Board Reviews

It can be used for business intelligence, predictive planning, financial consolidation, integrated planning, budgeting and forecasting, strategy execution, and management. It can be deployed on the cloud or on-prem.

It is very easy to use. It has got what they call a toolkit, which is a no-code development environment. You can develop a whole solution with it because it is a complete platform. There is a lot of online material that can be used as a reference. You can help yourself while developing a solution. 

There are some prebuilt applications in the platform environment. You can very easily customize and integrate these applications. It also has flexible scaling of machine resources, which is really great. 

It can have more functionality for narrative reporting. They should also improve their training courses, which are currently very lightweight. When you get into more complex things, it is quite difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do, and you have to look at a lot of videos before you actually understand, which is a bit frustrating. Their training can be more comprehensive.

I have been using this solution for one year.

It is stable.

Its scalability is good. Because of the agreement that they've got with Microsoft Azure, they monitor the performance and scale automatically. If more processing power is required, they just add it. You don't have to worry about that, and you also don't have to pay extra. 

In terms of usage, we started with four or five people. We currently have about 30 users, and we will use it for more areas of the business.

Their support was good. They got back to us and helped us immediately. I can't complain.

We have used Power BI and Cognos.

We use it in the cloud, so we didn't have to install anything. It took two days to get our environment provisions up and running. 

It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money.

I would rate Board a nine out of ten. In general, it is a surprisingly good tool.

Our business is the management of external client property portfolios. We use BOARD to provide clients with the ability to easily manage and maintain their property holdings.

BOARD has allowed us to provide to clients a tool which allows them to see the state of their entire holdings managed by us. With this tool, clients can make decisions based on fact and current information regarding property value, rental income, lease management, etc.

As a developer, the ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic. My favourite feature of BOARD is the ability to write back to the OLAP DB, as well as the Rdb, and secure user data allowing databases to be flushed and rebuilt daily.  

It would be nice to see truly transferable processes from model to model, as well as a method of building repetitive processes. 

Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules.

We use it for budget development and revenue forecasting, and it's performing quite well right now. 

There have been some minor hiccups, not with the BOARD platform itself, but it's just the learning, getting familiar with the product, and the end-user accepting the application. In a government organization, there has been some struggle to get people to use the tool, versus what they've used before.

I don't think it's the learning curve, because the way New Brain designed the application for us, it's fairly user friendly. I think it's more of a hesitancy to stop inputting things on Excel spreadsheets and then inputting things into the BOARD software itself. We're only about a year and a half into it, and what I'm finding is that they kept both. They've kept their Excel sheets. So they are doing double entry. They're were doing entry into Excel as well as entry into the BOARD system, because they didn't quite trust the application yet. Now that we're in year two, the second budget season with the system, they've stopped using some of those Excel spreadsheets. They're relying more on the BOARD application itself.

The way that we designed the personal service forecasting module - about 80% of our operating budget is personal-service related in government. The way that it allows us to take all the variables in, and do a lot of "what if" scenario planning on it, I think is the greatest benefit.

For me, because I do a lot of the administration of the system, it's just how easy it was to set up and how easy it is to maintain.

Being only about a year and a half into using the tool, I don't think I know enough of what's still possible. I'm excited to learn about the e-learning tool and the community that's just starting out.

If I was to look at it, from my point of view, there's a lot of report writing that we have to do in the government sector, so maybe explaining how we integrate with, for example, a publishing software, would be helpful.

It wasn't because of BOARD, it was more because we have integrated it with our ERP system, and we have made changes in our ERP system without filtering those through to our BOARD software. So it wasn't BOARD, it was really a self-inflicted kind situation.

The platform has worked wonderfully for us. There haven't been any issues that I've seen with the platform. In fact, we're looking at - maybe in the next year, or next two years - integrating more into it, really expanding what we're currently using it for, which is just budgets; to look at it and see what else we can do with it. It's very customizable.

I think there's a lot more that we could be doing. Right now it's just really budgets that we're using it for. I'm really interested in learning how we can use BEAM for our revenue forecasting, or revenue predictive analytics; how we use that in a government setting. The tools that we have now are really just Excel. 

Excellent. We've only done it through their online technical support, but we have had where we couldn't just solve it through an email, and they have been really very good about setting up time for us to make service calls with them. I love their technical support.

The budget system that we were using prior to investing in BOARD was written back in the early 90s, and it had a hard-coded date in there that it would not let us to do any forecasting beyond the year 2017. So we were forced into looking at another application. I spent about a year looking at applications. 

