OpenAir PSA vs. Teamwork.com

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

Teamwork is awesome for teams who need a flexible tool that supports all types of projects. Since it supports kanban it makes visualizing the work to be done and the work in progress very easy. The Gantt chart support is decent and helps to understand how a team is doing when it comes to getting work done in a given time frame. Teamwork isn't a great option for companies that have a bunch of projects going simultaneously due to the way Teamwork structures their billing based on a number of active projects.

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.

• I am a believer that simple and easy should be the key to create great opportunities.
• Teamwork has helped me to turn simple task management into the execution of large, massive projects.
• It has certainly worked great in helping to maintain workflow in my department.

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

• Visualization needs to be improved, charts graphs are limited
• Value stream mapping should be available to determine and prioritize the work.
• Documentation should be available stepwise with export and printable facility.
• It should be configurable like ERP with cross functionalities of different users, where users login, assign and approve the work, job or project details, where it should be collectively effected on a project.
• Add many examples, little more AI, Machine learning required for suggestion and recommendation. It would be a plus point

Incentivized

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.

We are already at an annual contract, and have been for the past 5 years; so far the system has delivered, and our personal is already trained in it. A major overhaul of our entire infrastructure (as in moving everything to a single, unified platform) might change the current continuity of Teamwork Projects on our organization, but that's not feasible in the near future.

Incentivized

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

The web based user interface is familiar, flexible (boards, task lists, and Gantts) and feature-rich. It is simple enough for the beginner to be effective and robust enough for experienced users to gain efficiencies with advanced techniques. Reporting is intuitive and can be customized for transfer via email or to paper. Great interoperability with other tools make teamwork dependable and a good partner for the overall technology stack.

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.

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

The support service provided by Teamwork is excellent, and one of the best I've experienced. This is for the following reasons: (1) The speed at which they respond to queries I raise (2) The depth of understanding they have of the product (3) The way in which they are able to understand my questions without needing me to re-explain (4) The quality of the documentation available online (5) The openness they express about current issues and downtime

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

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

I spoke about this quite a bit before, but as far as usability goes, Microsoft Projects is totally useless for me, so I avoid it at all costs. Basecamp was just a task management app and had very small feature set beyond that. We had to rig it to do other things for us, but it failed at that. Asana was a very nice app to trial, but it lacked many of the features that we were looking for.

Incentivized

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

• 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

• Overall, it keeps our team on track ensuring that all of our projects are on time and on budget, which definitely contributes to our retention rates.
• It ensures that we're tracking time on billable tasks which contributes directly to our bottom line.
• Teamwork Projects also helps us better forecast when a clients project can be completed (alongside the other work our team needs to accomplish) AND it helps us more accurately quote projects in the future because we have historical time tracking data saved.

Incentivized