We have used a few over the years, including things like MS Project. The issue you are up against is that you have to temper the time, effort and data that you put into it, to the info you get out of it.
The issues we faced were things like MS Project just took much time to input data. For bigger companies I can see it working well as you can devote resources into feeding the software with data. We also tried very simple PM tools and found that it couldn't tell us the data we needed. So catch 22 as we couldn't find the sweet spot. In the end we ended up building our own. The version of this was just Excel with some macros behind it. We could then tailor it to just entering the data we needed but still giving us the results that we needed.
The issues we faced were things like MS Project just took much time to input data. For bigger companies I can see it working well as you can devote resources into feeding the software with data. We also tried very simple PM tools and found that it couldn't tell us the data we needed. So catch 22 as we couldn't find the sweet spot. In the end we ended up building our own. The version of this was just Excel with some macros behind it. We could then tailor it to just entering the data we needed but still giving us the results that we needed.