Exciting Changes in 2022: A Look at the OpenAir Release Features

NetSuite OpenAir’s May 2022 release is heavily focused on enhancements to UI4. If your organization has not already made the switch to the new user interface, now is the time to develop a plan for the change and execute. Here are a few of the features that we at Top Step are excited about.

Redesigned Advanced Filters

Updates made to the Advanced Filters make this feature much more user-friendly and easier to view and manage filters. The redesigned Advanced Filter has moved slightly to the left and opens up to a panel with search criteria. It is more intuitive and requires less clicking back and forth. There is also a quick access dropdown menu with saved searches. Overall, the new layout is more compact, and users can more easily add multiple search and filter criteria.

Project Center Enhancements

These enhancements increase visibility of resource availability, allow for faster booking creation and modifications, and enhances overall usage and user experience.  The project center enhancements include:

• Resource Availability and Booking Indicators. This feature displays warnings for weekly conflicts, or availability, across all booked projects. You will click in the cell to display overage/underage vs. available hours.

  

• Copy & Paste vs Drag and Fill. Keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) allow for wuick updates. The drag and drop supports left to right (same user) as well as up and down (copy hour values from one user to several users).

  
  

NetSuite Connector Filter Builder

This feature removes the need for “<<END” and “END” tags while providing a dropdown for looking up valid fields by which to filter. It simplifies the interface for users unfamiliar with writing advanced mapping, but still allows free form typing for those who prefer this method. This applies to the workflow filters only and not to Lookup or If statements. The benefit for this feature is that it allows the user to easily click and select the desired function for the filter.

Copy Bookings with Projects

This feature adds a new copy function (bookings) for templatized project types. This is valuable for generic resources effectively “pre-allocated” to new projects for pipelining and planning.

Organizations with packaged product offerings or more predictable planning for resource allocations with new deals can benefit from immediately booking resources upon save. For example, if every project plan should include 80 hours of project manager time, this can now be auto-populated with all new projects initiated from a template.

Benefits of these features that initial bookings are created at the same time as the project, saving setup time. This also allows the user to simply update the resource, dates, and any other details.

Redesigned OpenAir User Experience

The new user interface will be deployed to all OpenAir instances between April 2022 and June 2022. Email correspondence will be sent from NetSuite OpenAir to notify you of your scheduled upgrade date.

We are always happy to assist you be it advisement and usage of new OpenAir features to optimization and development of reports.