We performed a comparison between Planview Portfolios and SAP PowerDesigner based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Enterprise Architecture Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features are scheduling, resource management, and, from a project perspective, the functions like issues that change orders. They are valuable because, from a project management perspective, we use the workflows that we build for project management and do active risk management and issue management for the projects that we want for our agencies."
"The integration stuff from tool to tool, like Projectplace to Planview, to manage projects is the most valuable feature. It keeps all our tasks up-to-date. It closely follows up with everything, which is really cool."
"I would say it works really well for forecasting remaining effort, especially in terms of forecasting the dollar amounts. We've gotten pretty good at adjusting rates because we have a lot of contract workers."
"We provided whatever feedback we had to the Planview team, and they went in and built those additional features that we requested. For example, they created a great way for our users to search for a specific resource, project, program, or role. We were not using some of the features, and we wanted them to not be visible, and they helped us with that. They also brought a feature to provide visibility into when a resource was never assigned to any task. There was no visibility to this before. This feature was really very good for visibility into the resource portfolio."
"The most valuable features are the resource management, the time sheet entry and usage, and the financial planning. With our projects, we primarily focus on resource assignments, as far as determining the actual forecast and actuals of our projects. A lot of it is based off of the resources utilized on those projects. The time based helps us capture the actuals. The amount of time people are spending on working on their project tasks. Because they've built this into the schedule, so we can build the forecast. With financial planning, we're able to look back on what our variance is and if there is anything between the scheduled forecasted hours, dollars against the actual hours, and the costs that they utilize."
"The sheer amount of information available in one single interface is valuable. Everything is there. It is also a lot of work to maintain all the information, but generally, you can find everything you need within this one tool."
"We are able to see where everyone in the team is in terms of hours, where there is capacity, and where we can actually add them, e.g., other projects that they're not currently staffed to."
"We use expenditures quite a bit. We put in forecast expenditures and then we actualize them below the line in the little box in the bottom tray. Being able to track the project with relevant milestones is also valuable. Milestones are valuable because it helps us to keep the project on track. The expenditures are valuable because we need to be able to understand expenses that are beyond the regular resources in the projects."
"The feature I found valuable in SAP PowerDesigner is extraction. I also like that my company hasn't faced any issues because of the clear documentation about SAP PowerDesigner."
"SAP PowerDesigner is fairly stable."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"The most valuable features of SAP PowerDesigner are the creation the flow charts and folders. It is a powerful tool."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a very fast reverse engineering process. It does a very expansive comparison."
"This solution has good tools for big data, where you can manage large and complex databases."
"I like the property sheet capability and the user-defined attributes that you can set up."
"The solution is a very pragmatic tool. It's quite easy to use."
"Sometimes within the application, when you pull a report, it takes awhile performance-wise for the reports to pull up."
"Its support to legacy paying customers is something PlanView is not handling well. We were unable to implement due to lack of professional support by PlanView. "
"The only area that I can see currently needing improvement is just the modernization of the look and feel of it."
"The lack of templates harden the initial learning curve."
"I would suggest for the request module that they open up the fields and columns so it's like we are doing our work in the work module. You can't do that with today. We also have to make sure that the fields can go both ways with the request and work modules. Including fields in the column sets would be helpful, because today they only use attributes."
"One big issue we have been having during our annual planning is that only the creator of a portfolio can edit it. This means that only the creator of a portfolio can edit which projects are included or excluded in it."
"The scheduling's kind of clunky in terms of its ability for us to see what stage work is at. They could have done better with that. It can be difficult to use."
"The administrative tabs are very confusing, especially in terms of configuring screens and users. It's not very intuitive versus many other applications that I have worked in the past. I have to go to separate sections than I think I have to in order to get to the place that I need to adjust something."
"There are many areas of this solution that needs to be changed."
"You have the possibility to complete a connection for abbreviations if you are creating columns or names of the tables. In the Citrix environment, this has been lagging to the point where the PowerDesigner was not usable."
"In terms of improvement, the pricing is a bit high."
"The solution itself does not need to be improved. However, they could add support for different languages."
"There are some minor things that could be easier. We're writing up procedures to bring all the modeling back into one group as this reduces delays in production."
"Checking-in models to the repository, especially when working remotely, is a slow process than can sometimes have problems with models being corrupted."
"In the future, I would like to see data manipulation capability where you can actually write SQL queries and manipulate data from directly within the tool."
"SAP PowerDesigner could improve by making the repository easier to understand. It is difficult to understand how the repository works because when I used logical models as part of the team, we wanted to use them together and update the older versions of the data model version but it was confusing. The repository needs to be explained."
Planview Portfolios is ranked 11th in Enterprise Architecture Management with 63 reviews while SAP PowerDesigner is ranked 4th in Enterprise Architecture Management with 32 reviews. Planview Portfolios is rated 8.0, while SAP PowerDesigner is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Planview Portfolios writes "Helps prioritize projects, share the big picture with management, and has a great planning capacity". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP PowerDesigner writes "Difficult to operate, long process to publish, but scalable". Planview Portfolios is most compared with Broadcom Clarity , Planview PPM Pro, LeanIX, Planview ProjectPlace and SAP Portfolio and Project Management, whereas SAP PowerDesigner is most compared with erwin Data Modeler by Quest, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Visio, IDERA ER/Studio and LeanIX. See our Planview Portfolios vs. SAP PowerDesigner report.
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