Autotask PSA is designed as a complete IT Business Management Platform for MSPs, now from Datto (resulting from the Autotask merger with Datto in 2017).
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Workday Professional Services Automation
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Workday Professional Services Automation automates the Opportunity to Cash process, connecting HCM and ERP data to match the right talent to projects, reducing manual errors and revenue leakage.
In my opinion, Datto Autotask is exceptionally complicated to set up, manage, and use on a daily basis. I would think the target market for this product would be someone managing a team of 20 - 50 people, possibly more. In my experience, for it to run properly you will need to dedicate at least half an FTE to running this product in an organization of that size per month. I would not recommend it for companies with less than 10 people or for companies that value quick communication with their clients. I would not recommend it for companies using Datto's RMM product. The integration exists, but it is clearly a bolt-on. They were not developed together and they are slow to talk to each other. Frequently you cannot add details from RMM sessions into the PSA without manually copying the ticket number, and if the ticket is more than a week old, then you can't even find it with the ticket number.
Workday Professional Services Automation is a great product for large companies that have standardized, repetitive processes. The ability to automate tactical HR tasks is essential for business productivity, and Workday Professional Services Automation delivers well in this area. However, when a non-standardized process occurs, it is difficult to modify the system in a way that doesn't create confusion for the end-user, resulting in a less than desirable HR experience. For example, when my small company was acquired, our parent business utilized the software for transferring employees from the acquired business to the parent business to ensure they could sign up for health benefits, payroll, etc on Day 1; but, because every form is interrelated, the in-house Workday team was either unable or unwilling to change their workday "standard" fields for offer letters. As VP of HR for the acquired team, I had to meet one-off with each acquired employee to reassure them that certain clauses in the standard offer letter would not apply, explain why their personal email addresses were being used instead of their business ones, and assure them that they were being fully vested/transferred employees and were not considered "new employees" like the offer letter stated, etc.
AutoTask allows for us to receive and work support tickets very easily. We've setup various 'Issue Types' that in turn are bound to SLAs ensuring that items are worked appropriately as they are received.
The automation that AutoTask allows for with regards to various emails/requests coming through has been great. It allows for us to not have to constantly "watch the queue" as when a critical item arrives the appropriate persons are notified and can work it.
I feel that the management of AutoTask for both user setup, and various automations is done well. We're able to copy settings as needed, and create templates for multiple items.
Datto Autotask PSA is a full featured product that can do almost anything you need. There is a significant learning curve to get started which requires several hours spent in product training. Additionally, several hours / days are needed to get clients imported, contracts configured, and integrations implemented. Once the setup and user training is complete, the product is very functional, but it's imperative to not get overwhelmed when starting out.
With workday support options, I would like to see a more immediately responsive response option. Possibly a chat or a responsive email response team would be helpful.
The portion of Autotask that we've used other companies for prior to using Autotask is the Endpoint Management. The Autotask Endpoint Management (AEM) portal integrates perfectly with their PSA/CRM tools. It's alerting features are much better than the above software as there aren't a bunch of superfluous and unneeded alerts. Instead, it only alerts for things that you specify that you want. Alerts aside, for the PSA/CRM, I don't have much to compare it to as Autotask was the first PSA we tried. It's hard to imagine a PSA having more features or doing a better job than Autotask.
Workday Professional Services Automation is a happy medium between the other competitors. It is just enough to help you run your business, but simple to use that even smaller businesses can take advantage without a huge and taxing price tag. Its expandable and has been very well received at the companies I've worked at that use it.
