Board Reviews

Our end user is a chemical industry company, and they did a lot of reports in Excel. We use Board to create reports automatically, instead of with Excel.

Before we used Board for our customer, they would share the same Excel sheets each in different departments. It was highly inefficient. They needed to wait until other people finished their parts. And it was not easy to catch the newest information in the Excel sheets. After we provided Board to the customer, they were able to put all their planning information in Board and get the newest information from it.

In addition, it has helped to integrate planning processes across our customer's organizations. For example, people from accounting, HR, and production are able to check other departments' information. While it hasn't improved the accuracy of the planning information, as the ERP system is quite accurate, the fact that we can let people from different departments check the information quickly helps them see accurate data.

It also provides us with faster access to information than we had before.

By using Board we can do a lot of free analysis. We can change the layout of a table and even the end-user can change the layout of a table. And in Board 11.2 you can save the layout. That's very useful for the customer, it's a very good function. We use this functionality to achieve free analysis.

Another feature is the Procedure environment. It's not a new function, but it's a big function within Board. By using Procedures we can modify the data in a lot of ways. We don't just collect data from the ERP system and show the data to the customer. We can also modify the data. We can do a lot of data entry and also do a lot of deep analysis, by evaluating the data. One of my colleagues has even used the dataflow, the Procedure environment, to build a booking system for making reservations.

What could be better is the manual. When I first used Board, I checked the Board manual all the time. It's a website, boardmanual.com, and there is a lot of information on this website about how to use Board and the meaning of each construct. Nowadays, most people use a web client, but on the Board manual website, a lot of the information is only about the Windows client. If they could update that, it would be helpful.

I have been using Board for half a year.

In the beginning, Board 11.2 was not stable, but after the patch was released, it became stable. Now it's really stable.

The scalability is great. Our customer is a global company, so in the near future we may need to expand the solution to the branches.

I get support from Board's headquarters every week. I get the answers from them. We go through the troubleshooting together and sometimes they are able to answer quickly, in that meeting. But if they cannot give me the answer directly, they will ask colleagues, and I will get the answer in two weeks. It's acceptable.

There are a lot of reasons that our customer switched to Board. Their previous solution, in terms of functionality, was really limited. It just scanned the data from the ERP system and showed the data in a table. In Board, we can create a lot of reports and do free analysis by changing the layout of the table. We can also send a graph or table to other people or download them. Board has more functions that the customer uses, compared to what they had before.

It's really easy to set up. It's just check, check, check, connect the folder, and finish. If you have already downloaded the software from the website, it only takes about five or 10 minutes to set up Board.

Of course, we also set up the access authority of each person. Different people have different access which determines whether they are limited in checking information in the solution.

While we're not involved in the maintenance side of things, it would probably take two or three people to maintain the solution.

In our company there are 10 people who use Board. In the future, we expect our customer will have 1,000 people in Board. Users would be the leaders of each department, such as the production team, the accounting department, and the sales department.

One of the reasons we chose Board is because the performance to cost ratio is high. And we did not only use Board to replace Excel, we also replaced a Japanese BI tool called Dr. Sum.

And if you use SAP and other BI tools, you may need to do a lot of add-on development. That takes a lot of money. But with Board, we don't do a lot of add-ons to collect the data. We just use Board Connectors to get the data from the ERP system. That also saves money.

Finally, a company can improve its productivity and save time with Board.

With Board you can do a lot of data entry, and by using the Procedure environment you can make complex reports. But with Tableau you can only show the data that was collected. It doesn't have as much functionality.

With Board I have learned how to deal with the master data and how to think about workflow, dataflow. and the structure of the cube.

We use it for retail budgeting and assortment planning. Our company is mainly focusing on fashion retail. And we are also now focusing on vendor forecasting to provide predictive analyses.

We are a Board partner in India. One of our clients is Bestseller, a fashion retailer. We are doing projects for them on retail budgeting and planning. We recently completed their assortment planning project and we have had good feedback.

The integration with SAP has helped with process optimization. Before, users were using Excel for planning. First they had to go to SAP, extract the data, and plan everything in Excel. Then, for reporting, they were using another tool where they would have to select the reports and send them to senior managers. But now, SAP is integrated with Board, so they get the data in Board, they do the planning in Board, and all the reports are in Board. There is no need to send reports via email to senior managers. And once the reports are approved, everything goes through automatically. It has made things easy for them. It has cut many steps from their activities.

