Page 323 - Untitled-1

302 DEFINING THE PSA MARKET

• Reporting Tools—The ability to generate flexible and detailed reports for
individuals throughout the organization (e.g., consultants, project managers,
executives, clients), with support for dashboards, OLAP, and import/export.
Changepoint continues to have an edge in the creation of reports, but
Novient and Evolve both offer solid reporting features as well.

• Billing—The ability to create detailed invoices natively that can be sent to
clients. It is important to have flexibility in determining the frequency of
billing cycles and adjustments that need to be made to T&Es before bills
are sent out. PeopleSoft offers the richest billing functions.

• Financials—The ability to track A/P, A/R, and GL to know how well the
company is performing. Most packages integrate with third-party solutions
to offer this functionality, but with the emergence of ERP vendors in this
space, it is certainly a critical differentiator. PeopleSoft offers the richest fi-
nancial functions, but other PSA vendors have solid interfaces to a greater
diversity of financials applications. This is important for organizations not al-
ready using PeopleSoft for financials, which is at an additional cost. Portera
offers seamless integration to a customized version of Oracle Financials.

• Integration—The heavy reliance on third-party applications for CRM, HR,
PM, and financials makes solid integration a necessity. At the publication of
last year’s report, most integration involved flat files, but now PSA vendors
are offering XML-based APIs and a few are partnering with enterprise ap-
plication integration (EAI) vendors to offer greatly improved, standard in-
terfaces to commonly used third-party solutions. In terms of APIs, most
vendors offer solid XML-based APIs.
(SPEX, division of Meta Group, Inc., 2001)

This is all a far cry from the traditional scope of offerings from the popular PM
or ERP vendors. With PSA, we are moving from buying a product, with multiple
capabilities, to buying a solution, made up of several products. Unfortunately, as
we see in the next chapter, there are many hurdles to clear before these solutions
reach maturity.