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.

We use it for budget development and revenue forecasting, and it's performing quite well right now. 

There have been some minor hiccups, not with the BOARD platform itself, but it's just the learning, getting familiar with the product, and the end-user accepting the application. In a government organization, there has been some struggle to get people to use the tool, versus what they've used before.

I don't think it's the learning curve, because the way New Brain designed the application for us, it's fairly user friendly. I think it's more of a hesitancy to stop inputting things on Excel spreadsheets and then inputting things into the BOARD software itself. We're only about a year and a half into it, and what I'm finding is that they kept both. They've kept their Excel sheets. So they are doing double entry. They're were doing entry into Excel as well as entry into the BOARD system, because they didn't quite trust the application yet. Now that we're in year two, the second budget season with the system, they've stopped using some of those Excel spreadsheets. They're relying more on the BOARD application itself.

The way that we designed the personal service forecasting module - about 80% of our operating budget is personal-service related in government. The way that it allows us to take all the variables in, and do a lot of "what if" scenario planning on it, I think is the greatest benefit.

For me, because I do a lot of the administration of the system, it's just how easy it was to set up and how easy it is to maintain.

Being only about a year and a half into using the tool, I don't think I know enough of what's still possible. I'm excited to learn about the e-learning tool and the community that's just starting out.

If I was to look at it, from my point of view, there's a lot of report writing that we have to do in the government sector, so maybe explaining how we integrate with, for example, a publishing software, would be helpful.

It wasn't because of BOARD, it was more because we have integrated it with our ERP system, and we have made changes in our ERP system without filtering those through to our BOARD software. So it wasn't BOARD, it was really a self-inflicted kind situation.

The platform has worked wonderfully for us. There haven't been any issues that I've seen with the platform. In fact, we're looking at - maybe in the next year, or next two years - integrating more into it, really expanding what we're currently using it for, which is just budgets; to look at it and see what else we can do with it. It's very customizable.

I think there's a lot more that we could be doing. Right now it's just really budgets that we're using it for. I'm really interested in learning how we can use BEAM for our revenue forecasting, or revenue predictive analytics; how we use that in a government setting. The tools that we have now are really just Excel. 

Excellent. We've only done it through their online technical support, but we have had where we couldn't just solve it through an email, and they have been really very good about setting up time for us to make service calls with them. I love their technical support.

The budget system that we were using prior to investing in BOARD was written back in the early 90s, and it had a hard-coded date in there that it would not let us to do any forecasting beyond the year 2017. So we were forced into looking at another application. I spent about a year looking at applications. 

I chose BOARD because of the way that I was able to change it over time and integrate, not only a line-item budget, but also a strategic budget. I was able to bring in all those other pieces into it, and it wasn't just strictly an accounting stream. I am able to do more of the predictive analytics and the forecasting, and move the city into that direction instead of just the numbers.

We worked with New Brain. New Brain made it really easy for us to learn the tool. They spent a lot of time with us just talking through the business. Working in the Finance department, we had to integrate - since the Finance department is decentralized, the capital budgets were done in a different department. New Brain really helped me work with the capital folks to identify their business process. They didn't even know all of their business process. So it was really nice that New Brain was able to help with all of those conversations, and help us even streamline our business processes within capital.

With New Brain, it was all about their experience with other local municipalities, and working with governments in fund accounting. Fund accounting is quite different from private business accounting. That's what drew us to New Brain, not only the BOARD application, but also their background in working with government.

Technical support is definitely a 10 out of 10. The system solution is about a nine out of 10, and the only reason why I would give it a nine and not a 10, is that it still takes IT folks to really support it. It's not totally able to be supported within Finance. Given the amount of resources that a government has, we have a very small IT staff, and the departments are more relied upon to do their own IT. That's the only reason why I would give it a nine.

I like this solution because it's so versatile, you can really model it after your specific business practices. It's not the case that you might have to change your business practices to fit into it.

We use BOARD for financial statements. 

It is performing great. My managers love it. It is easy for them to look at their budget and review their expenses at budget time so they can know what to budget for the following year, but also to keep track of their expenses during the year and not go over their budgets. 

It has streamlined the organization.

It has benefited us by reducing time. 

Also, we are able to easily export data. When directors need financial information, we can go in the system and export the data, then send it out so they have it ready and available. If they are not in the office, we can email it to them. In addition, all the managers are now more on top of their expenses and their budget, so it is better streamlined. 

It makes it easier for me since a manager can actually look at their budget and account, then understand it. Also, where it used to take me three days at the beginning of the year to create the new financial statement, now it is a matter of minutes because all the data is in the system. 

