Tenrox has unveiled the latest release of its PSA software 2019 R1. The company has continued to enhance its UX and UI as it looks to modernise the look and feel of the cloud product that had started to look dated compared to the opposition. That work is set to be completed in 2019. The interfaces updated with this release include a project overview screen and leave requests. There are also improvements to other areas including resource management.
Improving life for project managers
The new project overview page includes a snapshot of a project health. It includes the base information about the project such as the assigned project manager, client and dates. While this pane is fairly plain it does have a project health indicator. A healthy project appearing green. The design is simple though there is room for more information.
The second visible pane includes a summary of the project accounting information. This includes the number of booked and billable hours as well as the associated values. It also includes the invoiced value and expenses information. Whether these are highlighted if the project is off track isn’t clear.
The third pane has three tabs: Milestone, Team Member and invoices. This enables the project manager to quickly move between the most commonly accessed information to see progress on the project and information about each team member.
Leave requests
This has been revamped with the new UI. It simplifies the process for users and managers. The whole leave request process from entry to authorisation has been simplified. It is now possible to remove work process leave requests. The data collected from leave requests is also now available in Upland Analytics for deeper analysis.
The Leave request manager screen delivers a simple summary of leave requests and their status, enabling the manage to access each request quickly.
Currently, there does not however seem to be a way to cross reference the leave request with an impact to a project within the leave request manager screen.
Other improvements
The changes to the Resource Management feature set includes several updates requested by users. These include:
- consolidated work plan views,
- hard booking security profile setting for roles,
- hard booking security profile included in project copy.
In addition, the UI/UX has also been further improved.
The project planner now has an excel export capability. Other improvements include:
- role hard booking security profile included in UPP-RM integration,
- new view and grouping options for resources,
- drag & drop for resource replacement.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Upland is gradually weaving an impressive platform of products together to deliver a solution that is far more advanced that the original Tenrox it bought in 2012. The addition of Upland Analytics which is now embedded in the product and more is to come. The recent acquisition of Qvidian should see a strong quotation solution embedded into Tenrox. This is an area that other PSA solutions fall short in. The improvements to the user interface will also be welcomed and should help Tenrox win more deals over the coming year.
This latest release is more an iterative one than a major update. Some of the improvements will be welcomed by the existing user base. While the UI is certainly cleaner, it does not appear to contain as much use of colour to highlight areas of concern on projects. This may change as future iterations are released.
