Accelo vs. OpenAir PSA

The best services management, easy operations reporting, and data analytics features from Accelo are impressive and easy on data visualization and workflow management software. Accelo was very helpful in collaboration and easy to collect feedback from integrated platforms and the scheduling ability is very unique. The Automation tools are also cost-effective and the ability to manage time through Accelo is perfect.

Incentivized

I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.

Incentivized

• Tracking customer interactions. Nice integration with G Suite, could be a lot better if they acknowledged that contacts may actually have more than one email address.
• Support Ticket system is integrated, so we can view support history and other email correspondence easily. It's cheaper that Zendesk.
• Support is reasonably good, usually prompt and responsive.
• Constant development - lots of updates, just not often to areas that we use.

Incentivized

• 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.

• The client portal needs to be improved. It does not have the same user interface as we have within Accelo and we get a lot of client complaints about it.
• It needs more executive-style reporting and the ability to create your own reports and filters.
• It needs to be faster. With all of the things Accelo is doing to give you all the data, it is kind of slow compared to other systems in the browser.

Incentivized

• 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?

Incentivized

Looking forward to seeing more refinement of features provided and upcoming features promised :)

We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

Incentivized

We have not had any outages.

The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.

From the beginning the Accelo team has been very invested in ensuring our success and overall happiness with the platform. The initial implementation specialists and trainers did a fairly good job of learning our company and needs, and tried to tailor the trainings accordingly. However, once we made the formal switch to the platform, meaning we no longer were using our legacy systems, we found that we had a lot of questions....and a lot of ideas and recommendations. The support team is extremely responsive and seemingly happy to receive our continual feedback. And if we encounter an issue that seems to be a system issue, they work diligently to fix it (we've actually had an engineer join a call with us to learn of the issue - and subsequently fix it)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.

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

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

Harvest and Asana combined don't even scratch the surface of what Accelo can do. Harvest is nothing more than rudimentary time tracking. It's about as easy to use as they come, but it stops there. There's no tie in to project management, invoicing, capacity planning, etc. and the reporting isn't great. Asana we found to be very difficult to use for complex projects with multiple deliverables, multiple deadlines, multiple teams - and it didn't tie back to budgets and hours worked. So the deficiencies of those two tools are what led us to Accelo. In terms of more comparable systems, I had previously used Workamajig. The sophistication of Workamajig was there, but it didn't seem to have quite as much flexibility and customization. ProWorkflow we evaluated just based on sales and marketing information available on the platform and felt it wasn't quite as good.

Incentivized

It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).

Incentivized

Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.

• Save Money on Lost Time. You won't go over your client retainers in any given month if you use Accelo properly. This ultimately saves your company time and money.
• Lost or Broken Communications. They need to get it together with their email system, aka "request inboxes" ... There are too many lost or broken emails for them to be trustworthy with this. My suggestion is to make sure you know everyone you communicate with (including outside sources like Google or other companies) and set them up in Accelo, then send test emails. Also, when in doubt, use your Outlook or other primary sourced email when you want to make sure an email goes through with all appropriate files.

Incentivized

• It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
• Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
• It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.

Incentivized