Planisware Reviews

Resource forecasting and demand planning. Users can do both short-term and long-term planning. Generic resources and named resources can be structured according to corporate need. 

Currently, Planisware Enterprise 7.1 has about two dozen modules internally architected and available for local configuration. The pre-connected module architecture greatly reduces technical challenges that would otherwise involve substantial custom programming and validation. Connections with MS Teams, contracts, managing products, document management and stage & gate are some of the modules that can extend capabilities. 

Configuration (done by your technical super-user/administrator) can activate or hide any module from regular users. Content for modules depends upon functional administrators in your organization. A functional administrator is a gatekeeper/business analyst that is adept with Planisware and knows your local needs. Don't expect Planisware to provide local proprietary content.

Using an integrated Organizational Breakdown Structure (OBS; sometimes called Responsibility) distinct from the Resource Breakdown Structure gives substantial reporting flexibility out of the box. 

Making use of a consistent, organization-specific activity type categorization (WBS type) facilitates creation of project templates. Note that Planisware provides relatively limited documentation (beyond rudimentary conceptualization) for producing activity types across multiple templates. My white papers, freely available online, provide substantially more pragmatic instruction for using and producing Planisware activity types (AT). 

A distinct advantage of Planisware Enterprise is that any given customer installation can respond to local priorities, such as scheduling or time reporting, then phase in other priorities in your application roadmap over time. Functionality is enhanced and made easier to use with a cohesive set of modules. 

Planisware Enterprise offers very practical dashboards and bubble charts that visualize integrated advanced analytics. KPIs include: resource load and risk levels; net present value; return on investment. Project data cleanly consolidates to portfolio views.

Planisware Enterprise offers very practical dashboards and bubble charts that visualize integrated advanced analytics. KPIs include resource load and risk levels; net present value; return on investment. Project data cleanly consolidates to portfolio views. Recently, One-pager (swimlane reporting) can integrate directly with Planisware Enterprise. Generating monthly reports for projects takes far less tedium and time.

Data exchange and integration with Office 365 and Google Suite applications continues to mature. Project managers can work productively from within Planisware Enterprise. Native access to MS Office Online applications from within E7 include interactive editing and data integration from corporate email, documents, and worksheets. Planisware project data, graphs, and consolidations can flow into PowerPoint slide presentations.

Software as a Service (SaaS) speeds up deployment and simplifies maintenance. Planisware earned ISO 27001 certification in late 2019Q1 for superior data security. Hosting E7 on local Linux servers remains an alternative 

Standardized colors and clearer icons have made the overall interface more modern, inviting, and usable than earlier releases. Documentation and tutoring videos, accessible to users online from within Planisware, has become abundant and professionally edited to a high standard. 

Creating and using formulas in Planisware Enterprise is now streamlined, with integrated formula validation. In my judgment, having more extensive "offline" documentation would benefit new users.

Historically with Planisware, the load array, a feature that has been available since the 1990s with improvements, enables very flexible time slicing that surpasses such reporting capability via Excel. In concert with native and composite cost curves, the load array charts provides thoughtful, adaptable consolidation and drill-down for time-phased data such as capacity (resource availability) and demand (planned or archived hours on tasks).

 Planisware Explorer (PEX) offers enhanced capabilities for reporting and charting that goes beyond the functions in the Report Builder module, such as dynamic queries. PEX requires extra training for operational proficiency, typically from multiple fee-based Planisware courses.

Administration module enables super-user to control visibility of modules for regular Planisware users. The Data page shows available Object types.

E7 improves documents management to centralize communications among project users and stakeholders. Because the documents are included in each Planisware environment/configuration, messaging and documents associated with projects are easier to access than being spread through normal corporate email. Planisware stores project related documents and messages in a single database. Snapshots (backups) at a given point in time are easy to make and restore to alternate environments, even on an automated nightly basis.

Program and project roadmaps integrate well with PowerPoint. Slide elements are editable and dynamically linked (if so specified) to detail projects. Capability to drill down into project specifics is mature, native functionality.

Strategic Portfolio module offers an OKR page (objectives and key results) to connect specific company strategy with defined measurable actions.

