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After kicking the tires for 72 hours or so on the recent funded here are some thoughts on it vs. My go-to for similar functions around project management and collaboration, By no means is this comprehensive, but just some notes on some time with the tools.The Good about Airtable over Smartsheet:. Airtable is more fun: Playing with data is much more of a pleasure in Airtable than in Smartsheet.
GUI feels fresher: Airtable is more of a fluid feel for sure. Dynamic data refresh: Grouping and updating data happens in real-time. This is pretty great to see live as you change grouped data, etc. Smartsheet requires more reloads of things. Multiple tabs vs. Single sheets: The Airtable model of complex bases allows for more layering here than the design of Smartsheet.
So, the. Lots of templates: Airtable, although they are quite new in town, have done a wonderful job building out templates and making them available and easy to drive into. Licensing per workspace vs.
Users: Kind of big deal. The licensing for Airtable is at the workspace vs. The per user stuff of Smartsheet. You can publish Smartsheets and give non named users edit ability, but still tough for user adoption.
Making a workspace a “pro” workspace with a bunch of “bases” makes sense since you want users to be involved without a hassle or limit. Handling collaborators: because of the licensing difference, you don’t have to play games with users here and you can just put people in as needed.
Slack integration: Going to play with this more, but the fact that it’s baked-in is quite nice. Images attachments: The way Airtable does this is much nicer than Smartsheet. It does previews as well on the row. Grouping records vs. Indenting: Airtable has a nicer feel than Smartsheet on sub rows and groupings.
Smartsheet you have to indent or outdent and it is more correct technically, but Airtable can get there in what feels nicer and more dynamically. Options on format, Editing fields, and hiding fields: Airtable has more depth here. Really nice to play with and dymanically add.The Bad on Airtable vs. Smartsheet:. No Gannt View: Yeah, this is a big hit for tech project managers. Maybe I’m old school, but no Gannt view is tough to handle. Probably coming, but yeah tough one to hit.
Calendar view is there, but I guess the cool kids aren’t using Gannts anymore. Highlight changes: Airtable can’t really do this. I’m sure it’s coming but actually quite a great feature in Smartsheet if you have a lot of data and you have casual or semi-casual users that only care about what has changed. Dependencies: Not seeing how Airtable has this yet. Gotta be coming here soon no?.
Branding options: Smartsheet does a nice job here. It’s just more mature on this. No font options or formatting: Another tough one to navigate right now if you want to bold or adjust font size in view.
Minimal setting on printing in Airtable, but not cutting it right now. Row colors: I tend to use that a lot. Airtable made a design choice to only paint a small slot on the primary cell for this but you can paint entire rows with background colors in Smartsheet.
Conditional Formatting: Smartsheet is just more mature here as well. I’m sure Airtable will build on what they have, but tough to not have the options I have in Smartsheet around this so I can format and add colors here.
Printing scaling: Maybe it’s just me, but output to page width is a no go. Bugs are bugs and Airtable will improve, but this is no bueno when you want to get a base out to a 11×17 or something for folks. Nickel-and-dimey stuff: I could be more sensitive to this than others, but if you get a paying account for Airtable, let us have colors.
I get they are trying to figure out their freemium model differentiation, but it felt more ticky-tack than it should have. Built-in symbology: Smartsheet has some, Airtable doesn’t.
I guess you just use emoji copy/paste which works, but that also works on Smartsheet. Building out some symbology icons, etc. Would be nice.
Cell text wrapping: Just something that they missed so far. Kind of annoying as it is when getting cut-off on cell length. Text and stuff is there, but not in view. They have to add that when they start to give us font and format options. “Blocks” do what?: Yeah, I’m sure they are awesome for people extending the platform, but every time I tried to pull one in, it didn’t make any sense for me yet. Perhaps, my use cases just didn’t warrant it but they seem like nice avenues for extending the Airtable platform.
I’m just not using them for my needs.That is all I can think of right now. I get that Airtable is a newbie and it will improve. I have to say, it’s impressive and I’m in on it, but I’m finding it tough to go all in on it without some major adds to give it the polish and functions needed that are currently present in Smartsheet around PM work.