I chose BOARD because of the way that I was able to change it over time and integrate, not only a line-item budget, but also a strategic budget. I was able to bring in all those other pieces into it, and it wasn't just strictly an accounting stream. I am able to do more of the predictive analytics and the forecasting, and move the city into that direction instead of just the numbers.

We worked with New Brain. New Brain made it really easy for us to learn the tool. They spent a lot of time with us just talking through the business. Working in the Finance department, we had to integrate - since the Finance department is decentralized, the capital budgets were done in a different department. New Brain really helped me work with the capital folks to identify their business process. They didn't even know all of their business process. So it was really nice that New Brain was able to help with all of those conversations, and help us even streamline our business processes within capital.

With New Brain, it was all about their experience with other local municipalities, and working with governments in fund accounting. Fund accounting is quite different from private business accounting. That's what drew us to New Brain, not only the BOARD application, but also their background in working with government.

Technical support is definitely a 10 out of 10. The system solution is about a nine out of 10, and the only reason why I would give it a nine and not a 10, is that it still takes IT folks to really support it. It's not totally able to be supported within Finance. Given the amount of resources that a government has, we have a very small IT staff, and the departments are more relied upon to do their own IT. That's the only reason why I would give it a nine.

I like this solution because it's so versatile, you can really model it after your specific business practices. It's not the case that you might have to change your business practices to fit into it.

We have brought the solution to be the "one" solution and are using it in all aspects of finance in terms of reporting, forecast budgeting, modeling, and score cards. We are also using it for analyticals and "what-if" scenarios/situations. 

One of the things that we asked for it to do was provide ease of use and it has accomplished that. Also, it was an easy implementation, and it has been a huge success.

The low hanging fruit on the how it is performing now that we have built it into our integrity and trust in our numbers. Where in the past, there have been issues, now we have only one version of the truth. We have been able to provide seamless governance across the whole organization. Why we have done this is for the hard savings, my team is able to scale easily with the business along with the rapid growth that we have been seeing. 

It is "one" solution. Keeping it simple: Allowing my team, my users, end users, and me only one application to plug into to get all of their financial data. This is key. 

It would be huge in the future if BOARD offered a lot more graphs and presentations, and it was a lot easier to use. 

Stability has been fantastic. We have not had any downtime. We are an on-premise user, so we are very dependent on our own systems and we have very reliable systems. 

I am interested in the future of turning over to the cloud and the challenge of what that performance will be like. Right now, it is a future endeavor that we have. In the industry that I belonged to, the healthcare industry, there are a tremendous amount of safeguards that we have to add, therefore everything is on-premise versus out in the cloud. 

We are still a small organization. From my organization, I am very excited about it. That is one of the reasons that I picked BOARD, it would scale. 

We have not used technical support, because we are dealing with a third-party vendor.

BOARD goes by the motto of "Be Simple". I have used other platforms in the past: IBM and some Oracle products. The are very complex, data-ridden. BOARD is very non-IT friendly, which I am excited about. 

I came from an IBM situation, then I moved to a company that did not have anything. I knew I did not want to go to the complexity of a system that was too big for us. BOARD was at the right size and right time for us. It is also something that we can grow into (scales). 

Initial setup was very straightforward. It was a really good partnership that we had through interviews that we were conducted by BOARD, the third-party vendor, and us. Therefore, we knew where we were all the time. It was pretty seamless. 

BOARD implementation is done with the help of a third-party vendor.

We were looking at other vendors, like Sisense, and all your typical, major competitors.

BOARD stood out because it was the company with "one" solution. I liked the way that I felt as a user and administrator of it. There were a lot of clicks, drops, drags, etc. versus writing code. 

I have been totally thrilled with BOARD. 

Just do it. I think about the way that BOARD is trying to continuously reinvent itself. Adding the community is huge. It gives us a source out of Google to find solutions. We are so used to that in our society. BOARD has actually done that. The customer service is huge, knowing that every time I make a new inquiry that I always feel like I am the number one customer, even though I know I am not. It has been huge; it has been fantastic. 

There is a tremendous learning curve with it, because you are learning a whole new language at first. Once you understand the basic concepts of what a capsule, mask, and entity are, then it becomes pretty easy. Then, like with anything else, the more you use it, the easier it gets. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The all-in-one solution was key thing for us. I did not want have the end users go day-to-day having to use multiple apps to manage one task. I did not want to do that. I wanted to have "one" solution to fit all of our financial means. 

I use BOARD mainly for the analysis of data for planning. Our business is mainly to do with tissue donors. We do a lot trending via charts and data to see what kind of information we get and how we are doing. 