Historically, some releases--even with extensive delays from initial announcement--had minor, yet troubling glitches. Planisware Enterprise has been addressing this shortcoming with more frequent releases that include helpful improvements. 7.0.0 release was January 2021; 7.0.1 March 2021; 7.0.2 July 2021; 7.0.3 December 2021; 7.0.4 March 2022. 7.1 became available in September 2023. Documentation has become much more thorough and clearly illustrated. Release notes for 7.0.4 has 133 pages. In my experience, small irritations I reported in E7 have been fixed in several days.

SaaS provisions that Planisware provides in relation to security are superior to what smaller organizations can afford. Planisware SaaS no longer relies upon third-party providers. Faster data response time is a user benefit.

Availability of Planisware software as a service (SaaS) contributes to operational stability; your team still needs to keep the configuration responsive to evolving business needs. Each customer has responsibility for continuing to grow "know why" as well as "know how."

Investing in local capabilities on your customer side is vital--both for technical configuration and functional administrators. Over-dependence on the vendor can be needlessly expensive.

Discussions with fellow Planisware customers conclude that commitment to achieving and sustaining product proficiency across versions is a key best practice. At-cost Planisware certification courses can provide training for a corporate customer's advanced users (those responsible for maintaining L1 level changes).

One function I have requested for P6 and continuing through E7 is a comprehensive, detailed listing of attributes across modules--somewhat similar to attribute display in OPX2 versions (pre-P5). Some few attributes (e.g., Z-order) are difficult to document completely. Pull-down list of hundreds of attributes is insufficient.

Two years+ in E7; eight years in P5 and V6; over ten years in earlier OPX2 versions since 1998

Stability, particularly with Linux hosting of Intranet Server, is consistently good. Most cases of stability problems traced back to incorrect data, such as schedule dates that are impossible in the real world. Identifying and fixing bad data resolved stability issues about 80% of the time. In one or two cases since 2002, a Planisware update (patch), in one incident received within twenty-four hours after reporting, remedied incorrect data handling.

Planisware scales effortlessly when hosted on decent Linux Server(s) with ample RAM and sufficient CPUs. 

In a SaaS environment, what Planiware determines is adequate performance by sevice level agreement may not align with your company's users over time. Planisware can upgrade servers your organization uses after appropriate negotiation. 

Customer Service:

Very good overall. Planisware tries to be customer-centric. Their approach has been primarily reactive to customer questions and concerns, not proactive and comprehensively enabling. Customers typically receive better answers and solutions when they are politely aggressive with Planisware.

Technical Support:

Between good to excellent, depending upon the proficiency of the individual Planisware consultant who responds. In my experience, some answers via SupportUS have been incorrect. The majority of responses are helpful and valid.

Positive

My first experience in 1998 was spearheading selection and adoption of a commercial, off-the-shelf project management package to replace a "home-grown" project management program that was not Y2K compliant. Flexibility and configurability of Planisware were compelling business advantages compared to the competition.

Scope of implementation, both for initial setup and major updates, calls for multi-talented team effort.

It is customary to have at least three distinct Planisware environments per customer: develop; test; production. I recommend planning for a playground environment (similar to develop) to allow pretesting of new releases without disturbing the integrity of the current develop environment). Having a distinct train environment allows new users to gain operational proficiency without compromising production. One operational question that repeatedly occurs is, "what has changed overnight?" An automated nightly backup environment can be of great help in answering these questions quickly. If your organization uses a monthly or quarterly point of reference for project data, one or more environments for keeping this copy accessible  records can help greatly.

Establish a priority of gaining technical proficiency with Planisware's tools so that your company can handle internally the vast majority of ongoing operational improvements.

I recommend nightly proactive analysis of Planisware Intranet Server log files to pinpoint issues before they become troublesome to the user community. Typical problem resolution investigation tends to fixate reactively on user-reported glitches and may miss emerging trends. Proactive global analysis of log files can reveal quantitative correlation over time of application stability and health. Creating timely Planisware versions is also beneficial.

Strategic planning and project execution, effectively orchestrated through Planisware Enterprise, achieve value delivered. In other words, “make vision reality.”

Expansive business transformation is a corporate use case when at least one company executive sponsors company-wide commitment and vigorous participation.

