Services organizations with a global workforce often find it challenging to comply with regulatory guidelines across geographies. Besides managing talent across regional boundaries, they must also adhere to regional regulations, local work practices, and other requirements. As a result, it becomes extremely important for business leaders and managers to get clear visibility into every aspect of the business, as it helps them plan more effectively.
Organizations must count on Professional Services Automation software to tackle every challenge adeptly. Professional services software acts as a major productivity enabler for most organizations. It helps organizations automate repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks to save valuable time and energy for their resources, enabling them to focus on more creative tasks.
A comprehensive PSA software suite provides visibility into time and data related to projects, resources, financials, and planning. By leveraging PSA software, organizations can easily comprehend the profitability of any project before it commences, and also realize the anticipated profits during the project execution phase.
Let’s glean through some of the most compelling reasons you must count on PSA software.
1. Lack of Real-Time Visibility
In the age of remote working, it has become quite challenging to provide every stakeholder with a timely project status update. While most organizations have started discussing things like project status, challenges, and obstacles, over calls, managers often lack granular insights into their projects. The lack of visibility or real-time updates makes it difficult for project managers to identify tasks that should be automated. A PSA solution offers the following benefits:
- A PSA software acts as a single source of truth for project time data pertaining to project tasks, resources, finance metrics, and more. This allows managers to gain granular insights and real-time visibility into projects and other metrics.
- Managers can further utilize this data to gain complete control over project resources, costs, billing, and administrative overheads.
- A centralized and scalable PSA software also allows you to automate most of the tasks that would otherwise become an administrative overhead.
2. Compliance Issues and Integration Challenges
As employees of global organizations work from diverse geographical realms, organizations are compelled to meet and abide by all regional regulatory guidelines. Some organizations work with local vendors to manage compliance with statutory rules and regulations of various jurisdictions.
However, this often creates data silos and hampers large-scale automation initiatives. As complex tech ecosystems of leading organizations comprise diverse systems, it becomes important to integrate them seamlessly before launching global automation programs. Leveraging various systems and tools that lack seamless integration can thus limit the scope of automation. To meet regulatory requirements across jurisdictions, your organization needs self-driving PSA software.
- PSA tools are equipped with enterprise-grade firewalls and SSL encryption to protect your data, which further helps you stay compliant.
- You can also integrate your PSA software seamlessly with your organization’s tech ecosystem.
- By connecting disparate systems, you can identify new automation opportunities and also create a more connected employee experience.
3. Inaccurate Bidding and Pricing
In order to make more informed, accurate, and effective business decisions you have to make the most of every opportunity that comes your way. In the data-rich business world, it is important to unify a disconnected ecosystem to improve the entire decision-making process. Project managers need complete access to all the available data as well as the flexibility to analyze any opportunity. You must empower them with a thorough analysis of “what if” scenarios so that they can make more accurate bidding and pricing decisions. Managers must also have a clear understanding of how modification in cost, price, and utilization rate can impact a project.
An intelligent PSA solution:
- Allows project managers to simulate profit and revenue scenarios.
- Helps managers make accurate bidding and pricing decisions by analyzing project utilization goals, revenue goals, margins goals, and billing rate goals.
- Is specifically programmed to consolidate all project-related costs, which further enables decision-makers to devise a profitable strategy.
- Enables managers to view billing rates in real-time and identify the rates that can positively impact project profitability. Since these calculations are done automatically, PSA solutions can help you achieve profitability goals successfully.
4. Ineffective Resource Utilization and Management
Services organizations often fall prey to ineffective resource utilization. Project managers tend to count on a specific set of qualified, skilled, and competent resources to accomplish any project-related task. The qualified, skilled, and competent resources tend to experience employee burnout, whereas the rest of the resources remain unutilized or underutilized. This happens primarily because managers lack a centralized mechanism of selecting the right set of people for any specific task. Managing all the resource allocation and resource utilization tasks using spreadsheets often makes it difficult for managers to ensure optimal resource utilization.
A PSA solution:
- Helps large organizations by providing all-inclusive resource management capabilities.
- Enables managers can view allocation levels of resources using dynamic charts, which helps in ensuring maximum utilization of resources extensively.
- Performs capacity planning by generating forecast reports. The data in such reports can drive hiring decisions and strategize upskilling programs for employees.
- Leverages the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a smart resource recommendation engine aimed at ensuring maximum utilization of available resources.
5. Failure to Accomplish Profitability Goals
Organizations often fail to harvest the desired outcomes from multiple projects, and this happens due to different reasons. The most common cause for project failures is an ineffective bidding and forecasting process. You must track the historical data of similar projects to make intelligent bidding and forecasting. A comprehensive analysis of historical data can help you monitor and track profitability metrics to decide and plan efficiently. By analyzing the data, you also get a 360-degree view of project metrics, resources, and finances.
A reliable PSA solution:
- Helps project managers calculate the profitability of any project smartly. Many professional services organizations have already started using PSA tools to calculate the actual costs associated with delivering any project successfully.
- Manages all the aspects of projects, such as capturing billable hours, defining workflows, managing approvals, applying relevant rates, etc.
- Helps manage financial metrics and discover new revenue opportunities by consolidating data from multiple resources across your organization.
- Analyzes project health and cash flows, enabling project managers to smartly set profitability goals and accomplish them by consolidating relevant data and analyzing it comprehensively.
Choose a Cloud-Ready PSA software
Considering what has been discussed above, it is a prudent step to choose a PSA solution for your business. However, you must choose the best-suited solution smartly to leverage all its compelling benefits. It is recommended that large professional services organizations must invest in an enterprise-ready, cloud-powered PSA solution to accomplish the end objective of agility, flexibility, profitability, and security.
Author Bio
Arpan Patra enjoys good books, traveling, and writing on a wide range of subjects, from coffee to technology.