If we could upload other data, e.g., pivot tables which can be done in BOARD already, that we have pre-existing and have that data distribute to more complex spreadsheets, I would like that going forward.

No stability issues. Everything has been good.

We did have some downtime because there are only two staff members in my division. My managers continuously use it, except we do not have the time to continuously update it.

No scalability issues.

The person that we worked with, Roberto, understood what we needed and helped us when we had questions. We felt at ease and that we could always go back to him, email or call him. He was always ready and available to help us out.

We have not used technical support.

We were just using spreadsheet.

The initial setup was very complex for us. 

I am looking forward to the upgrade for BOARD 11. We have to learn all the back-end of the setup. We do not have the company that comes in with everything already preset. We have to learn it and set it up ourselves. If we dedicate the time to it, we will get it.

We did look at a competitor.

If you want to streamline your business and reduce hourly time using the creation of spreadsheets or other financial reports that they should go for BOARD because it drastically reduces time. It will also make your financials ready and available for any type of financial planning or reporting. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We needed somebody who would understand what we wanted and the output that we needed. 

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.

Our primary use case is corporate reporting. We are implementing it in phases. We did finance, then we did what we call our direct consumer group. Now, we are working on our production case goods (inventory).

For the most part, it is performing okay. I am having some performance problems with the data. We are going back to all the transactions by day. Therefore, we might need to have a little help from our consultants with this at some point. We have not yet spoken with technical support about this issue as it is a brand new problem.

Our data is now more structured. Between our data warehouse and BOARD, which are both brand new, we now have a more structured data view with more accurate, timely data.

We can also build reports super fast.

You can build reports pretty quickly. 

We do not use BOARD as our main data store. We have a data warehouse that BOARD consumes data from. Therefore, our data's fairly organized before it comes into BOARD. All of the dimensions and fact tables are all lined up already in the data warehouse. Thus, it is an easy task to get the data into BOARD.

If we build a ton of procedural stuff, it is not good at alerting us to what may have failed, like logging and job steps. It is our understanding from the jobs we continue to run, even though one step might have failed, that functionality is not what we would like to see. 

We would like to see it stop and report that there was an issue, and that we need to resolve it from that point moving forward. In general, we would like to see better logging in the procedural world as we currently find it deficient in procedural areas. 

I have not seen any stability issues.

We have not tried to scale it much as we do not have that many users. At the moment, we have around 10 maximum. However, this could change.

It is hard because we are not speaking on the phone. We are going back and forth with emails, and I think it is getting lost in transition on a couple of the issues that I have had because it is an email chain versus a phone call or a chat. Emails are hard for technical stuff. 

However, I have not used the technical support that much, because we are still engaged with the consultants, not yet switching completely to the technical support. We have weekly calls with the consultants. They are a type of technical support.

It was before my time at the company.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We evaluated Tableau, Power BI, and BOARD, then chose BOARD. 

Try to use all the out-of-the-box functionality. Try to use BOARD for what it is good at doing and do not tread outside its capabilities, because then you start running into issues, such as writing procedures. When possible, do not write procedures. Procedures are necessary, but we are backing away from writing them. We are trying to use BOARD out-of-the-box.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The consultants have always been helpful. They make sure that we are successful. I appreciate that.

The primary use case is developing a demand planning/collaboration platform. It's performing well.

The collaboration part. That is the tool that our client is really using.

I would like to see a better Web client, where the controls work the same way as in the Windows client. I do think that the focus is now on the Web, so it should be improved upon.

I think the stability can be improved upon, but overall it is stable.

We've seen downtime from our side, that we did not design it the way that it was going to be used. But I also see that we have had to take away features because it was not supported in the way that we wanted it. We're using it in the client versus Web; in the client it works and in the Web it doesn't. So we had to pull certain controls off the screen.

I think it's very scalable. We hardly see the impact on the tool, the CPU, the memory, when the users are connecting through it, through the Web. The Windows client is a different story. It's not scalable at all, so we decided to go with the Web.

There is room for improvement. In the beginning there was a struggle reaching the right person, especially in the same time zone. That has been resolved. I think it's getting better over the months, but it can still be improved upon.

The company that I work for is based in Italy, so all the support was coming through Italy. Now, the support now is U.S.-based, which is better for us.

When selecting a vendor, in general, the most important factors are their

• being responsive
• being truthful.

If I have an issue, I don't care if they say, "We cannot fix it," or, "We'll fix it in a later version." Communicate that.

My advice would be, you should seriously consider this solution.

We started using BOARD as part of a solution. We're developing using BOARD to go into implementation for our customers.