A Sampling of Noteworthy Planisware Tools 

Data Quality Audit is now integrated into the Projects Module. Defense Contract Management agency introduced DQA in 2005. This 14-point schedule-check criteria has become an industry-standard for best practice that Planisware Enterprise adapted “out of the box.” 

Conceptual overview of these metrics in Planisware: 1. Logic—missing links; 2. Leads—distort total float; 3. Lags—affect critical path; 4. Relationship types—most are finish-to-start; 5. Hard constraints; 6. High total float; 7. negative float; 8. high-duration tasks; 9. Future tasks have actuals;  10. Incomplete tasks—no resources nor money allocated; 11. Missed tasks—failed baseline dates;  12. Critical path test (continuous from pf to pf); 13. Critical path index 14. Baseline execution index—tasks accomplished against planned completion tasks

With DQA panel appearing to the side of the schedule view, Project managers and others (e.g., PMO) can rapidly spot potential glitches and delays and apply corrective measures.  Problem targets appear in red for easy identification. Administrative users can adjust threshold, add additional rules, and enable them to appear in reporting.

Planisware Enterprise removes manual tedium for Project Managers who may be calculating these metrics on a case-by-case basis. Applying these DQA metrics as a set across all projects greatly simplifies and shortens time for periodic review.

AI Help applies Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to help center content of PDF E-Learning documents residing in your designated Planisware environment. Familiar counterparts are the text paragraphs that Google Search adds in front of answers to your queries. 

AI Help provides step-by-step answers and identifies up to five pertinent documents. 

A super-user with administrative rights can provide environment-specific setup for AI Help, likely with guidance from training specialist familiar with local needs. Large Language Model connector has to be created during setup for this tool.

Approval Workflow uses pre-defined “definition” to enact approve/deny/review/cancel rules at a single level of action for designated decision-maker roles. Although conceptually easy to understand and apply in daily use, this tool requires local functional administration proficiency to configure for a given enterprise’s user population.

Underlying technical framework already has relationship links to simplify configuration setup.

Planisware Sign provides eSignature for designated signers within Planisware Enterprise. Setup can also handle external users with third-party DocuSign or Adobe Sign.

Lesson Learned module identifies and encapsulates knowledge gained by experience—operationally significant, technically valid, and applicable for either reinforcing a condition that is positive or reducing shortcoming. An administrator can specify where lessons learned creation can occur, e.g., projects, activities, requirements, portfolio. Users who may access shared Lessons Learned module are also administrator-defined.

Scenario Optimization enables rapid elimination of overload bottlenecks with particle swarm optimization (PSO).

Selected user incentives, especially for project managers

Refinements in everyday PM functions such as Gantt chart have also matured with ease of use. Project manager can quickly spot and resolve  scheduling challenges. Identifying predecessors or successors is simplified to one or two mouse clicks. Accounting calendars can span longer than twelve months to accommodate less common fiscal years. Resource forecasting and demand planning can deploy with multiple calendars that respect work days in other countries. Date and time of day formats can simultaneously correspond to many country conventions.

In large projects, workpackage management enables project managers to bundle a set of activities with a given objective and delegate control to a workpackage manager.

One-pager (swimlane reporting) can integrate directly with Planisware Enterprise with purpose-built connectors provided. Project managers can pre-select an array of activities that appear and reduce preparation time to minutes rather than multiple hours. Preparing monthly reports for collective review becomes fast, semi-automated, and easily repeated in following months.

Agile reporting is now available in the portfolio module. Epics define and flexibly detail high-level work (e.g., initiative) that is too large for a user story to finish in a single sprint.

Progressively staging Planisware Enterprise rollout 

Distinct advantage that Planisware Enterprise has is that any particular customer installation can initially provide basic modules and tools, such as project scheduling and enterprise strategic planning, then phase in other functions in a company roadmap. Functionality is enhanced using a cohesive set of modules. 

Planisware Enterprise 7.1.4 has over two dozen modules. Pre-connected module architecture greatly reduces technical challenges that would otherwise involve substantial custom programming, testing, and validation. 