Using Board has reduced costs for our clients because they would have to get an SAP license for each of their users. There is only one license for the Board SAP integration. So users can just use the Board license and cut down on licenses for SAP. And because they were using an additional reporting tool, that has also been cut down. They have even been able to cut down on Office, because there is no more Excel. Everything is in Board.

The most valuable features are the reporting and the charts. The reporting functionality is handy for aggregation, when it comes to planning. That ability is fascinating and our users are very happy with it. The charts and the reporting allow our users to see all the data and to see how things are going this year or in the COVID situation. They're seeing everything. Instead of having to check data line by line, they're seeing it in a graph and they're seeing it in charts. The reports are very useful here when it comes to aggregation. They want to see things at the regional or store level, or on the complete city level.

The forecasting is happening and the reports are sent to senior levels, like the CEO and managers. It's one solution, so that users don't have to go to other software to see any of their data. All the data is in one system, making it a one-stop system and solution for end-to-end planning. There is no need for a multiple software solution. The data, reports, and planning are there in Board, so there is no need to go to SAP or any other third-party ERP system. That's because Board is integrated with all the ERP solutions. Users are able to keep on using Board, making the planning seamless, with no need to go here and there.

We're using version 10.6 and small things are improved in 10.7 and even more in Board 11. Board 11 is much better. 

There is room for improvement when it comes to how users see the data. Most clients are comfortable with MS Office and Excel. Something like 70 percent of Board, when it comes to data entry, is like Excel, where they can use Tab or formulas, etc. But if they want to freeze data—imagine the data contains 20 columns or 30 columns—they need to scroll. The freezing option is there, but it is not in the control of users. It is in the control of our technical team. We need to configure it and freeze it, but the end-user can't freeze the data view to a particular column. That option is there in Excel, where they can freeze things and scroll and see what the values are. So most users are asking for the option to be able to freeze things. 

Also, some of our users are still using an MS Office add-in for Excel for certain calculations, and when they export from Board, some of the values, some of the totals and column names, are not coming through into Excel.

In addition, when it comes to speed and memory, we recommend our users use an 8 GB RAM machine. When loading certain large quantities of data, it is taking 4 to 5 GB of memory. We're still analyzing this but we have raised a ticket to find out why it's taking up so much memory.

Finally, it should be very friendly. The UI should be more attractive.

I have been working with Board for the past year. It has been very good learning Board as a powerful BI tool. Our team has made good progress. We recently finished the Board certification, so all of our team got the Practitioner certificate. We are looking toward the consultant certificate, which we are scheduled for in the next month.

As I mentioned elsewhere, sometimes users are finding that the memory use is high.

Stability-wise, there are no issues. 

We do get some error messages in the client, messages that we have raised tickets about with their support team. They are just a warning, they are not corrupting, but they give end-users the wrong impression. We have started correcting those. Apart from that, there are no stability or performance issues.

It's scalable because anything can be built with Board when you build it from scratch.

We have a very small team. We have around 15 licenses. Around five to six people are developing complete solutions for our customers. On the customer side, we have 150 licenses in the Board production environment.

Board's technical support is very good.

Our clients started with Board. They didn't replace any solution, other than Excel.

The initial setup is very simple, whether it's the installation of Board, license management, user installation, Windows installations, or if you want a cloud installation. Even the cloud administration console and the web server installation and the MS Office add-on installation are very simple. There are no problems involved with installation of Board.

For one server it did not take more than two to three hours and it was only me involved in the setup.

For deployment I use the Board Transporter tool. We have three environments: development, QA, and production. We're following Agile methodology. We first deploy it in our IT environment, then QA, then production. Transporter makes things very simple. However, I'm not sure that the Transporter tool will work on Windows clients. For Windows clients the Transporter 10.6 version was very problematic. Then we installed a web server. When our client was installed we then logged in to the client and there was the Transporter package and we started using that.

Go with the latest version. Even my customers should have done so. If you're a new customer going with Board, go with the latest cloud version, always. The latest version is always best and it will solve most of the issues.

If our customers are happy, we are happy. If Board is making things simpler for our users, we'll be getting more licenses and we can suggest that users use more features of Board. It is making life and their work simpler. That is very good and that is the main objective for us.