I also work with sales and different kinds of modes of sales, which helps us identify the ways we're doing direct orders, regular consignments. 

I cater to different departments like planning and the complaints department. Then I also take care of the users who use the Capsules on a daily basis. I also handle tickets for people if they have any issues with BOARD.

I translated a lot of Excel files, charts and trending for bimonthly calculations, into BOARD.

They had calculations from baseline for average, standard deviations, just like what you would do in Excel.

We have 75 or 86 buckets based on the tissue. There are something like 20 product lines. So if you do the math, we are talking about some 800 graphs and layouts which they generally print every month. So it has been very flexible. We identified a print option for the screen, so when we hit print, and I have eight layouts corresponding to eight graphs, they print like a shot.

The data doesn't have to just be there, it has to look prettier too. So I'm able to add little fancy italics. It makes the whole experience for the users better, there's something to look at. They prefer looking at it, and they start asking questions, which helps me develop further. If they want more, I can enhance it and give it to them.

I like the procedures mainly, how the data flow corresponds and how a cube is based on different dimensions, and how the entity reacts to it. We have a cube which can be broken down into different levels, and the way they want to slice it and dice it, that's the user's requirement. So we do that fairly well.

The procedures, they have a long list... There are existing gaps which I was asked to overtake and minimize and make it more efficient. Whatever procedure was created has 90 lines of writeup. If I could just export it to Excel and read it, and open different pages, see different pages of procedures at the same time, in different windows - so that I don't have to close it again, go back in - it would save a lot of time, and it would make it a little easier for everybody.

Initially we did have issues with the BOARD crashing, but at that time I was fairly new. I will say that the services were meant to start after a few hours but that's the time where it briefly pauses and if anybody, by chance, was even trying to get into BOARD, it would lock them up. But that was fine. It was not really a stability issue. Our users did make a little bit of commotion, but eventually I explained it to them, and it was fine. Now it is pretty stable.

I haven't reached my goal yet. I like to give the best. I'm sure there's more at the end. There is more to do always. Although I will say that right now the users are very happy with whatever they have, but I'm sure that technology definitely has more to offer them. I'm sure BOARD will keep on improving in functionality, which will help us also to provide a better experience to the users. So I wouldn't say I have reached any end point yet.

I've been using BOARD for around three years. And I think I'm very comfortable with it. The help desk has been very, very, good, supportive with their emails. Any question I ask they give me some steps, and it is like a jump-start for me to brainstorm the thing, rather than making a phone call. It gives me my personal time to analyze what they have written, and gets me to resolve it, and help the users on the other side. So, many people are happy with what I have done.

When it comes to selecting a vendor, what's important is a big community, support systems. I feel communication is very important, whether it's an email or something else. Within a couple of hours, if somebody responds, that is helpful, if they can provide a quick solution. It pacifies the people on the other side, because we are dealing with a lot of users at one time.

I think BOARD is a very good tool. I have worked with different BI tools like Tableau and Cognos. I think BOARD is not a very heavy software. It's a very light software compared to others; it doesn't just crash sometimes. And given the cost and effectiveness, everything which comes into play for the organization, I think BOARD fits the bill.

It is definitely good. Depending on your data, and what kind of business you are doing, I think investing in BOARD is a good, viable solution, because it's very user-friendly, and once you get the hang of it you can do wonders. I've been able to accomplish that next thing, I figured it out without notes. If I had received a tutorial I don't know what I would have done. I would encourage people to get into it. I find that Tableau is good software too, but it can be confusing. It's nice software, but I would say BOARD is much more user friendly.

Currently, we use it for our sale forecasting and our supply chain planning. We have been with BOARD for about a year now, and there is still a lot for us to learn. We want to take it to the next level, and use it for our budgeting and predictive analytic capabilities, therefore having a more integrated usage across our organization.

We have better reporting and have been able to better track performance. We now have real-time data. Ultimately, it will help us to make better decisions as an organization.

With BOARD, it is having the real-time data. That is a big buy-in for us. Also, it allows people to quickly create dashboards with reports. These are the key features that we like.

Some of the features lacking in the current solution that we are looking for have been highlighted in BOARD 11, such as being able to send our user a mobile app, sending a PDF file but the user can go back to the data source, and some of ability around being managing the back-end data better. These seem to be addressed in BOARD 11, so we are looking forward to the rollout.

We have had some challenges with newer version of the rollout. We are looking forward BOARD 11 with its more refined functions.

It has great potential. Right now, we started with just one or two departments, but as we are able to demonstrate the success of what we do, we will be able to get more buy-in from more people.