Module configuration, as distinct from custom programming, is relatively rapid. Planisware Enterprise provides data connectors with MS Teams, contracts, managing products, document management, and signature approval. 

Content for Planisware modules flows from functional experts in your organization. A functional administrator serves as a specialized business analyst that is adept with Planisware and is immersed in your organization’s proprietary content. 

Your technical superuser can activate or hide any module by user categories to reduce distractions and simplify working choice. 

Planisware Enterprise offers pragmatic dashboards and captivating bubble charts that visualize integrated advanced analytics. KPIs include resource load and risk levels; net present value; return on investment. 

Superusers can tailor reporting dashboards for rapid and insightful impact.

Planisware activity types and project templates bring consistency.

Here is a firsthand example of how a Planisware feature can harvest dividends while reducing future effort: 

Best practice identifies each project activity by customary descriptive name—the “what” component—and by the activity’s inherent project functional type—the “why” facet. Resource algorithms typically use Planisware activity types.

A consistent, organization-specific Planisware activity type categorization (WBS type) facilitates creation of project templates. A purpose-specific Planisware breakdown structure serves as authority for approved activity types. 

Each project template, with hundreds of pre-defined activities (WBS element; task; start milestone; finish milestone) contains an almost-complete work schedule with durations, WBS type, and links in place. An organizational unit may have six or more templates for project managers to select and implement for new projects. Using Planisware project template as new project foundation assures consistency and completeness. Using pre-defined templates propagates WBS types across the portfolio. 

Note that Planisware provides relatively limited documentation (beyond rudimentary conceptualization) for creating hundreds if not thousands of activity types across multiple templates. 

My white papers, freely available online, provide substantially more pragmatic instruction for creating and using Planisware activity types.

Planisware documentation

With release 7.1.3, Help Center is the currently published name for E-Learning. The familiar Planisware hierarchy organizes over a hundred categorized PDFs. For example, the Projects module currently has fifteen entries with three of them additionally sub-divided. 

Many concise video topics are also listed. Narration tends to overuse verbal “here” and requires visual attention to surmise the specific object that the narrator is pointing out when saying “here” and “here.” 

Smart search helps authorized users search globally across the database. 

Help Center documents and tutoring videos, accessible to users online from within Planisware, are professionally edited to a high standard.

Implementation consulting

Achieving go-live operational status with Planisware requires substantial team effort. With over 600 employees located in 14 countries, Planisware commits to making Planisware Enterprise a success in each corporate-level implementation. Planisware as a company has plenty of implementation project experience to establish winning implementations at a basic level.

Advanced implementations call for paid consulting from Planisware, individual consultants with expertise, and/or organizations that have developed specialized working knowledge to deploy Planisware’s architecture and features.

Each client organization needs to invest heavily in substantial training for its own implementation team to gain proficiency and participate meaningfully in technical decisions and functional content. Day-to-day operational oversight always remains local responsibility.

For paid Planisware clients a mature service ticket process is available, possibly provided through an extra-cost Planisware contract. 

Discussions with Planisware users conclude that commitment to achieving and sustaining product proficiency across versions is a key best practice. At-cost Planisware certification courses can provide training for a corporate customer’s superusers (those responsible for maintaining L1 technical changes).

Planisware Enterprise, originally called OPX2, has flourished beyond its mid-1990s foundational roots that integrated management of projects, resources, and portfolios.

Proficient accelerator of the project economy, Planisware Enterprise galvanizes company capabilities beyond classic project and portfolio management. Transforming pressures of the fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) have inspired the wide-ranging feature set that Planisware EPPM provides.

Pervasive technology presence in today’s world contributes to intense stakeholder scrutiny, project complexity with multi-level scheduling, expectation of data-driven decisions, and proactive knowledge-sharing—bottom up and top-down together.

Scope of Planisware Enterprise current release, 7.1.4 (December 2024) includes additional tools for strategy, finance, risk, contracts, application connectivity, idea management, lessons learned tracking.

Planisware’s strategic planning capabilities clarify and communicate enterprise project objectives and key performance indicators across the organization and tie them to specific projects.

User outcome, in simple terms, is doing the right projects and doing those project right.

Project managers gain strategic perspective because top-level findings and scoring dynamically flow into their respective project plans.

