3 Big Time Savings with Professional Services Automation

Professional service organizations have a lot of moving parts. Resources have different skills, different availability, and even different regional access. Project leaders juggle multiple client priorities. Team leads need to understand resource availability and usage. And leadership needs a handle on all of these.

Without a dedicated tool, professional service organizations typically turn to a host of other options, like spreadsheets, that are neither made for the task or equipped to do it well. This results in lots of manual work, tedious data entry, and, inevitably, errors. Reporting takes days or weeks, leading to missed opportunities and a lack of visibility. But to get a better view, more people would need to spend more time on the ineffective tools that keep them from doing more meaningful and effective work.

That’s where a Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool comes in. A PSA reduces the amount of time your team spends managing tasks so they can spend more time working on those parts of the business that help your organization and your revenue grow.

3 Time Savings that a PSA Brings to a Project-Based Organization

Streamline Project Management

So much of what a professional services organization does relies on well-managed projects. A PSO touches everything from resource allocation and usage to revenue projection and realization. So it’s essential your project management be as efficient and accurate as possible.

With a PSA, project managers, resource managers, project leads, and organizational leaders all have immediate access to transparent, precise views of projects. In some PSAs, like NetSuite, project managers can put placeholders in for named resources during the planning process so that the team can see what skills are needed and when. This creates a more unified view of resource demand across clients as well as within a single project. The result is better visibility that maximizes utilization and directs hiring, retraining, and even team availability for project kick-offs.

With the information readily available, leaders no longer need to wait for updates or reports on project progress or billings. Plus, a PSA can offer role-based access, so those who need the ability to change plans and approve hours can, while others who only need view access can see projects, enter hours, and gain visibility on resource availability, all within a single tool.

Reduce Data Entry

Data entry can be the source of a lot of lost time. Not just because of the time it takes to get the data into the system. But manual data entry can and frequently does result in mistakes and errors. Entries must be checked and rechecked, and even then, there can be issues. When that same data needs to be replicated in multiple places, the problem is compounded.

With a PSA, however, data can be shared in several ways and with no manual intervention. Data entered at one point can be replicated to other pertinent points in the system without manual input. For instance, hours entered by a team member can be used in project and resource planning and in revenue reporting and projections, all without needing to enter the information into multiple points in the solution.

A PSA can also act as a hub for all of the other systems within an organization. Integrating with other tools across the business, your PSA can take in data for planning and reporting and feed data back out for sales, accounting, or any other operational needs.

Automates Reporting

The keys to improvement and growth come from having visibility into where the business is and what the future looks like. That requires timely and accurate reporting – something where a PSA excels.

Unlike a spreadsheet, which can require hours of manipulation by a skilled user, PSAs offer dashboards and the ability to create a report on the fly. This means that leaders can have the information they need to make data-driven decisions at their fingertips at any time.

Additionally, professional services teams can reclaim time spent on regular reporting – from project status to resource utilization to revenue realization. Report automation allows teams to set up reporting parameters and create these reports without spending hours weekly or monthly in their creation. The time reclaimed can be spent on higher leverage tasks, and leaders and project managers will have timely, accurate information from which to work.

A PSA Pays for Itself in Valuable Time Saved

A Professional Services Automation solution is invaluable to an organization. A PSA helps increase revenue, offers resource management tools, and reduces costs. Many of these come from the core benefit of a PSA – it saves you and your team time at every task and every level.

If you’re looking for ways to increase your team’s effectiveness with a PSA solution, contact Top Step. We’ve helped hundreds of businesses, like yours, define and select the right PSA tool for their business, configure it, create customized functionality for it, and train teams to understand the value of the solution now in their hands. Top Step’s experts can streamline the PSA implementation process for your organization from start to finish.