Board Reviews

Our business is the management of external client property portfolios. We use BOARD to provide clients with the ability to easily manage and maintain their property holdings.

BOARD has allowed us to provide to clients a tool which allows them to see the state of their entire holdings managed by us. With this tool, clients can make decisions based on fact and current information regarding property value, rental income, lease management, etc.

As a developer, the ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic. My favourite feature of BOARD is the ability to write back to the OLAP DB, as well as the Rdb, and secure user data allowing databases to be flushed and rebuilt daily.  

It would be nice to see truly transferable processes from model to model, as well as a method of building repetitive processes. 

Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules.

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. 

We use it across our entire business. We use it for financial data, we use it for inventory data, we use it for sales data, we use it for inventory transaction data. We actually use it across all those platforms. 

It's performing very well.

The benefit is the ease of access to the data to generate reports. That results in faster decision making.

The simplicity of loading data into BOARD. I've used other solutions that take a more technical approach to getting the data in. I think the ease of being able to get the data into BOARD is what makes it nice for people with a semi-IT background. 

BOARD 11 looks like it's capturing a lot. I would compare the wishlist to things that are in Power BI.

The example today, here at the BOARDVille 2018 conference, of the implementation by the city of Fayetteville: She's actually hosting her BOARD application to the website and allowing all the citizens in her town to use it. That would be nice, to be able to host your site and actually have BOARD be the driver of your site. So you could have anybody in your organization go to www.myorg.com, for example, and then go through what you allow them to go through. So rather than having to go through the application, to be able to go to actually host it to a website.

We haven't had any real issues with the stability. We've had one issue where they had to come in and fix something that kept needing restarting while we're developing, but we've not had that issue in a while.

There are no issues with the scalability. We're a medium sized company. I have worked for larger companies and smaller companies. I think it BOARD is pretty fast as far as data loading and processing. We haven't had any scalability issues.

They're amazing, how quickly they respond and how well they partner with you.

I wasn't involved in the initial implementation. 

Our IT does the upgrades, they're pretty seamless. If there is an issue, they let me know, but we haven't had any. As far as expanding from the initial implementation, that's what I do and that's been pretty seamless.

I think the most important criterion when selecting is support. Once you create your relationship and implement, I think it's important to keep that relationship going.

I would give the solution an eight out of 10, because I think with BOARD 11 they're getting up to speed with a lot of the usability, the knowing how to use it without being taught how to use, making it more intuitive. But the reason I would say an eight and not a 10 is because - I do have a little bit of coding background - while it's nice that it's a user-interface development, could we speed it up if we could use code to actually develop faster, for people who would like that option?

My advice would be, know what you want before you purchase anything.

The primary use is called "Track Stat". It's our performance management system that we use at the city of Fayetteville. We use that to capture data throughout the city and report our progress to the Citizens' Council and managers.

It's performing very well. We're very happy with the ease and the flexibility of the solution. We've had very, very few issues in terms of launching the application, and the issues that we did have were really like access and user errors. Other than that, I can't think of another software solution that we've managed at the city that went as well as BOARD has.

For us, the city of Fayetteville has very disparate data sources on different RMS systems, so the benefit for us was to be able to reach out across departments - globally, across our organization: folks like Fire, Police, Inspections, Parks and Rec - and really build a cross-functional dataset that we're able to analyze and then produce reports for the public, online.

From our perspective, what was very valuable is the ability to customize. We didn't see a solution out there that really matched exactly what our functional requirements would be. So we were able to work with New Brain, our integrator, and we were able to build from the ground up what we wanted, and I think that's pretty unique to BOARD.

The one thing that I think we would like to see in terms of improvement of the application is the ability to print. It's fantastic to have all of these graphic visualization of data, but we're not able to very easily just print. I'm not a developer, I'm an end user, but from my perspective, if you can have a little "print" button and then you just click it and it would produce what's on the screen, or anything like that that would be easy to do, that would be very helpful.

When we built the Track Stat, we had a focus on getting that out onto the Web and having it available for everyone. But some folks just need the print copy, so that's really been a stumbling block for us, and a pretty serious one at this point. We just need the ability to print.

My impression is that it's excellent. I believe that BOARD does provide a very stable environment. Again, we haven't had any real issues.

I think it is very customizable. For us, it's not a financial and budgeting solution. It's really just based on some performance metrics. We don't have financial forecasting, but if we did we certainly know that we could build that. For us, I feel like that's pretty excellent with BOARD.