Markedly more effective project/product execution is a key benefit from how Planisware Enterprise dynamically integrates strategic enterprise knowledge sharing—goals and key objectives—into a mature, cohesive project portfolio system that provides real-time data consolidation and single-source-of truth analytics.

Top-down wisdom and bottom-up productivity coalesce in Planisware Enterprise.

Locally created standard project templates enable project managers to duplicate the core of a project quickly with a few mouse clicks. Templates maintain consistent project components, including activity types, inter-activity project links.

Planisware Explorer (PEX) offers enhanced capabilities for reporting and charting that goes beyond the functions in the Report Builder module, such as dynamic queries. PEX requires extra training for operational proficiency, typically from multiple fee-based Planisware courses.

Administration module enables super-user to control visibility of modules for regular Planisware users. The Data page shows available Object types.

7.04 release improved documents management to centralize communications among project users and stakeholders. Because the documents are included in each Planisware environment/configuration, messaging and documents associated with projects are easier to access than being spread through normal corporate email. Planisware stores project related documents and messages in a single database. Snapshots (backups) at a given point in time are easy to make and restore to alternate environments, even on an automated nightly basis.

Program and project roadmaps integrate well with PowerPoint. Slide elements are editable and dynamically linked (if so specified) to detail projects. Capability to drill down into project specifics is mature, native functionality. With the Planisware Presentations module, you gain additional flexibility.

Strategic Portfolio module offers an OKR page (objectives and key results) to connect specific company strategy with defined measurable actions.

1. Planisware Enterprise is a flexible fusion of project, product, portfolio, resource, cost modules and much more. It successfully enables prioritization of business cases, resource capacity planning and utilization, extensive scheduling, and multi-national monetary costs with individual rate escalations. Planisware can handle and display concurrent complex projects with long time horizons and intensive resourcing (such as R&D). User-adaptable views of data can be tailored to a variety of user classes.

2. Planisware has depth of capabilities to enable a given organization to address solutions according to most pressing need, whether that be resource planning, time card administration, project scheduling, or portfolio prioritization. Moreover, each solution can flexibly embrace local business processes. Within widely accepted project management principles, Planisware genuinely offers, "Have it your way." 

3. Planisware excels in resource planning, especially with providing depth for an extensive set of algorithms in parametric estimation. For example, large R&D pharma organizations can exceed the limits of available database columns with locally defined attributes (or fields). Planisware makes provision for defining "drivers" (e.g., project complexity) in separate database tables from attributes used for sorting or filtering in order to remain within Oracle or SQL Server database constraints on any given table.

4.  Granting the need for planned, prioritized deployment and making ample provision for competent operational maintainability, Planisware offers unsurpassed empowerment to business users to extend and adapt the deployed configuration, particularly when application expertise is governed and embedded in the business rather than controlled exclusively within IT. Reducing day-to-day dependence upon IT is a hidden distinctive of Planisware.

5. Planisware thoughtfully builds additional capabilities into virtually every major release for enhanced functionality. In practice, Planisware, as an array of integrated, critical planning tools, will not become obsolete any more than comprehensive financial suites such as SAP. Planisware is a revitalizing "blank canvas" for enterprise project/product portfolio management that keeps conforming to organizational needs.

7.04 improved documents management to centralize communications among project users and stakeholders. Because the documents are included in each Planisware environment/configuration, messaging and documents associated with projects are easier to access than being spread through normal corporate email. Planisware stores project related documents and messages in a single database. Snapshots (backups) at a given point in time are easy to make and restore to alternate environments, even on an automated nightly basis.

Program and project roadmaps integrate well with PowerPoint. Slide elements are editable and dynamically linked (if so specified) to detail projects. Capability to drill down into project specifics is mature, native functionality.

Strategic Portfolio module offers an OKR page (objectives and key results) to connect specific company strategy with defined measurable actions.

Knowledge findability and sharing concerning Planisware implementation, deployment, and problem resolution receive very modest peripheral attention and low priority from Planisware for customer access. By way of contrast, internal Planisware consultants-employees have open access to technical discussions and strategies that individual customers are forbidden to use for fear of violating confidentiality agreements. When an organization is prepared to pay Planisware consultants premium hourly fees, they will create, identify, and/or filter an answer. 

