Delivering projects on time and within budget in a competitive global market can be difficult even in the best of times. Now, services firms must be even more nimble in supporting their customers. OpenAir 2020 Release 2 comes just in time to help.
Economic uncertainty and fallout from the coronavirus pandemic have forced firms to renegotiate contracts or repurpose services while accommodating customer changes. They need tools that are easy to use, with the ability to quickly move resources, understand the impact of those changes and still maintain the productivity of their billable employees. Also, services firms can take advantage of any downtime by providing additional training to employees, rethinking business processes and optimizing their technology environments.
With NetSuite OpenAir 2020 Release 2, services organizations can easily staff projects with the ability to book resources from the Project Center and make changes “on-the-fly.” New workflows in the NetSuite Connector provide opportunities to further optimize the platform. The release also features continued enhancements to the user experience with redesigned list views and screen headers, and custom field tags for displaying alerts and statuses.
Project Center: Manage Key Projects from a Single Screen
In this release, services firms can now manage project resource bookings from within the project center outline view, providing an easier view and streamlined management of projects as a whole. Enhancements include:
- The “add new resource” icon lets users easily create a quick resource booking.
- Dropdown lists now make it faster to search and select resources to refine the resource list.
- Inline editing on the left side works the same way as for phases, tasks and milestones.
- Form permissions, form rules and form scripts are now evaluated for each booking record.
User Experience: Redesigned List Views and Screen Headers
With this release, NetSuite OpenAir redefines the way organizations look at projects, bringing usability and performance enhancements across the platform with the newly redesigned list views, new record headers and administration global settings.
- With the newly redesigned list views, organizations can now view Project financials (Billing, Recognition), Workspaces (Documents, Discussions) and Administration (Job codes, Customers, Contacts) from one location.
- New redesigned record headers include: purchase orders, purchase requests, resource profile approvals, schedule requests, workspaces, workspace discussions.
- Administration global settings have a redesigned screen header with tab navigation and overview screens for each settings section to make for a faster and consistent user experience. There is no need to go to the main landing page any longer with this enhancement.
- View monetary subtotals for each currency.
NetSuite Connector: Redefine the Way you Look at Workflows
NetSuite OpenAir 2020 Release 2 enables organizations to set up integrations once and let them run smoothly with up to date enhanced health checks and embedded best practices for the highest performance.
- With this “set and forget” integration, project delivery groups can now create workflow groups and schedule when they run. With new safeguards, organizations can avoid accidental data integrations issues caused by changing a workflow in use.
- Selected workflows can include only the workflows you need in manual runs for faster access to data.
- Protected workflows safeguard select workflows against unintended changes for scheduled or real-time integrations.
- Health checks will identify issues blocking your integration runs.
- Recommendations show how to get the most out of your integration.
- Health checks validate integration settings to provide critical integration status information
Global Features: New Custom Tag Field Types
2020 release 2 also adds a “tag custom field” to entity properties forms and displays it on the list views, project status summaries and reports.
- The field now displays as badges with specific text and colors to draw attention to important information on forms, list views and reports.
- Read and set tag values using OpenAir API, user scripting or OpenAir Integration.
- Control who can see or update tag values using form permissions and form rules.
Mobile: Quickly enter and approve time from anywhere.
NetSuite OpenAir 2020 Release 2 also allows organizations to take advantage of the redesigned Timesheets features with OpenAir Mobile 3*, now available for iPhone devices. With the latest versions of the iPhone (3.2) app, you can now:
- Get a quick snapshot of your time entry with an improved timesheet progress bar.
- Save your OpenAir storage space with compressed image attachments.
*OpenAir Mobile Android 3.0 is scheduled to be released in the upcoming months
These are just a few of the highlights in OpenAir 2020 Release 2. For more information on the full list of features and how to use them, be sure to check out the 2020 Release 2 notes (opens in new tab).
The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.