We have brought the solution to be the "one" solution and are using it in all aspects of finance in terms of reporting, forecast budgeting, modeling, and score cards. We are also using it for analyticals and "what-if" scenarios/situations. 

One of the things that we asked for it to do was provide ease of use and it has accomplished that. Also, it was an easy implementation, and it has been a huge success.

The low hanging fruit on the how it is performing now that we have built it into our integrity and trust in our numbers. Where in the past, there have been issues, now we have only one version of the truth. We have been able to provide seamless governance across the whole organization. Why we have done this is for the hard savings, my team is able to scale easily with the business along with the rapid growth that we have been seeing. 

It is "one" solution. Keeping it simple: Allowing my team, my users, end users, and me only one application to plug into to get all of their financial data. This is key. 

It would be huge in the future if BOARD offered a lot more graphs and presentations, and it was a lot easier to use. 

Stability has been fantastic. We have not had any downtime. We are an on-premise user, so we are very dependent on our own systems and we have very reliable systems. 

I am interested in the future of turning over to the cloud and the challenge of what that performance will be like. Right now, it is a future endeavor that we have. In the industry that I belonged to, the healthcare industry, there are a tremendous amount of safeguards that we have to add, therefore everything is on-premise versus out in the cloud. 

We are still a small organization. From my organization, I am very excited about it. That is one of the reasons that I picked BOARD, it would scale. 

We have not used technical support, because we are dealing with a third-party vendor.

BOARD goes by the motto of "Be Simple". I have used other platforms in the past: IBM and some Oracle products. The are very complex, data-ridden. BOARD is very non-IT friendly, which I am excited about. 

I came from an IBM situation, then I moved to a company that did not have anything. I knew I did not want to go to the complexity of a system that was too big for us. BOARD was at the right size and right time for us. It is also something that we can grow into (scales). 

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was a really good partnership that we had through interviews that we were conducted by BOARD, the third-party vendor, and us. Therefore, we knew where we were all the time. It was pretty seamless. 

BOARD implementation is done with the help of a third-party vendor.

We were looking at other vendors, like Sisense, and all your typical, major competitors.

BOARD stood out because it was the company with "one" solution. I liked the way that I felt as a user and administrator of it. There were a lot of clicks, drops, drags, etc. versus writing code. 

I have been totally thrilled with BOARD. 

Just do it. I think about the way that BOARD is trying to continuously reinvent itself. Adding the community is huge. It gives us a source out of Google to find solutions. We are so used to that in our society. BOARD has actually done that. The customer service is huge, knowing that every time I make a new inquiry that I always feel like I am the number one customer, even though I know I am not. It has been huge; it has been fantastic. 

There is a tremendous learning curve with it, because you are learning a whole new language at first. Once you understand the basic concepts of what a capsule, mask, and entity are, then it becomes pretty easy. Then, like with anything else, the more you use it, the easier it gets. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The all-in-one solution was key thing for us. I did not want have the end users go day-to-day having to use multiple apps to manage one task. I did not want to do that. I wanted to have "one" solution to fit all of our financial means. 

The feature that I have found most valuable is the concept that drives Board. That concept is that Board is entirely customizable. If we have a new process, or a new reporting function that we want to achieve, we can make it happen in Board. We are able to do it ourselves, and that is without any IT background or training.

This product has saved us countless hours in developing our budget each year. What used to require a number of employees working overtime each week consistently, has been cut down to one person working 10 hours of overtime once a year.

Our Budget is also more accurate, reliable, and is updated every morning with actuals from our accounting software.

 Board has also helped us with developing an initiative tracking system.

The issues that we have with Board are small. For instance, there is no spell check for text that is written.

I have used Board for 4 years.

No. The biggest part about deployment was getting employees trained on how to use the software. 

No, The software is extremely resilient, and problems are only encountered through user error, which are often easy to fix.

Customer Service and Technical Support have been great.We haven't had issues very often, but when we have, the fixes have been quick and easy.

We did all of our budget work in Excel before using Board. We switched because our Excel files would often be corrupted from one year to the next. This is not a problem with Board. Our algorithms always stay in place and we don't have to worry about corruption.

The setup is as straightforward or complex as you make it. You dictate what you want the software to do for you, and then the software is customized to your needs.

