Oracle PeopleSoft ERP vs. Viewpoint Spectrum

Well suited for established, large organizations with a large user base and the ability to devote significant resources to design and implementation of a vetted, long-term solution for business processing. Not well suited for very small businesses or businesses whose business processes are changing continuously. Changing PeopleSoft for business process changes/modifications requires significant time and resources due to the design, testing, and implementation tasks involved

Incentivized

Viewpoint Spectrum would be fine for small to medium-sized companies. It would be great for transitioning from an in-house paper-based process, especially since it's designed with small construction companies in mind. They're making it even easier for smaller companies by offering additional features that you'd normally have to find in other products. However, companies can easily outgrow this system. We have about 15 years of data in the system, over 300 active jobs, and nearly 1,500 employees. In the past 3 years we've noticed slower performance and frequent locks in the system that require intervention from a system administrator. We moved to the cloud about 2 years ago and this has made troubleshooting even more difficult as we don't have the same access that we did before to resolve performance issues.

Incentivized

• PeopleSoft has great development tools to help support the application. The application designer is a robust tool that provides the PeopleSoft Developer a powerful user interface to help support the PeopleSoft Financials application.
• PeopleSoft Financials delivers robust financial reporting capabilities. With the use of nVision, queries, BI Publisher, and trees the Finance team can create all their reporting needs in an automated fashion.
• PeopleSoft Financials has streamlined interfaces from the subsystems to the General Ledger. There is drill back capabilities from GL to the various subsystems to perform streamlined account reconciliations.

Incentivized

• Dashboards make navigating to the crucial information quick and easy.
• The layout with what we affectionately call the job info bar helps our project teams to quickly get where they need to go in the system.
• Crystal reports are easily managed and integrated with Spectrum, giving us great flexibility in custom reports.
• With a little training, and I mean a little, Spectrum is user friendly. Easy to create favorites/shortcuts for ease of use.

Incentivized

• Inability to view the results of multiple queries at once in the Query Viewer.
• Although there is excellent integration with Oracle's other products, there is an unacceptable amount of support for other third party vendors.
• Personalization Feature for a Quick-Access Menu. Due to the abundance of features in PeopleSoft SCM, it sometimes takes a while to find that one option as there are so many others in the same menu. It would be nice for a user to be able to drag and drop some options they use frequently into a Quick-Access menu.

• Subcontract Kiosk can be glitchy - allows subs to overbill on subcontract billing items
• Document Imaging can be glitchy - often says users do not have adequate security to view/add documents, but they do - if they sign out and back in, it works fine
• At times, support can be lacking - sometimes case responses are delayed or you get an incorrect answer

Incentivized

PRISM is a great tool to track and watch numerous financial documents. I would like to see more of an integration platform that would control tracking for specific project details. There is currently only a little section for job notes which I would like to see improve. I think navigation could be improved, but isn't the worst compared to some platforms I have worked with as it provides a tree like structure on the backend which helps synchronize information together for fiscal financials.

It checks all of our boxes at the moment.

Incentivized

The usability is very outdated In my opinion. The screens resemble those of Windows 3.1. Too many clicks and drop-downs or clicks to go to a new screen. The business logic also appears dated and requires an update. Overall, it does not have a pleasing User Interface and should be refreshed, or a new interface should be built from the ground up.

Incentivized

Some things in Spectrum are NOT that intuitive, but I think knowledge of the software just comes with time. There are still some things I need assistance with in Spectrum but I'm very comfortable with my day to day items now that I've been using it for years. However, if there is something I don't do often or haven't done before, I don't find the software to be that intuitive, I actually find the logic on some things to be a little weird but it's fine once I know how to do it.

Incentivized

Very little down time. They host our system.

Incentivized

For the most part the product is very reliable. Since we are hosted we sometimes have connectivity issues but I would say that is more our ISP than Spectrum.

Incentivized

I can't give them a perfect rating because it does often take a long time and usually more [expensive] to resolve trying issues that cannot be solved by our in-house team. PeopleSoft is complicated, and the mix and match of user-created and stock modules cause problems very often. These usually require more customization to completely fix, requiring more money spent with

Incentivized

The support has recently changed. Last year, you could call in and get an immediate response. Now that doesn't seem possible unless you have an urgent situation with access to the software, payroll or payables. I have found that using chat or e-mail works nicely for the most part, but sometimes I feel it would be easier if someone from support would jump on our site and take a first-hand look rather than going back and forth

Incentivized

Our trainer was excellent and navigated the time zone differences expertly. She gave us test assignments to complete and was available for questions at any time.

Incentivized

I recommend that everyone pay special attention to developing a solid testing and training plan if you are even thinking of implementing PeopleSoft. Be ready to obtain good trainers and developers, otherwise, your journey can be unnecessarily painful and much more expensive. Try to stay with an implementation partner who really has your needs at heart, and actually takes the time to understand your organization!

Incentivized

It is important to have a strong implementation partner. It made the transition from our old system to the new system easier.

Incentivized

It is pretty much in line with PeopleSoft Financials because it gives seamless integration between Financials and HCM. Also, when you have both the softwares on same technology, it is very cost effective. One of the reason for selecting PeopleSoft Financials and HCM are their capability to customize the business process. We have gone so far that we have built the bolt-on solutions.

Incentivized

Spectrum, when compared to Simply accounting, is better. It has more options, and it is easy to navigate. Spectrum meets our needs better. Spectrum, when compared to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, is better. Spectrum has better connectivity between its project management system compared to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate. Spectrum, when compared to CMIC, I believe they are equal. CMiC has a better project management system, but Spectrum has an easier accounting system to navigate.

Incentivized

You can grant user specific access which is nice. Project managers do not need all the same modules as Accounting. But Accounting does need access to PM modules as well

• Positive tracking of ledger information for all areas of the organization. Our organization has multiple business units that require the accurate and complete tracking of transactions and budgetary history going back multiple years, which PeopleSoft Financials has done
• Ability to connect with external vendors easily and to export any and all file types and connect to service operations/web services as well as accept and process transactions from external systems has brought a positive impact
• PeopleSoft provides the framework to reconcile transactions across the organization and within different business units to provide transparency and transactional history for metrics and data analysis

Incentivized

• Viewpoint Spectrum has allowed us the opportunity to be proactive in analyzing the costs for a project in time to make a difference in the outcome of the project. It has allowed us defense in supporting our communications with the project owners.
• Viewpoint Spectrum has allowed us to become more productive with its accounting software and the cohesion between the modules. It has definitely streamlined the processing necessary to account for the business.

Incentivized