. Ongoing support is top-notch.
n/a
nothing comes to mind.

Prophix Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Difficult to get immediate help
We purchased the Customer Success package for the first year after implementation and it was nice to have a dedicated support person who knew our setup, processes and needs. I would recommend this to anyone implementing Prophix, especially for the first year or two until users can start to handle some troubleshooting on their own.
Yes - Yes
The Customer Success package is well worth the price for new-to-Prophix organizations.
I've worked with multiple support people at Prophix and they are easily the most knowledgeable and helpful support team of any partner we work with. They are usually quick to respond and diligent about finding a solution to our issues. Prophix also has a feedback forum where you can submit ideas, and vote on others' ideas as well. If an idea gets enough votes, Prophix will consider adding it to their software, and has done so many times. That's pretty great!

Prophix Training

  • Online Training
  • In-Person Training
  • No Training
Prophix does a nice job ensuring users have a working knowledge of the system depending on the user's role within the system. Training during and after implementation is available and a vast library of resources are available to new users.
Prophix Academy is worth using for early users of the product. It could be updated more frequently though.
I did a lot of self-guided training. If you have the time to spend really digging in on your own, with some help from Prophix, you can handle virtually anything you need to do, outside of critical troubleshooting or issues with the cloud.

Upgrading Prophix

Yes - Updates are deployed automatically in the cloud and have presented no issues.
  • new features
  • new capabilities in our cubes
  • more charting options in the dashboards

Evaluating Prophix and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
For this second implementation the management team relied on my prior experience with Prophix and we didn't even look at other options based on my recommendation. The product does exactly what we need it to do and that was enough to make the decision!
nothing comes to mind.

Prophix Implementation

Took longer than expected. But in the end, we were happy.
  • Implemented in-house
Yes - We focused first on financial reporting. When that was complete we moved into the next phase of transitioning our budget processes away from Excel into Prophix. Our final phase was building a separate cube to track chemical expenses. We plan to also start forecasting within Prophix in the near future.
Change management was minimal - n/a
  • time to implement
  • ensuring the SQL queries were written to obtain exactly the data needed

Configuring Prophix

I think it's just right for our needs
This would be based on your unique needs so it's hard to say.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
none

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