Article

Managing Time For Moving Resources
By Jean-François Ferland, Infotech December 2000, vol.21 no.12

The modular suite Tenrox PSA V6 by Tenrox not only manages projects, but expenses, costs, available resources, and can be used as time recorder supporting swipe card systems.

Whereas several firms are directed towards the realization of projects, the employees leave their offices to meet the customers, to carry out mandates or to work from their home. In its eWorkforce optimization suite, Tenrox PSA V6, the Quebec developer Tenrox uses email to facilitate interaction between the organization and people. This modular suite of applications, offered to large as well as small businesses, can be bought, rented or hosted.

Launched at the end of November, Tenrox PSA V6 is an improved version of the Tenrox PSA released in June 2000. The principal components of this client/server suite of applications, running on a Windows NT server, are the management and tracking software Tenrox Time & Expense, for time and Tenrox Expense Reporting, for expenses and reporting, as well as the management applications Office Cost & Revenues and Office Invoice.

There is also  Tenrox Incident Management, to carry out issue tracking and change management, as needed for help desk, problem reporting or project realization workflow. Office Skill allows the managers to match projects and resources according to the availability and the level of expertise, whereas PC TimeClock is used as a time recorder at workstation level.

Tenrox PSA includes the viewing tool Tenrox PSA Explorer, which allows the user to visualize the whole organization in a tree-like structure, and the possibility of updating workstations using Tenrox PSA Sync. The software development kit (SDK) Visual PM is used to enhance de suite according to specific needs, with more than 200 forms. Punch allocates the management of in/out time of employees using a swipe card system.

As for accessibility and use of the suite, Tenrox PSA V6 includes Tenrox PSA Desktop, a Windows application, and Tenrox PSA Web, which is used via a browser and gathers standard time entries and timesheet management information.

Moreover, two components, Timesheet@ for timesheets and Expense@ for expenses, allow off-site interaction with the application through email. By sending a message to a designated address, the user receives a document from the server and returns it once it's been completed.

"Nowadays, employees and consultants are increasingly working from remote locations. Whether it's from their house or on the road for consultations, access to all information is not always possible. Practically everyone can have access to email, and we allow the employees with these two modules to have access to that precious information " says the director of public relations at Tenrox.

At market level, while Tenrox counts 500 customers in 50 countries (with 60% of customers in the United States and 10 % to 15 % in Europe), the director of personal relations evaluates that fifty to sixty companies working in this field already exist, only four or five of these companies approach the level of software offered by Tenrox. The company just recently moved to Laval Technology Park.

"Currently, our main competitors are the old paper-based methods of time and expense management, or the large UNIX systems that are not very user-friendly and are difficult to access, whereas our software allows for an intuitive and simple way to access information".

Tenrox PSA V6 also offers flexibility in regards to purchasing, since it can be bought, rented to be installed on a corporate Intranet, or be hosted on Tenrox's server facilities as an Application Service Provider (ASP). the director of personal relations believes that this last approach will be very popular with small and medium-sized organizations that do not have the necessary budgets for hardware or administrative resources. 

The bilingual application, to which other languages could be added soon, is available as a suite or in separate modules.