In terms of performance, it's still pretty new to us. It's good. We know BOARD is very powerful, but there is a big learning curve that we still have to get through.

There are definitely a lot of benefits we're still discovering. We have our own software but our reporting functionality and different workflows are not as flexible and mature as what BOARD can do. That's why we have it.

It's very powerful. BOARD is a good platform. Without actually programming, you can develop a workflow and solutions for a lot of things.

Again, it's very powerful, but there is also a big learning curve. It should be a little more intuitive.

In development we have issues for which we have had to open tickets. It's part of the learning process. We don't know where exactly it's going wrong. It's not quite intuitive sometimes.

We're starting with two projects; we expect many more new projects that we're going to partner on with BOARD.

We were doing more home-grown development. Our collaboration piece, again, is not as powerful, as flexible, nor can it expand in the future, as much as BOARD can.

BOARD is a very good solution to compared to other reporting/BI tools out there. Also, because we are based in Boston and BOARD's headquarters is in Boston, I think helped make it an easy choice. And within our company, on the European side - it's an Italian company - they already have a relationship with BOARD.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are the 

• software features
• support
• education they provide to help the internal resources get up to speed.

Personally, I think the setup and the concept is intuitive, but once when you get into detail, try to get to a solution, that's where the challenge is.

I would tell a colleague the same thing we're experiencing. BOARD is very powerful, flexible, but it takes an initial learning curve.

Our primary use case is for forecasting and budgeting. We budget capital expenditures, the full P&L financial statement. We have our top-level VPs enter their driver rules and then Finance goes on the back-end and calculates the gross margin impact of that. We capture operational expenses down to the vendor level. We also do all of management reporting.

The performance has been great so far.

The benefits are 

• getting the data in one spot
• the ability to report dynamically
• version control.

I think it's flexible. I chose this solution because, even though it wasn't out-of-the-box, you can customize it, and the long-term growth potential of the software is where I see the value.

More export to Excel functionality. Right now, we're having to build within the cloud-based platform, as well as build within the Excel add-in, because the export to Excel is somewhat ugly. So we're doing both simultaneously.

So far so good.

I think it's very scalable. Again, that's why we chose it, because I think there are endless possibilities to do more. Right now, we're just using it for FP&A-type functions. But the BI functionality, which is the core business, I think is tremendous.

We were just using Excel, there were version control issues, mistakes on copy/paste. We needed a dynamic solution that would be accurate.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• customer service and level of support
• the ability for a non-IT person to maintain the system 
• long-term growth in functionality - I don't want something that's going to be out-dated three years from now.

The setup was so-so (somewhere between straightforward and complex). I think if you are IT-savvy, I think you can get it good enough. It's definitely meant for an end-user to be able to be a power user in the system.

The final decision came down between Borg and Tagetik. We chose it because BOARD was a sandbox, instead of out-of-the-box. Tagetik is great, it's ready to go, but three years from now, that's all it is, that's all it's ever going to be, just financial reporting. I was looking for something that can change over time.

I think that from talking with other customers here at the BOARDVille 2018 user conference, your consultant, if you're using a BOARD consultant, I think that that person is very important. Also, just allow ample time, because it is a sandbox, the startup time is going to be more considerable than out-of-the-box solutions.

We implement the solution. We have about 50 customers, mainly around budgeting, planning, or supply-chain orientated.

In terms of its performance, our customers are very happy.

Better integrating of operational and financial processes. Driving everything to reduce working capital and inventory. Big things, as opposed to just deficiencies.

The ability to do Write-back and visualization, with minimal IT development orientation.

I'd like to see a more passive report user for enterprise report writers who aren't particularly technical, so you could really get it out there to literally every employee, or every customer.

It's good. I feel it's stable in our client base, and I'm quite confident that the new version will increase the scalability.

I think it is scalable. We have small customers, we have large customers. And it seems to go with the growth of the process and the data. We haven't really tested it for large volumes of big data yet. That's what we're exploiting with the new version when it comes.

The initial set up is really rapid, quite quick. It's simple, it's IT-driven, typically.

It's got that combination of everything. I'm a business person predominantly, so I don't like having technical solutions. And it's something even I - and I'm not a consultant - can  deploy. I like that about it.

I'd still recommend that you need an experienced practitioner to take you through a well-designed solution. It's not about the technology, I think it's about the experience that people bring to designing a solution: building the data architecture, integration; leveraging their smarts. At least the first time, work with a partner.

We are a supply chain software provider. We have been using BOARD to create a collaborative platform for users to modify and make edits. This is the primary use case, along with our clients. Also, the flexibility has been great and the performance has been optimal. 