Excel. We switched because of the need to have accurate and consistent data that was secured. Once it's been approved in BOARD, it's stable, it's there. There was also the need to be able to add attributes for all of our data, who is the owner and that kind of thing, and have it different for everyone. And the need to be able to get into that solution cross-functionally at the same time. That obviously is not possible in Excel. And 5,000 Excel spreadsheets are not fun for anyone.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is the ease of implementation, that is really important. You can build all you want to, but it has to be something that's easy for an end-user to understand. I think that really helped us in our success, in that the product that we put out to our end-users across the city was pretty easy for them to understand, they didn't have to go to school or have significant training to understand it.

It was pretty straightforward. They set up a meeting schedule. We did a lot of meetings through the website. They set all of that up. It was pretty painless.

Products like Hyperion, Tableau. We went with BOARD because of the cost, the ability to customize, and New Brain being a company that was an integrator and willing to partner with us - it was more about a partnership than it was about anything else.

I would rate BOARD as an eight out of 10. The things that really could be improved would be a couple of things. 

I think the print issue is big, and then the ability to have that back support. It feels like BOARD as an organization has grown exponentially and probably isn't in the right space for support and training. Once that application is launched, to be able to say, "Okay. How are you going to support this moving forward?" Because not everybody is prepared to get in there and create Cubes. I'm not a Cube-creator, but I don't want to pay someone large sums of money to get in there and make adjustments, and that kind of thing. 

And maybe having some out-of-the-box, off-the-shelf things like, "Here's an application and this is what it does," and then you can grab onto those.

Do your homework. Talk to other customers, and really do a benefit analysis, like what are you looking for? For us, again, we weren't looking for an ERP system or anything like that. We were looking for very customized, specific solution. Anybody looking for that, they really do need to do their homework. Create a steering committee from your organization to get everybody's perspective.

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.

Our primary use for BOARD was initially to report income statements and other P&Ls to our executive team, which was our phase one of implementing BOARD. Our phase two would be uploading from external data, then analyzing the external data with the internal data.

It has been going great, but there is still a lot to learn (a lot of training) that we can get from BOARD because our company is pretty small. We do not have a team dedicated to BOARD because it is a full time job if you are deciding to develop it from the ground up. We would need to allocate more time into something like that. 

Right now, we are not using the product to its fullest potential.

I do not think it has that great of an impact on our company yet. We have not yet been able to dedicate the time and training towards it. 

For me, it is useful! We are a finance team, though not in finance, but it is working out well for our team.

The aesthetics of it are really nice. That is what attracted us to BOARD: the ease and functionality of it. Once you start using it, you can't go back to the old Excel.

I would like an eLearning platform for BOARD. I heard it was in development, and it is on the way. 

It is pretty stable. 

The product should fit our needs in several years.

The support from the BOARD team and their consultants is great. Whenever I use technical support, they are good.

Before BOARD, we were just using Excel.

We switched to BOARD because our goal is customer probability. I think its our executive manager's solution to consolidate all the data from different data points from all the different departments like marketing, operations, finance, and sales, then gather them all in one place and effectively distribute the information without developing a new solution.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

BOARD was the only company that came onsite to do a demo. Their demonstration blew us away. The dashboard looked amazing.

Before you implement. look at what you want to achieve before you start working on building a database, then starting an implementation. Make decisions on what you want to do for your company.

Looking at BOARD 11, it looks impressive. I like the new design, user interface, and everything is on the cloud.

What do you appreciate most in a vendor?

• All the different, little plugins that they have for Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. It makes it very easy to use.
• The cloud and desktop client are very easy to use. 
• At first, the product was not very intuitive, but now if you get it, it is customizable.

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.

We use it for a few different things: 

• Our budget
• Sales reporting
• Performance tracking for some of our operations' groups. 

In the last year or two, we have seen a ramp up of usage. Other than some performance issues, we have been having some pretty good success with the product. 

It has definitely saved us time, especially in our budget and planning processes. A lot of time was previously spent manually manipulating information. Now, the information is there, so they can actually look at it and utilize it for forecasting and planning. 

The drill down is good for people who have that high level view, because they can do some analysis based on it. 

I also think the visuals are good; being able to get away from Excel and automate some things. Thus, people are not spending all their time manipulating manual data, and being able to pull from several data sources. Therefore, we have come up with some nice views. 

I would like to see more flexibility in terms of the visuals. Also, some more flexibility around the design and the formatting, because a lot of times the hard sell is to people who have a certain view in mind and we can't necessarily replicate it. In BOARD, even though it is better in terms of the process, they still want to change look and feel, e.g., colors, etc. 

It is pretty stable. The only issue that we seem to have is with the performance, which with version 11, it looks like they might have addressed it.

The more that we use it in our company, the more other departments are looking to use it. I think it has the ability to keep up with this growth. 

My analysts have used the technical support. Sometimes they have felt like they did not receive the answer that they needed, or you have to go and upgrade in order to address a problem. 

It was set up right as I started with the company. 