We work closely with our BOARD technical team. I am happy with the level of service that we receive from BOARD.

We have SQL reporting, but we mostly use Excel for reporting. That is why we choose BOARD to help transform our reporting.

We definitely had some success with our implementation, but there were some good learning experiences on how we could allocate our resources and how we roll it out to our organization.

In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us.

We looked at different options. We have a long list of vendors and options that we narrowed down to BOARD.

BOARD allows us to customize our front-end based on our needs versus other systems where you just have to adapt your processes to their system.

It is important to have a clear strategy in the beginning of what you want to achieve. Make sure that you allocate the resources, then work with BOARD to ensure you have a successful launch.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• It has to be a reliable platform from a technical perspective. 
• It has to have good network support, customer service, and also have a reasonable price within our budget.

We have two primary use cases:

1. Visualizations and dashboards.
2. Budgeting, planning, and forecasting.

Relative to other products that I have worked with, it works quite well. Obviously, there is a little bit of organization that is required. However, overall, it runs quite well.

It allows them to look at their data differently. 

In the past, they were limited to spreadsheets. Coupled with this tool, they can catch their data to understand where they are at a lot quicker, then see what is going on.

The visualizations. It has a good set of visual elements that you can use and can explain quite well.

We are in the partner channel. I would like to see better relationships with the partners. For example, I have discussed it with the support team that when it comes to supporting the product, if a request comes in from a partner, we should be able to bypass Level 1 support. They should move to Level 2. They should assume that we have already done some of the initial legwork that Level 1 might have already done. We might know the exact cause, the exact root cause of the problem, and/or we need to figure out how we can fix it.

One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes.

The stability is pretty good. We have used other systems, and it is on par with the big competitors out there.

We have not had a chance to scale it up too much. We have had some test cases where we used some existing data to scale it up, but we really have not tested the limits of what it can do. I do not think there will be an issue in the years down the road with what they already have.

BOARD technical support is knowledgeable and helpful.

The product is much easier to use, because it is geared towards more of a user-friendly force with the implementation. The user substance view is a lot quicker. They see it, and you can quickly show something that they understand if their data is available. 

The implementation is probably quicker. With other products, because of the complexity, users might not like them so much.

We implement BOARD at different clients. We need to understand what their situation is, then we can figure out how best to help them with this tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: A commitment to the product as well as the willingness to help support the product.

Budgeting. It's performing very well.

The ease of designing. The ease of making it happen on a daily basis. What I mean by that is catching up daily. You just schedule the report and off it goes.

It has a lot of valuable features. Primary is its flexibility and versatility and, obviously, functionality goes along with that. Plus, it does that at a small footprint in the file servers, and does it very efficiently.

It's outstanding, because I don't know of any issues that we've had.

It will scale to whatever you need. You just need to find somebody to build the SQL statement and you're all set.

We have used technical support but not in the last couple or three years. We've had them come in and do training. The training group is very knowledgeable, and we're very happy with them. As far as the phone call support, like I said, we haven't used them in a few years, but it was very effective, as I recall.

It gets real difficult to use a lot of Excel spreadsheets, especially when you have 10 or 15 or more people using different spreadsheets, trying to get them all together. Not only that, but are their formulas correct? Don't get me wrong, Excel is a wonderful product, but this eliminates all that. 

Once you have somebody look at it and test the product, you only have to do it once, and then, you don't have to worry about a spreadsheet coming in from someplace else that isn't right.

When selecting or working with a vendor the most important criteria are

• performance
• functionality
• price goes along with that too.

The concept of how it works was a little bit hard for me to take, because I'm an old IT-er. Once I got past that, the complexity disappeared. Configuring the functionality of a report, for instance, you can get very simple or you can get very complicated. The point is, it can be whatever you need it to be.

There is a learning curve as there is with any product, no matter what the vendor tells you. But I would not say it's anything out of the ordinary, especially if you have newer folks working on it. What I mean by that is people that are new to the industry, younger folks. Like I said, us older folks have a difficult time grabbing onto that concept. But once that happened, it was easy.

There were several. There were a couple that were in the cloud, and we didn't like the cloud aspect of them. That was four or five years ago.

My purpose is telling them what they need and writing the initial SQL and building the capsule. Once I do that, I'm done, and then they just go off. I'm not a day-to-day user.

In terms of advice to a colleague who is looking at a similar solution, I don't know what their actual needs are, but my advice would be to go forward with this product. Don't be afraid to get some initial training, because they didn't want to supply that for us initially. My advice would be to get the initial training.