Benefits of Professional Services Automation Software

Professional services organizations with a globally distributed workforce often operate with disparate systems, inefficient manual processes and complex inter-dependent communications, resulting in inconsistent service delivery that directly impacts their project profitability. Professional services organizations need to realize what inefficiencies these systems are causing and how to streamline their work processes.

A report published by SPI Research in 2017 revealed significant improvement for businesses that moved to PSA software. These improvements include on-time and on-budget project delivery, higher resource utilization, increased profit margins, lower project cancellation rates and revenue leakages.

By adopting PSA software, professional services organizations can make better decisions, capture project time data, optimize resource utilization and profitability, and deliver projects on time. Here is how PSA solution will help you:

#1 Gain Complete Visibility on Data and Analytics

A smart PSA software provides clear visibility of project status, projected margins, billable hours, performance metrics and insights into the project lifecycle. Using this valuable data-driven insight, business leaders and managers can easily identify backlogs, budget creeps, and roadblocks and address potential issues immediately. PSA software automatically combines data from multiple sources and transforms it into actionable insights – for improved decision-making. Without PSA software, it is challenging to gain complete visibility into your project, and there are high chances that the project might go out of scope and budget creeps.

#2 Optimize Resource Utilization

Professional service automation software lets you comprehensively view available resources, allocated/unallocated resources, and resources on time off and vacation. PSA software provides accurate resource information, including availability, smart match, skills, location, employee type, and more. This makes it easier for managers to view and manage all resources across organizations, ensuring the right resources are being assigned to suitable projects. Using the resource management feature in PSA, you can crop out the bottleneck and make the most out of your resources. Furthermore, PSA monitors under and over-utilized resources so you can identify and address the potential burnout in your workforce. From skills mapping to bench management, PSA plays a vital role in managing resources efficiently.

#3 Increased Revenue and Profitability

PSA provides visibility to actual profitability and allows you to track expenses, billable/non-billable time, and leftover budget. Also, it gives timely updates on invoice status, contract closures, payment dues, and fixed bids and helps professional services organizations to forecast potential revenue opportunities. Many professional service firms are experiencing payment delays because of longer billing cycles, invoice errors, and cash flow shortfalls. To avoid payment delays, professional services organizations should leverage PSA software to invoice and bill clients accurately. By running the financial report within PSA, professional service organizations can get accurate visibility of profitability and understand how efficiently capital is spent.

#4 Reduced Administrative Tasks and Cost

According to UiPath’s 2021 Office Worker Survey, 67% of global office workers spend their time on repetitive tasks. Performing repetitive administrative tasks usually leads to employee burnout, making it impossible to perform critical tasks effectively. Automating administrative tasks will reduce the number of hours your resource spends, allowing them to work efficiently on billable work. With PSA, time and project data can be automatically captured, project status can be tracked, and payroll can be processed without intervention. As a result, resources can efficiently work on primary tasks without any unnecessary administrative burden.

#5 Greater Operational Efficiency 

Without the right PSA, projects might go out of scope, resources are left unmanaged, and it impacts the overall financial growth of a professional service organization. PSA provides a single, centralized platform to track operational gaps and the actual performance of the services delivery lifecycle (SDL) against planned revenue, cost and margin and serve clients faster. It enables project teams to examine every aspect of their business processes and potentially improve, eliminate or streamline how resources work. PSA is also highly beneficial in identifying which types of campaigns are most successful, which clients are most profitable, and what pricing is optimal to maximize profit and win more bids.

#6 Increased Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is vital to a company’s success – especially in the service industry. PSA software enables better client collaboration throughout the lifecycle of an engagement, enabling projects to be delivered in line with customer expectations. PSA helps you manage all of your customer activity – proposals, engagements, transactions, documents, and conversations – in one secure location, with desktop and mobile access for everyone involved. Having a comprehensive view of customer requirements streamlines customer service issues, promotes understanding of customer requirements throughout the organization, and simplifies regulatory compliance.

#7 Centralized Communication and Collaboration

Successful project delivery requires collaboration among team members, clients, and stakeholders. Lack of communication can lead to misunderstandings in the workflow, lowered returns on investment (ROI), and even revenue loss. With PSA software, project teams can easily move tasks between projects, get visibility into backlogs, and get timely notification of project updates in real time. Furthermore, PSA will keep stakeholders and project teams informed about the progress of the project, identify potential roadblocks, and suggest improvements. This greatly increases productivity and reduces the likelihood of miscommunications or misunderstandings.

Professional services organizations need a robust solution that caters specifically to their type of business and addresses the challenges posed by the dynamic workforce and disruptive technologies. PSA software provides real-time visibility into all business metrics-profits, margins, revenue, project, resource, cost, revenue leakage and billing data to help business leaders make proactive decisions. Further, with the ability to configure and schedule reports, PSA software can fulfill an organization’s reporting needs. Also, leverage advanced API for BI and prebuilt Tableau, PowerBI, and Google BigQuery connectors to meet specific analytics needs