We implemented the software through Neubrain. Their level of expertise was very high, and they knew the Board software very well.

We are a municipal government, so we don't have ROI in the traditional sense, but we were able to save a lot of money in overtime costs, and personnel due to the ease of using Board.

Budgeting. It's performing very well.

The ease of designing. The ease of making it happen on a daily basis. What I mean by that is catching up daily. You just schedule the report and off it goes.

It has a lot of valuable features. Primary is its flexibility and versatility and, obviously, functionality goes along with that. Plus, it does that at a small footprint in the file servers, and does it very efficiently.

It's outstanding, because I don't know of any issues that we've had.

It will scale to whatever you need. You just need to find somebody to build the SQL statement and you're all set.

We have used technical support but not in the last couple or three years. We've had them come in and do training. The training group is very knowledgeable, and we're very happy with them. As far as the phone call support, like I said, we haven't used them in a few years, but it was very effective, as I recall.

It gets real difficult to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets, especially when you have 10 or 15 or more people using different spreadsheets, trying to get them all together. Not only that, but are their formulas correct? Don't get me wrong, Excel is a wonderful product, but this eliminates all that. 

Once you have somebody look at it and test the product, you only have to do it once, and then, you don't have to worry about a spreadsheet coming in from someplace else that isn't right.

When selecting or working with a vendor the most important criteria are

• performance
• functionality
• price goes along with that too.

The concept of how it works was a little bit hard for me to take, because I'm an old IT-er. Once I got past that, the complexity disappeared. Configuring the functionality of a report, for instance, you can get very simple or you can get very complicated. The point is, it can be whatever you need it to be.

There is a learning curve as there is with any product, no matter what the vendor tells you. But I would not say it's anything out of the ordinary, especially if you have newer folks working on it. What I mean by that is people that are new to the industry, younger folks. Like I said, us older folks have a difficult time grabbing onto that concept. But once that happened, it was easy.

There were several. There were a couple that were in the cloud, and we didn't like the cloud aspect of them. That was four or five years ago.

My purpose is telling them what they need and writing the initial SQL and building the capsule. Once I do that, I'm done, and then they just go off. I'm not a day-to-day user.

In terms of advice to a colleague who is looking at a similar solution, I don't know what their actual needs are, but my advice would be to go forward with this product. Don't be afraid to get some initial training, because they didn't want to supply that for us initially. My advice would be to get the initial training.

I have been using BOARD for the last four years to create financial reports, create budget scenarios, perform budget cycle, run consolidations, create dashboards and visualizations. BOARD provides in-depth insight to enable users in their decision-making process. Taking data and making it easily readable/ready-to-use.

• BOARD helps by providing access to all sources and data. 
• Changes can be made easily by the users themselves. 
• The reports are easy to play around with. 
• Management can customise the filters as per their requirement.

• Easy to install
• User-friendly
• Data presentation is great
• Many features and tools to choose from
• Information is easily accessible and clear.

• More visualization could be brought in
• More customization of data in regards to specific user requirements.

Three to five years.

I use BOARD mainly for the analysis of data for planning. Our business is mainly to do with tissue donors. We do a lot trending via charts and data to see what kind of information we get and how we are doing. 

I also work with sales and different kinds of modes of sales, which helps us identify the ways we're doing direct orders, regular consignments. 

I cater to different departments like planning and the complaints department. Then I also take care of the users who use the Capsules on a daily basis. I also handle tickets for people if they have any issues with BOARD.

I translated a lot of Excel files, charts and trending for bimonthly calculations, into BOARD.

They had calculations from baseline for average, standard deviations, just like what you would do in Excel.

We have 75 or 86 buckets based on the tissue. There are something like 20 product lines. So if you do the math, we are talking about some 800 graphs and layouts which they generally print every month. So it has been very flexible. We identified a print option for the screen, so when we hit print, and I have eight layouts corresponding to eight graphs, they print like a shot.

The data doesn't have to just be there, it has to look prettier too. So I'm able to add little fancy italics. It makes the whole experience for the users better, there's something to look at. They prefer looking at it, and they start asking questions, which helps me develop further. If they want more, I can enhance it and give it to them.