Since 1998 Q4. 

1. Distinguishing between software stability and issues arising from data integrity is beneficial. Poor data can and will impact performance so greatly that the software becomes suspect. As an illustration, a custom module may falsely discriminate between a string that ends with one or more trailing blanks and the actual string itself. The underlying Planisware software is performing normally, yet it appears to end users that configuration itself is unstable.

Planisware scales effortlessly when hosted on a decent Linux Server with ample RAM and sufficient CPUs. For the majority of enterprise installations, Software as a Service, managed by Planisware, is a preferred approach.

In a SaaS environment, what Planisware determines is adequate performance by service level agreement may not align with your company's users over time. Planisware can upgrade servers your organization uses after appropriate negotiation.

What are your impressions of the stability of this solution?

Stability for SaaS environments is excellent. Most cases of stability problems traced back to incorrect data, such as schedule dates that are impossible in the real world. Identifying and fixing bad data resolved stability issues about 80% of the time.

Customer Service:

Planisware service flows from highly-motivated internal consultants who have passion for excellence. Enthusiastic customer-focus pervades well-planned annual conferences that Planisware hosts.

Technical Support:

1. Planisware support quality is generally high and effective, particularly with consultants who have primarily responsibility for a given customer organization. Quite a number of these Planisware consultants that I have interacted with are very knowledgeable and stellar in responsiveness. They also understand project management in specific industries, such as pharmaceutical R&D.

2. A clarification from experience: Specialized technical support from Planisware primarily flows through a team of consultants that have initially implemented a specific configuration for your organization. In the years after that initial deployment, having a valid support contract is key to sustaining that technical support availability. The normal Planisware maintenance contract pertains to core software, version releases, and occasional software patches. Having this contract alone will *not* include continuing technical support for local configuration issues and possible customization concerns.

3. Understanding your local Planisware configuration is essential for addressing problems, whether they be data related, business-rule change, insufficient training, inadequate scripting, or software-based. In this sense, technical support for Planisware cannot be monolithic "one size fits all."

Positive

My first experience in 1998 was spearheading selection and adoption of a commercial, off-the-shelf project management package to replace a "home-grown" project management program that was not Y2K compliant. Flexibility and configurability of Planisware were compelling business advantages compared to the competition.

Planisware helpfully distributes incremental updates about three times annually. Extent of the client base and collective user expectations push priority improvements into new versions and resolve rare technical glitches rapidly.

What any single user or small client may earnestly request for increasing productivity may take years for development to start—unless one pays rather dearly for underwriting special services from Planisware’s offshore support group.

Neglect of formerly active users

Planisware has been a profitable business and attends well to paying clients. In my experience, individual Planisware users, particularly those who suddenly lack affiliation with a paying client between jobs have been bottom priority. Service tickets don’t apply for this category of formerly active users.

Recognizing expansive growth in the worldwide Planisware user community, Planisware should address this continuing education defect.

I recommend that Planisware provides formerly active users privilege of connectivity with Planisware “playground” environments that are periodically refreshed with a current release version. This new option would cultivate “hands on” proficiency in the overall Planisware user community.

Planisware Enterprise security

Software as a Service (SaaS) speeds up deployment and simplifies frequent upgrades. Planisware earned ISO 27001 certification in late 2019Q1 for superior data security. Planisware periodically dispatches qualified technical employees to travel to the hosting regional data centers around the world to ensure highest security measures remain paramount.

Approximately 80% of Planisware’s corporate clients prefer Planisware SaaS over private local hosting.

Planisware Enterprise evaluation

My Planisware journey began in 1996. Longest employment was at Merck (2002–2011) and continues with contingent worker assignments. I have nearly twenty years overall experience with Planisware, primarily for pharma organizations.

Planisware Enterprise, including OPX2, has three decades of commercial availability, with over 600 organizational clients and 800,000 global users.

Clients include PepsiCo, Johnson and Johnson, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Navistar, Beam Suntory, Air Tahiti, Michigan Department of Transportation, Airbus, AstraZeneca, Zebra Technologies, Ariane Group, Alcon, BMS, Volkswagen Financial Services, Bosch Global Software Technologies, Total Energies.