Our organization doesn't use a dynamic feed, but our clients have improved a lot in terms of coordination and communication. This has improved their internal performance. 

The reporting part has been very valuable as the capabilities of the tool do not have to change graphs, change how grids are displayed, and can create reports on the fly. These are things that our customers tend to like. 

It is snappy, and it is quick. 

• We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD. 
• We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. 

The stability has been fine. We have an additional challenge because we have to integrate it not only with where we are pulling the data, but with our own technology, as if we are implementing three systems. This has been challenging, but we are slowly improving on it. Hopefully, future implementations will be quick. This downtime is mainly due to our learning curve.

It is highly scalable.

BOARD has been very supportive, though we still have to find a way to extract as much knowledge from them as possible.

I personally do not develop in BOARD. We have been investing in our own resources, therefore we have a couple of people who can develop in BOARD (to provide support).

We have an internal solution. However, we think it is sub-optimal. This is why we work with the BOARD. We have other partners with some similar cookies, but not exactly.

We switched to BOARD because we felt the need to have flexibility, and BOARD had the performance that others did not. 

Implementation is rather complex.

BOARD has a lot of flexibility, but it is sort of a development tool. It is not an out-of-the-box kit where you can just feed it in. It needs to be constructed, and it needs an expert to learn it.

We have been very happy with what we have seen. We are pretty new to this. We have done three implementations so far. BOARD has been performing well and is very efficient, though we have to improve the implementation time on our end.

I would personally advise looking into BOARD (depending on your needs).

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

1. Product
2. Relationship with our clients/partners.

If we do not have a sustainable working relationship, then we can't move forward, even if the product is outstanding.

Our primary use case for BOARD is sales analysis, as well as financial planning, analysis, and budgeting. We are also highly leveraging the CPM portion, as well as the BI tools that BOARD provides.

So far, it is performing extremely well. We are very happy with the new updates and new releases. We have had very good support.

The benefits of the solution are a lot of flexibility from a data modeling standpoint. The product can add specific line items into our budget, for example, or if we want to make changes to the data model, we have that flexibility. Therefore, flexibility and scalability are some of the strongest qualities that BOARD has.

The most valuable feature of BOARD is that it is comprised of a full bundle package solution, while being a BI and CPM tool. Meanwhile, some of its competitors are either/or, but not both.

One thing that I personally would like to see is additional visualization tools for visuals. A lot of its competitors are releasing different iterations of their BI visual tools. 

Stability has been perfect. We have never had any issues from downtime.

We are not nervous about our future with BOARD. We are very confident.

We were using a different solution and needed to increase automation, and we needed to stray away from Excel spreadsheets and the combination of different tools and mechanisms.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are 

• Partnership
• Cost
• Scalability
• Implementation.

I am actively involved in the setup. We have set up our sales portion. We are about two weeks out from having a full release for our financials.

It is a complex tool and very sophisticated. We get a lot of use out of it. Thus, we expect complexity with flexibility.

We used consultants to support us with the implementation and to initially set things up properly. They were absolutely supportive and knowledgeable.

We looked at the big players: Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Vena Solutions, and QlikView. We did not feel any of these solutions were perfect.

I would say the best is yet to come. Based on all the new, upcoming releases, features, and eLearning. If you are looking to make a decision, you should defer from making a decision right now, because the best is yet to come.

We use BOARD to show scorecards for each business unit. As part of the finance team, we can control the numbers showing on each dashboard and update selected business unit KPIs as our strategies change from year-to-year.

We also use it for tracking services hours as a consultancy.

We also implement the product for clients, primarily solutions for finance, around financial reporting, making it easier to close the books every period, annual reporting, also board and narrative reporting.

It's performing very well.

All staff can now see their relevant scorecards online. This helps them see exactly how we are trending towards our goals, from which their bonus compensation is calculated.

The solution gives us consistency and reliability of data. As users of the tool, it's very easy to input our time, it's very clear who's working on what, when. It lines up our billing and invoices. So, it's very clear who needs to get billed 

Also, for implementers, it's a very visual tool. So rather than having it on a whiteboard, during design conversations, which are very abstract, we can be mocking things up using the tool and the clients can see it built before their eyes.

It is easy to make quick updates. As the business changes, we can maintain the tool without programming help from IT.

Simplicity. The big thing for us is, when we do an implementation, we want them to own it when it's done, so they don't have to come back to us to make small changes going forward. It's a tool that really can be owned by the office of Finance, whereas with other tools you always need to go back to IT or the consultancy and ask for help.

