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Tenrox Review - If the shoe fits...
March 09, 2015

Tenrox Review - If the shoe fits...

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

2014 Release 2

Modules Used

  • Organization
  • Work
  • Timesheet
  • Expense
  • Financial
  • Reporting

Overall Satisfaction with Tenrox Professional Services Automation

Our organization is primarily a Staffing and Recruiting firm (and when including that portion of the business we have many more employees than indicated), however the division in which we use Tenrox performs project-based work. We perform project-based work with a wide variety of project types and are able to create several different structures in the system to manage them all in one place. One of the reasons we have kept Tenrox is that it houses our full data even when smaller groups within our organization have to use other systems as is often dictated by our clients. We use many smaller systems for more specific and/or granular project management, and Tenrox houses 'it all' as our go-to.
  • As a systems administrator, I enjoy the Tenrox system itself. I would say of the systems I have worked with in the past and those that I currently work with, Tenrox is one of my favorites relative to my current business needs.
  • Tenrox has a huge range of capabilities and options and its very easy to select and use particular components and ignore those that aren't valuable based on the need.
  • It is a well-structured system and once you understand the basic mapping it is very logical.
  • When our PMs and hourly resources are first presented with Tenrox they often feel overwhelmed at a glance, but the vast majority of the time after only a small amount of training they are able to use the system quite well.
  • Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
  • Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
  • (The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
  • Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
  • We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
  • A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
Tenrox as a system is one of my favorites, if not my favorite. I really like the system-structure and its capabilities. Previously, the only negative mark I gave Tenrox was customer service and as stated that has shown great improvement in the past months. Conversely, our other primary system (Advantage) has always provided us with excellent customer service as one of their strongest points, which made it even more frustrating to have those issues with Tenrox support. I did not select Tenrox myself, but if I were shopping around now, I would be very very likely to decide on Tenrox. I would recommend it, so long as the system fits the needs of your business and staff.
If you are trying to house a large volume of relatively small projects or clients who need granular reporting on a large volume of small deliverables, Tenrox might not be the best solution. We do have one group that utilizes Tenrox Project Planning (TPP) for a client that has such deliverables, however as mentioned elsewhere in this review we have found TPP to be problematic when synching with the Tenrox system. The administrative time it would take to manage those projects directly out of Tenrox is simply not worth the small dollar value of the individual projects.

The level/proficiency of project managers relative to administrative support. Tenrox is a bit more robust and more complex to figure out than a lot of systems out there that might have a very simple interface for project managers that might have different levels of proficiency and need in the system. When evaluating if Tenrox would be good for your business, I would suggest considering your administrative support team and how much they can handle in conjunction with the system's proficiency of your project managers and how much you will need them to use Tenrox (i.e. will your administrators be doing the majority of the system work, or will actual project managers be expected to setup and maintain projects, resources, etc. etc. From there, do you have enough admin bandwidth relative to the number of systems-minded project managers, resource managers, etc.).

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