Certinia Professional Services Cloud

What differentiates Certinia Professional Services Cloud from other similar products?

This is the only product I've used for PSA, so unfortunately I cannot compare it to other similar ones.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

The mostly intuitiveness when managing resources and projects.

What do you dislike most about this product?

There are multiple ways to perform one action (this is a good thing). However, sometimes one of those ways is able to affect many other entities in the system as intended, while one of the other ways does not affect the other areas as intended. For example, removing a hold on a resource on a Resource Request - if I change the 'Status' field from 'Hold' to 'Ready to Staff,' it does not remove the hold from the resource. The only way to properly unhold the resource is to go to the 'Resources' tab on the RR record, select that resource, and then click the 'Unhold' button.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Do lots of research on whether it suits your business needs. There are bugs, but overall, it seems very applicable and intuitive across the board.

What differentiates Certinia Professional Services Cloud from other similar products?

The seamless integration into Salesforce was a key decision making tool for us. We are a salesforce heavy shop and so being able to blend account, opportunity and delivery data has been immensely impactful and saves operations teams a ton of time.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

The data is organized well into Projects, Assignments, and time reporting. This allows us to easily stratify how users spend their time. We then take that information to inform our business decisions and which services products we sell. It also helps us to make hiring decisions.

What do you dislike most about this product?

We must leverage a 3rd party vendor for development and support. The tool is admin heavy. We managed it on our own for the first 1.5 years, but as we grew we needed more support. Additionally, unless you pay for Premier Support, which is costly, the basic support received is not that helpful.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

When you onboard, make sure to onboard the full feature set. I did not mandate Assignments, and Schedule updates and so when we needed to pivot to that motion, it took a lot more enablement to get our team there. I also recommend working with a 3rd party for Managed Services once you are live.

What differentiates Certinia Professional Services Cloud from other similar products?

The fact it is built on the Salesforce platform provides many benefits including great self configuration tools, really powerful reporting and what must be one of the most extensive communities out there for business software. Financial Force also has it's own strong community and help content which enables customers to really help themselves and get the most out of the product.

What is your favorite aspect of this product?

It's pretty flexible and easy to adapt to your own organisation, if you have someone who can 'do' Salesforce (and if you don't, it's realtively easy for someone to get up to speed). The most powerful benefit to our organisation has been the reporting and dashboards that we've been able to put in place. These took some thought & work to get there, but we now have some really powerful visuals to drive the organisation on.

What do you dislike most about this product?

No strong dislikes, though we've had to build out some features ourselves vis Salesforce config which feel like they should come out of the box (i.e. control around ability to create credited assignments/an approval process around this and recording details as to *why* they are credited rather than billable). But, because the Salesforce tools are so powerful, it's been relatively easy to get the software to do exactly what we need.

What recommendations would you give to someone considering this product?

Really put some thought into what you want the software to give you visibility of and what targets are right for your business model. E.G. billable utilisation is easy to get out of the system, but where you expect this to be will depend on your business goals, which will probably differ if you're a product led business vs service led. Also, consider documenting your processes and how you need users to use the system (we produced a PS Handbook) so that folk can understand *why* they need to do certain things so they are bought in to the processes.