Review

Next Generation PSA By Tenrox
By Ray Palmer, PM Review, September 2002

Tenrox is a suite of applications for the Professional Services Automation (PSA) market. Tenrox has over 800 clients with an increasing number in the UK, including HMV, Fujitsu and EDS, the latter using the system to track work and resources for the Accord project, said to be the largest IT project in Europe.

The product includes timesheets, expenses, resource management, project accounting, client billing as well as modules for purchasing, time and attendance, issues and changes. The applications can be configured using pre-built or customized workflows to meet specific client needs.

Tenrox PSA is a web based system and a very attractive feature is that users are able to configure their own home pages to display their preferred information. This can include their own ‘to do’ lists, timesheets to be approved, documents of interest, outstanding issues and, in the example shown, the contents of the user's e-mail inbox. Reports can also be displayed in the same home page view and use live data drawn on demand. The user has control over the format of the home page and can set the selection and sort criteria for each section. The bottom right corner of the example is a web page selected by the user; in practice, this could be from the organization's intranet.

Projects are organized as a hierarchy for analysis and reporting purposes. Adding a new project requires several key pieces of information: start and finish dates, priority, cost and billing rates, the name of the project manager and so on. Budgets can be allocated in terms of time, cost or billings at project, activity or assignment levels. An effective safeguard here is the automatic generation of a warning e-mail, (to the project manager, for example) whenever a budget limit is reached.

To manage sequences of work, the system includes over 25 standard workflows, including problem tracking, service requests, opportunity management, customer follow-up and so on. A client can tailor workflows to meet particular requirements, for example defining a step to include a manager’s approval of an expense report, or to generate an automatic notification when an order is placed. A typical timesheet sequence might include the collection of hours and expenses, their approval, the creation and issuing of an invoice and the updating of accounting records.

Resources are allocated to assignments by skill and the system is able to search for staff having the requisite skill and experience profile. The result of a search provides a list of available staff, displaying their location, group and other data, at which point a manager can either directly assign resources, or reserve them pending further developments.

Issues are handled conventionally, with the items being recorded in terms of description, priority, creator, date, status, assigned to, and so on. Each is given a reference number and a deadline and can be updated to reflect its changing status. Managers looking for specific data are presented with a summary list of the issues. To find, for example, ‘all unresolved issues more than a week old’, the data can be filtered and the manager can then drill down to the detail by clicking on the issue number. The layout for each issue type can be tailored to differentiate between, for example, product improvement requests and project issues.

Interestingly, Tenrox PSA also includes a purchasing module that processes requisitions from staff and presents the resulting purchase orders to the appropriate manager for approval. The system enables users to search for specific information, for example all purchase orders placed by the HR group in the last three weeks.

Tenrox’s marketing material is clearly aimed at organizations with plenty of project and IT systems know-how. The software operates on databases such as Oracle and SQL Server, and is designed to integrate with SAP, Peoplesoft, Microsoft’s Great Plains and other corporate applications.