It would be nice to have more connectors for other data sources. BOARD is a great tool to become the single source of the truth. Making it easier to connect data sources for niche software tools will make it easier to keep everything in one place.

I would like to see all features and functionality available over the Web. 

I would also like to see tight integration with the learning management initiatives that they have, with respect to the e-learning portal, the community, so that when folks are using the tool they can feel the various support and pieces they have at their disposal. That's lacking right now.

No issues. The only issues we ran into were related to communication mistakes that we made. As long as we follow our change control process, the system is rock solid.

No issues. The tool seems to have a lot of ways to handle scaling.

It's certainly an enterprise product. It's got a lot of clustering capability and options, depending on the environment. It's a very scalable solution.

Like any solution, it needs to be monitored for sizing over the lifetime of the solution. You can imagine it will become used by more and more departments, by more and more users, for more and more purposes. So, managing it and being proactive to understand user growth, data growth, sizing of the environment, accordingly is an important task.

With the combination of 24/7 global support and their community, there was great customer service, tech support, and community support.

I filled out a form, I got an email back within a few hours. More complex things were solved by a phone call.

Previously, we used Clarity. We switched because Clarity was at the end of its life, and there was no active development to improve the tool. The feedback that we were getting from some of our clients is, they weren't impressed by what's on the market. It was just kind of lackluster. 

Before we were a partner with BOARD, we did a market review - a technical and business review - of all the products that were on the market at the time, two years ago. BOARD was the one we choose for both technical and business-model reasons. We've been very happy with the ease of use and scalability.

Important criteria when selecting a vendor would be: who is using their solution right now, how successful have they been, how large are the installations, and what is the roadmap down the road for improvements for the solution.

The setup was a bit complex, but BOARD helps with all that.

It is also important to start with small phases. Do not try to do everything at once.

We worked with a vendor team. Their help was a key to our success.

Instead of taking two people a week each month to perform our internal KPI reporting, the same two people can have it done in a day.

Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support. This is important. 

We evaluated these tools:

• IBM Planning Analytics
• Oracle Essbase
• Adaptive Planning
• Budget Maestro

We chose BOARD because of the ease of use. For us that reduces our risk as implementers. We can focus on the business requirements and then translating that to the technical side is easier.

It is refreshing to use a tool that makes things easier, and works as expected.

Reach out to a sales person and watch a demo, because only when you see someone working with it will you appreciate the simplicity.

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.

It's a flexibility, fast, and easy to use solution.

It has helped us manage our workflow.

It needs improvement in the areas of sales, credit, and supply chain.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

• Drill down
• Split & Splat

• Budget & forecast process

• Supply chain

I have used it for six years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is 10/10.

Technical support is 10/10.

We previously used Excel and OLAP cubes. We switched because BOARD is easier to use.

Initial setup was complex because my company has its own fiscal calendar that was difficult to set up.

A vendor team implemented it. I rate it 8/10.

The ROI is great.

• Great cost\benefit ratio

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated IBM Cognos and QliqView.

I hope to improve BOARD in all business areas.

• Integrated environment, guaranteeing us the ease of use and flexibility needed to create applications or procedures on our owns.
• Ability to perform multidimensional analyses.
• Integration and normalization data from different sources.

Each user is able to obtain all the information needed in autonomy.

8 years

We needed technical support and customer service few times, and had good results.

We used several excel files, linked each other. Instability and errors happened every day.

Initial setup is easy to do and to understand, there is no need to have great IT knowledge.

We implemented the BI tool through a vendor team 8 years ago, and their level of expertise was high.

We are currently implementing Board Financial Consolidation package with Board consultants with optimum results in terms of time and comprehension of the product.

Pricing and licensing are not standard, but it can be tailored according to company needs.

Board was suggested by our ERP consultants and we are convinced after the demo.

• Software is easy to install and backup is simple.
• Support from BOARD is fantastic; always returning with solutions for both server and application questions.
• There is permission control where data access can be set to different groups of users.
• Accounting periods can be locked after each import which prevents accidental overwriting of past data.

We lack a good presentation of consolidated data to customers and senior management and BOARD's slick graphics solved that. It allows various graphical presentation using the same set of data and the drill-down of details can be done from the reports directly.

Data import error messages can be improved to provide more information on why a record failed to get imported.

Ease of use and completeness of the offering.

This platform has help our organization streamline our budget process and give us insight into our customers, products & services.

Product is excellent, no areas of improvement that are not currently in the product or on its roadmap.

3 Years

Very high level of customer service.

Excellent

Yes - Paris software POLAP and Business Objects from SAP.

Easy installation and minimal SQL skills to get it up and running quickly.

In-house