Make sure you know what you want before you start having someone work on building and designing something. A lot of times in the past (for us), people had what they thought was an idea of what they wanted, we would do all this work, then they would look at it and say, "No, that's not what we want." Then, we would have to start from scratch again. Definitely spend the time upfront to map everything out. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Availability
• Good communication
• Good technical knowledge, but also being able to speak to non-technical people. 

Mainly with our sales forecasting, cost-center budgeting, and financial reporting. We implemented last September, and had some startup issues, but that's normal. Since we ironed those out, it's been working pretty well. 

We went live with our 2018 sales forecast. We're just starting our first revision of that annual budget. There is a little bit of work to get that going, but that seems to be working well. And we're getting in the various reporting for the different business uses. So, so far, so good.

It has sped things up - since we never have enough time to get things done. This has streamlined the process. Before, sales was doing Excel spreadsheets, and then we were putting that in a forecasting system. This, on the other hand, is all direct, and we can report right from it. Then we're loading actuals in, so it's a much more streamlined approach.

Having one version of the truth. And we're tracking each revision, so we can say, "Okay, this is what you said, and now it looks like you're coming down or you're going up. You need to explain why." It's good that everyone sees the same numbers and can see what we're seeing. It makes things a little bit easier.

We, and finance and accounting, use the client more, where everyone else is on the Web version. Going between the two makes it difficult sometimes. But nothing you can't deal with.

We've had a few little issues. We adopted the cloud version, we were something of a guinea pig for them. They've had a few issues that they were able to work out. But overall, it's a few bumps here and there, but it seems to be working well now.

Scalability is very good. We went away from our old system, partly because it had been life-cycled. But we always had issues with the size. We tend to budget at a detailed level, SKU-based, with all the customers. And we ran into limitations on what we could do. Where with BOARD, it seems, we have even expanded what we do, and we're not having any issues with response time and the like. It should be able to satisfy our needs for the coming years.

We were using Datum, I think Cognos bought them, or IBM. It reached its lifecycle, and they were reviewing, I think it was their TM1 system. We did a whole RFP, and had several vendors, from Oracle and BOARD and the TM1 system. We did a whole analysis and BOARD came out the winner.

We chose it for the usability. It was a lot easier to see the process and have the users involved. It was more collaborative, they felt it's their ownership as opposed to our trying to push that. So at least now they have the tools to make that easier for them. 

Again, it's our first go-around, so we're still working out the kinks. And there are complaints, but with anything new, that's always the case. Salespeople like to complain.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are financial stability and a company that is looking toward the future and taking advantage of the new technologies. Our old solution, they life-cycled and they weren't really supporting that system and they had moved on. BOARD continues to grow and develop, and understands the needs of dynamic organizations, and seems to adopt their product to that. So it seemed like a good fit.

I was not involved in the IT setup, but setting up what and how we wanted to report, I was involved with that. It was pretty straightforward. Just getting used to the different way the BOARD handles things, as opposed to our previous systems. Nothing that difficult; just getting used to things.

I would tell colleagues to give this a good look. The setup may be a little bit more time-consuming, and understanding how everything works together. But longer term, it will probably save in the end. I don't have to be looking for other bolt-ons, it covers everything. So I would say that's probably the best advice. You may need more than one other solution, where with this, I think it will cover all your bases.

We have two primary use cases:

1. Visualizations and dashboards.
2. Budgeting, planning, and forecasting.

Relative to other products that I have worked with, it works quite well. Obviously, there is a little bit of organization that is required. However, overall, it runs quite well.

It allows them to look at their data differently. 

In the past, they were limited to spreadsheets. Coupled with this tool, they can catch their data to understand where they are at a lot quicker, then see what is going on.

The visualizations. It has a good set of visual elements that you can use and can explain quite well.

We are in the partner channel. I would like to see better relationships with the partners. For example, I have discussed it with the support team that when it comes to supporting the product, if a request comes in from a partner, we should be able to bypass Level 1 support. They should move to Level 2. They should assume that we have already done some of the initial legwork that Level 1 might have already done. We might know the exact cause, the exact root cause of the problem, and/or we need to figure out how we can fix it.

One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes.

The stability is pretty good. We have used other systems, and it is on par with the big competitors out there.

We have not had a chance to scale it up too much. We have had some test cases where we used some existing data to scale it up, but we really have not tested the limits of what it can do. I do not think there will be an issue in the years down the road with what they already have.

BOARD technical support is knowledgeable and helpful.

The product is much easier to use, because it is geared towards more of a user-friendly force with the implementation. The user substance view is a lot quicker. They see it, and you can quickly show something that they understand if their data is available. 

The implementation is probably quicker. With other products, because of the complexity, users might not like them so much.

We implement BOARD at different clients. We need to understand what their situation is, then we can figure out how best to help them with this tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A commitment to the product as well as the willingness to help support the product.