The last Blue Tent department adopted the new project management software from Netsuite at the beginning of September. Our team is now fully entrenched in the project systems so I thought I would share a few highlights and a few of the challenges that we faced so that the Netsuite nation has a better understanding of how the tools work, where we hit road blocks and what you can do to avoid the mistakes we made.
1-    Highlights to the web based project management software:
a.    We now have departmental visibility into production capacity.  This is huge for us, especially our Web Development team who may have as many as 30 projects in the hopper. Our managers need to know what resources have what workload and for what clients. This allows our sales team to work with clients on a project slotting process and help them manage timelines and delivery expectations. I think this is one of the most important reasons we have moved to this system
b.    Project profitability. Blue Tent now has the ability to know what are margins on work are by project phase. This helps our team from the front of the house to the back of the house make sure that we are giving realistic budget numbers to both customers and our internal teams.

2-    Challenges to the project management software:
a.    Start simple! We came out of the gate trying to accommodate every possible scenario for all of our project teams. As usual this was done without a lot of input from the teams that would actually use the system. What we got back was overly complicated. We quickly boiled down the process to be a simple as possible and now our internal teams seem to love the new tools.
b.    Email notifications for tasks. This was a classic….. our internal teams will share many tasks as it might take a PHP programmer and an SEO expert to both work on the same task.  The CRM task function works with email notification……the project task notification did not! Oh no what to do? Lucky we have a few smart JAVA developers on our team and in about 3 hours they had a Netsuite script to allow our tasks to notify the user with an email…oh joy! If anyone in the nation needs this function, let me know!
So those are a few more notes from our foray into the full use of the SaaS world. One system to pull together; CRM, ERP and Financials.

Good luck - Peter