Phocas Software

Brilliantly powerful BI solution

Avantages :

Phocas is pretty easy to use, even to the not nerd people. It's interface is intuitive.

Inconvénients :

Dashboards can use some more features. Other than that all looks good.

Happy to Recommend Phocas!

Commentaires : We started with Phocas in 2009 with just the standard sales database for one region of our business but have now progressed to multiple sales databases for other business units with fully integrated rebates module as well as finance and procurement style database now, with plans to roll it out further in other parts of the business.

Avantages :

The ease of use of Phocas is what puts it at the top of our list for BI software. The set up of the data was quick and easy (with great support from the Phocas guys) and ability to drill down from top line data right into the detail of a transaction is what makes Phocas a great tool for us. Phocas is widely used across our business to track and analyse sales data, finance data and purchasing data with future plans to add more modules. The PUG Forum is also a good feature for me, if there is something that you don't know how to do then you'll find the info there or someone can point you in the right direction. It's also a great place to suggest the feature that you'd like to see and Phocas review and add on to their product road map, so you know they are listening to your ideas.

Inconvénients :

I'd say the visualizations and widgets on the dashboards could do with abit of updating. The charts aren't always a flexible as you'd like with axes labels and adjusting the axes to suit the chart, plus you have to be quite specific with the data in the first place to get the chart you want.

Good BI Tool, Not Great

Commentaires : Good, basic BI tool that can give sales teams good information to understand their customers and opportunities to grow sales and margins.

Avantages :

Easy to pull in our ERP data. Good to summarize trends and KPI metrics. Matrix feature is great to find correlated products "like" customers aren't buying. Ability to filter (called "Focus") on a dimension and all of the widgets within the dashboards will update to just show the info relative to that filter. Ability to quickly change dimensions and measures to show information in different ways. The customer service department is awesome - will help whenever and however they can.

Inconvénients :

Custom calculations are hard to use. Graphing tools are not robust (i.e. no data labels, data tables, combo charts are limited, etc.) Needs an additional user license that fits in between the Viewer and Full Licenses to give additional user features like exporting, but not the ability to design dashboards. Formatting and sorting the data is below average. The back-end Designer tool takes awhile to master. Wish there was a handbook or instructions on how to use the different features of the software.

Johnstone Supply - Las Vegas - Why Phocas has increased our productivity!

Commentaires : Overall we are very happy with this product. It has opened the door for getting information to our teams much faster and it also created a new full time position for data analysis! The flexibility of being able to create our own databases, & adding to existing databases has increased our ability to share information to our teams in a easy to view format instead of sending spreadsheets that some people did not look at.

Avantages :

It is very easy to use! I can show someone the basics in 5 to 10 minutes and they are off and running creating favorites and dashboards. The software is updated every month and their support and documentation is outstanding. The product gives us the information we need faster than doing it in our ERP system. With a couple of clicks you can analyze you sales data and then quickly change views to look at the data in a completely different way. It very robust in all the options you have. The company is developing based on their customer needs, you can tell that they all want to help us achieve success with this product.

Inconvénients :

This is hard to say because their are few cons. We have requested enhancements and we have some support issues that are submitted. But we have no visibility , (web portal), to review what we already submitted. It would be nice to have a support portal to check open cases and enhancements we have submitted.

A great product with an excellent, dynamic and knowledgeable support team.

Commentaires : It's really quick to get the information we need. When we implemented it we presumed the sales team would spend hours on it. They don't. They get the information they need within seconds and can quickly move on to do their actual jobs. It's an extremely powerful tool.Some functions in the business don't use it very much but that's because we didn't collect data before because we couldn't analyse it. Now that we can analyse it we need to collect a bank of data so we can see what we want to do with it. Chicken and egg.

Avantages :

The screens are easy to navigate and there aren't lots of clicks to get the information you need.I particularly like how easy it is to create Dashboards and delve deeper into dashboard data.The supporting team are excellent too. After a bumpy handover to BAU Phocas have completely turned it around. Their team are engaging, helpful and knowledgeable. I also know that, if I can explain the data composite I'm looking for, the team will find a way of getting it.

Inconvénients :

It isn't so easy for less skilled team members to use- those who don't understand databases, don't have very good computer skills or only use it occasionally.I'd like it to be easier to import simple data such as a spreadsheet.