Board Reviews

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.

• 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.