In 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant positioned Planisware Enterprise in the top right quarter for Strategic Portfolio Management.

Evaluating strategic portfolio management systems is possibly as challenging as comparing major symphony orchestras for excellence. Is Berlin Philharmonic superior in musicality to Pittsburgh Symphony?

Adding product maturity, international product acceptance, professional published comparisons into consideration, Planisware Enterprise is much more than decent for anchoring strategic portfolio management.

Bottom line: Planisware Enterprise is pacesetter.

The solution can be used for performance monitoring, project management, and support.

The solution is performance-oriented and easily customized accordingly to many areas, such as performance KPI.

More integration is needed with other kinds of products for better collaboration.

I have been using this solution for approximately one week.

I have found the stability to be good.

The solution is scalable.

We have one department using this solution and it has approximately 50 users.

We use professional consultants to do the implementation of the solution.

The solution could be less expensive and the cost of scaling is expensive too.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Planisware a six out of ten.

I value the project and resource management.

We have found it to be a good project and portfolio management tool.

I would like to see improvements in the following modules:

• Resource
• Project
• Portfolio
• Timecard

I have used it for almost six years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a very high rating.

We have only used Planisware.

The initial setup was complex. The scripting was OPX2 scripting.

It is an expensive tool.

We evaluated other options. As this is a customized tool, we needed to provide a breakdown of how the organization is going to use it.

This included a technical breakdown of structures and an explanation of the different modules such as resource, project, portfolio, and timecard.

Compared to other PPM tools, Planisware is more advanced. We can do more customizations with this tool.

Overall, I would say this software deserves an 8/10 given the overall balance of features it provides and its flexibility to adapt to organisations.

Planisware integrates in a powerful way project scheduling, resource & costs management amongst other things. Such a mix is extremely useful in R&D matrix organisations. It is not a surprise if PLW is a market leader amongst Pharma companies, which struggle to maintain product portfolios with decreasing resources.

The integrated resource management capability enables fully-loaded project costing, more transparent portfolio reviews and budget preparations. Senior Management has access to one, single truth on projects in the portfolio.

Reporting out of PLW has been a definite weakness. But the recent PEX module is addressing that issue quite nicely, even if the product is still being improved.

All in all, I have dealt with PLW for about eight years. Initially I used it with Legacy systems, then used it to build a brand new project & portfolio management platform (following a rigourous review of three other competitors)

A project this size generates LOTS of issues. Next to change management challenges and the complexity of building such an intregrated, transversal solution amid an existing landscape, the deployment has been, in retrospect, relatively smooth.

We worked hard on building a solid and generic data model, which has allowed us to avoid major stability issues.

Not really. The solid data model, and selection of state of the art servers has guaranteed very decent system performance. Users located across Europe, US, and Asia continue to enjoy stable and equal performances.

We have worked directly with PLW consultants. Their expertise and dedication levels have allowed us to find solutions to the questions and issues which would come up along the way.

Other than stand-alone MSP plans, not really.

The solution we have implemented spans across the whole organisation. As such, we have raised a lot of organisational operating issues and misalignments during the design phase. It was a conscious effort to use the opportunity to challenge and revisit the way the organisation operates.

As a consequence, it is fair to say the technical set-up has been complex indeed.

We worked with dedicated vendor consultants AND an in-house support team already knowledgeable about PLW. I can say that PLW consultants are, as a rule, dedicated, straightforward, competent and experienced individuals. I have dealt with about 10 different consultants (Paris office) and they have all contributed to my general satisfaction of the PLW product.

We did review four options, in an effort to truly choose what would be best for the company. We looked at the (then - around 2010) key names around, i.e. Oracle Primavera, MS Project, and SAP (given the extensive use of that ERP at the company). PLW came out in the end as the most flexible and capable solution for the business needs which had been identified. Please note that the advantage it had in terms of data migration (PLW was already being used in legacy systems) was excluded as a criteria during the selection process.

Know precisely what you want to do. PLW is a very flexible toolbox (as stated by PLW themselves), so make sure to define clearly your goal, keep the end-user in mind and enjoy the trip!