I like the procedures mainly, how the data flow corresponds and how a cube is based on different dimensions, and how the entity reacts to it. We have a cube which can be broken down into different levels, and the way they want to slice it and dice it, that's the user's requirement. So we do that fairly well.

The procedures, they have a long list... There are existing gaps which I was asked to overtake and minimize and make it more efficient. Whatever procedure was created has 90 lines of writeup. If I could just export it to Excel and read it, and open different pages, see different pages of procedures at the same time, in different windows - so that I don't have to close it again, go back in - it would save a lot of time, and it would make it a little easier for everybody.

Initially we did have issues with the BOARD crashing, but at that time I was fairly new. I will say that the services were meant to start after a few hours but that's the time where it briefly pauses and if anybody, by chance, was even trying to get into BOARD, it would lock them up. But that was fine. It was not really a stability issue. Our users did make a little bit of commotion, but eventually I explained it to them, and it was fine. Now it is pretty stable.

I haven't reached my goal yet. I like to give the best. I'm sure there's more at the end. There is more to do always. Although I will say that right now the users are very happy with whatever they have, but I'm sure that technology definitely has more to offer them. I'm sure BOARD will keep on improving in functionality, which will help us also to provide a better experience to the users. So I wouldn't say I have reached any end point yet.

I've been using BOARD for around three years. And I think I'm very comfortable with it. The help desk has been very, very, good, supportive with their emails. Any question I ask they give me some steps, and it is like a jump-start for me to brainstorm the thing, rather than making a phone call. It gives me my personal time to analyze what they have written, and gets me to resolve it, and help the users on the other side. So, many people are happy with what I have done.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, what's important is a big community, support systems. I feel communication is very important, whether it's an email or something else. Within a couple of hours, if somebody responds, that is helpful, if they can provide a quick solution. It pacifies the people on the other side, because we are dealing with a lot of users at one time.

I think BOARD is a very good tool. I have worked with different BI tools like Tableau and Cognos. I think BOARD is not a very heavy software. It's a very light software compared to others; it doesn't just crash sometimes. And given the cost and effectiveness, everything which comes into play for the organization, I think BOARD fits the bill.

It is definitely good. Depending on your data, and what kind of business you are doing, I think investing in BOARD is a good, viable solution, because it's very user-friendly, and once you get the hang of it you can do wonders. I've been able to accomplish that next thing, I figured it out without notes. If I had received a tutorial I don't know what I would have done. I would encourage people to get into it. I find that Tableau is good software too, but it can be confusing. It's nice software, but I would say BOARD is much more user friendly.

Currently, we use it for our sale forecasting and our supply chain planning. We have been with BOARD for about a year now, and there is still a lot for us to learn. We want to take it to the next level, and use it for our budgeting and predictive analytic capabilities, therefore having a more integrated usage across our organization.

We have better reporting and have been able to better track performance. We now have real-time data. Ultimately, it will help us to make better decisions as an organization.

With BOARD, it is having the real-time data. That is a big buy-in for us. Also, it allows people to quickly create dashboards with reports. These are the key features that we like.

Some of the features lacking in the current solution that we are looking for have been highlighted in BOARD 11, such as being able to send our user a mobile app, sending a PDF file but the user can go back to the data source, and some of ability around being managing the back-end data better. These seem to be addressed in BOARD 11, so we are looking forward to the rollout.

We have had some challenges with newer version of the rollout. We are looking forward BOARD 11 with its more refined functions.

It has great potential. Right now, we started with just one or two departments, but as we are able to demonstrate the success of what we do, we will be able to get more buy-in from more people.

We work closely with our BOARD technical team. I am happy with the level of service that we receive from BOARD.

We have SQL reporting, but we mostly use Excel for reporting. That is why we choose BOARD to help transform our reporting.

We definitely had some success with our implementation, but there were some good learning experiences on how we could allocate our resources and how we roll it out to our organization.

In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us.

We looked at different options. We have a long list of vendors and options that we narrowed down to BOARD.

BOARD allows us to customize our front-end based on our needs versus other systems where you just have to adapt your processes to their system.

It is important to have a clear strategy in the beginning of what you want to achieve. Make sure that you allocate the resources, then work with BOARD to ensure you have a successful launch.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• It has to be a reliable platform from a technical perspective. 
• It has to have good network support, customer service, and also have a reasonable price within our budget.