Board Reviews

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.

We use this solution in several ways, including:

• We develop data modeling for customers.
• Internally, we use it to monitor and control company performance.
• We create demonstrations for potential new customers.
• We create dashboards that permit us to find and understand inefficiencies, which can then be improved.

Board helps us to better explain KPI performance, thanks to the creation of dashboards. These permit us to show the right information to discover trends and allows us to take action in advance.

It is useful for self-analysis regarding company data and helps to find areas where we can improve.

The most valuable feature is the ability to create processes inside it. We can have Business Intelligence integrated with a CPM that permits us to develop structured projects. Also, the capability to manipulate data allows us to create different processes, easier and faster.

The product can be improved by making it possible to know where cubes are used. Also, the auto definition of a better cube structure can facilitate the process of structuring the database. This would avoid some types of errors.

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.