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Hit the report button!Other subreddits you might enjoy:Working Snoo logo. Hi,(warning: lost post coming).Hey fellas, so let me jump right in. I co-run a family business ('engineer-to-order' manufacturing) with hundreds of employees on three different worksites. We don't have a budget for an ERP system, and so we thought of clearing the mess of our local drives, which are overcrowded with literally thousands of different Excel files which we exchange over email between different worksites. On top of that, we have a lot of engineers (50+) and we currently don't have any project management software (don't ask why). I'm currently leading an Odoo rollout at my shop.
Its very powerful but be prepared to adjust some of your current practices to meet the rigors of MRP. Until you get it fully loaded and running it will seem a lot less efficient but it will pay off particularly in quality once you're rolling.
Most importantly don't neglect training! Everyone will hate it at first but find a few champions and keep pushing. It takes a lot more time than you think so plan it out and then double your time expectations.
Have you looked into Office 365 with Access? Where I am we make extensive use of Planner for project tracking and updates, Teams seems like a nice central hub for communication and planning, but we just started using it, and SharePoint is an excellent product.
You can migrate your Excel files into MS Access and create some very powerful databases. Honestly, with some effort MS Office can do most, if not all, of what the pricey alternatives can accomplish. That said, Access is not an easy software to set up. Once the tables and relationships are set it is very easy though.
You have professional engineers you can't think just because you are a 3rd world country you don't have to step up your game.Market forces will push on you and the prepared and organized company will be able to take that push and put it into profit.I recently hired a software developer who was working for a firm in Mexico whose client was Telcel the national carrier. I paid him the same but we bought professional software for project management, technical tools for software development; IDEs, TeamCity. Normal stuff for us here in USA.He said that with better tools he thinks of his time there as developing with crayons. They only used free tools, and managed with Excel. I thought that was so crazy.
Big staff too like 15 developers, versus a team of 5 with us.When the monthly salary was only $1.5k USD a month why spend $2k on software a year?Because quality of the product matters more to me than the cost. We were able to attain that with just money, most of the time that can't be done.Until your dad gets over that cost saving idea you are stuck. Maybe one day you can make your own firm and build it up with a different model.Now you are stuck until you change.
I (made to order custom architectural products manufacturer) am using a combination of a small boutique ERP that we customized to generate a dynamic BOM, along with Wrike for project management and Copper (previously Prosperworks).We are looking at Doing to replace this combination of tools but even that would take significant custom programming.I have used airtable for prospecting clients and it worked well in this limited capacity but I think it would take a lot of workarounds to get it to work as an ERP replacement if you do anything complex. Whether you recognize it or not, you are using an ERP system now. It's Excel, a CRM, and email.
They are all siloed and you're cobbling together what you can on the cheap. This works for mom and pop shops, but not so well for companies at the size you are describing.I strongly recommend you start allocating a budget for an ERP system specific to manufacturing, even if just core modules for now. Add additional functionality as time goes on.
If you can't afford a Tier 2 system, there are cheaper ones like those you mention, but they tend to be a catch-all solution. Zoho One sticks out. I want to say its something like $1 a user, but I don't know about implementation costs and it probably doesn't do much in the way of catering to manufacturing specifically. Taking the hit for a T2 implementation now may be a better move in the long run. Airtable is more like an Intranet/collaboration software from what I understand. I have a friend that runs a company of about 15, they use Airtable for exactly this purpose.If nothing else, talk to who you can at established manufacturers in your region. At your size, surely you have connections to those other organizations.
See if they are using ERP and, if so, which and why. Talk to their IT staff and controllers, people who are in the system and using it every day.Why are you so set on an on-premise solution?Because you are a manufacturer look at Infor, Epicor, IQMS, maybe NetSuite (though they do process manufacturing better than discrete).
JobBoss and Global Shop are other ERPs we see prospects considering in this field specifically.I hope this helps. Time to make some decisions. Thank you for your comment, it’s just that I live in a post-Soviet country and our manufacturing is extremely outdated. I have colleagues with 25+ years experience in industry who have never used a smartphone.
I have a IT infrastructure running on Windows XP, except for the top management. And even some people in top management, like our operations director, don’t have a computer. The only thing that is sort of computerized is accounting, and maybe warehouse management, because it is directly tied to accounting.I’ve spoken to Infor people, they have quite a few projects here, but their system is expensive, really long to implement (15+ months), and will require massive manpower to develop it & train the user base.I think I’ll first check ECM solutions, and maybe Odoo or Zoho. Should be a good start.