Function Point

Great ERP for marketing or advertising agencies

Comments: Overall we have a great experience

Pros:

Funcionalities are exactly what a medium - sized marketing or advertising / PR needs

Cons:

Ease of use is not always great. Would be great if some focus could be put in there

Our business is healthier and our employees are happier because of the things we can do and see now

Comments: When it comes to project and operational management, there are loads of options that talk a good game. However, the Function Point team is actually changing the game with how agencies and production companies can run their businesses successfully. Function Point set our business up for success in navigating a pandemic, remote work, and new sales structures. Changing our project management system to FP has been the single greatest immediate and long term benefit to our company's profitability. Our business is healthier and our employees are happier because of the things we can do and see now with the FP operating system. The sheer amount of usable, reliable and readable data that the Function Point platform can produce matched with the top notch customer experience and support makes the perfect software to support busy creative agencies.

Pros:

The ease of timetracking against specific jobs, service lines and tasks; financial and project/task management tracking in one platform; estimate creation within the system that has all the information transferred automatically when making it a job; the BI reporting with bar graphs and pivot grids.

Cons:

The lack of reviewing software; how difficult/how many extra steps it takes to move a task to a different assignee or different date; no seemless/single channel communication tab; no quick search functionality; it's not an easy system for account or project managers to keep tabs on mulitple projects/people at once.

The Function Point team is always responsive and available

Comments: Function Point has grown with us as we've grown as a company. Their support team is responsive when question arise, and I know that everyone from their account team to product development to support is available when I need them. Their interest in soliciting feedback and involving clients in their roadmap development is so welcome.

Pros:

Budgets, tasks, and schedules can all be connected and feed into each other, meaning less work for our team. Enter a timesheet entry and everyone knows the status of that task and how it has affected the overall budget immediately.

Cons:

I think most things are specific to how we do business. For example, we'd like more customization of contacts and companies so we can track details more specifically. Right now, we're maintaining two CRMs -- FP and Salesforce. It would be amazing to combine them. We'd like to be able to give clients more insight into their projects. We stopped pursuing the client portal because it looked outdated. Perhaps that's changed. But providing some way to share a real-time timeline / schedule with clients would be valuable to us. We'd also value a re-do of the Resource Planner / Scheduler that allowed us to look at forecasted work, landed business that's not yet actionable (draft tasks) and landed, actionable work. This would give us greater insight into what business we can commit to.

Not the most "functional" project management software but definitely keeps us organized

Pros:

The company pages in Function Point provide us with all the information we need because we're able to customize them to our needs. We can include the client information, but we also have team information so one page tells everyone who is involved with that client's projects. The customizable dashboard also allows each person to view things that they feel are important to them.

Cons:

I find Function Point to not be as "functional" as its name might suggest. It is often laggy when you click on links. Getting to pages that you want to be on takes many clicks instead of just one (for example, it seems strange to me that clicking on the name of a "schedule" within a company takes me to a jumbled list of tasks rather than the actual schedule page where I can see things laid out in order). There isn't a good calendar view that allows a person to drag and drop tasks (and since I manage our company's design calendar, it would be great if I could do this since it's basically like putting together a giant puzzle). The customization seems to have stopped with the "dashboard" type of views of the main page and schedule pages. If you want to view, for instance, the time allotted to people within the company for a day, you might visit the Work Planning View, which overall is a great view (shows tasks assigned and a total number of hours allotted to each person). The downside is it always only shows everyone in the company, which isn't ever what I need. Being able to choose who I see in this view (and others like it) would improve the functionality a lot. There are also too many different ways to view things. There are at least three different ways to see how many hours of work a person has scheduled for the day. There are a couple of different views for tasks within a certain project. It can be overwhelming.

Cures the timesheet entry drudgery.

Comments: I'm not particularly good about keeping my timesheets current, but Function Point makes it a lot easier to keep on track.

Pros:

I like that I can access it anywhere and on whatever device I happen to be using. I rely on the weekly timesheet for most of my time entry stuff. The TAB through interface makes it really simple.

Cons:

My biggest complaint is that when you make a mistake or key something that needs clarification, a dialog box requiring an action comes up nowhere near where you're currently working on the page. And you have to click the OK button to close it. It won't accept the return key or tab key. Say you're looking up a job. You type in a few letters, hit TAB and a list comes up. That list is at the bottom of the page and you have to mouse over your selection and click it in order to move on. Even if you don't see the job you're looking for in the list, you still have to mouse over and click OK. It's a small thing, but compared to all the other software I use each day, this is a pretty clunky issue for me.