Top 3 Benefits Of Leveraging Automation For Professional Services Organizations

The digital transformation is both challenging and revolutionizing industry in equal measure. For many organizations, this has meant restructuring themselves so they can continue to deliver in the digital age and remain competitive while enhancing customer experience and building an efficient workforce. How do they achieve this? For a lot of these businesses, the solution is automation. Professional services organizations (PSOs) have also taken the same approach.

As they strive to enhance their performance, PSOs are increasingly turning to automation – and with good reason. A 2019 survey from Service Performance Insight (SPI) Research, LLC showed PSOs using automation achieved a 7% higher billable utilization.

As the Professional Services Automation: Exploration of Benefits for Organizations report highlights, automation can deliver many other benefits. Automation provides an altogether more structured approach, bringing an end to the reporting, monitoring, and communication difficulties that can otherwise occur.

Automation also streamlines the way companies work and encourages them to look closer at their business processes and identify areas for improvement.  All of this can result in greater efficiency, productivity, and an increase in business growth and earnings.

Automation software is becoming adopted widely in professional services and project-based organizations striving to improve efficiencies and remain competitive such as:

• Information Technology businesses with IT services departments
• Business Consulting
• Digital Marketing and Communications agencies, and
• Architecture, Engineering, and Construction businesses.

The NetSuite OpenAir platform is a tool that enables automation. In this article, we will focus on some advantages of using automation in your PSO and how OpenAir can enable automation in these crucial areas.

Access to Real-Time Information

Accessing the information needed to make real-time decisions in a fast-paced environment is one of the biggest challenges for PSOs, and many organizations struggle with this. However, automation enables up-to-date information PSO’s need to ensure they are responding to data.

Through automation, PSOs can access crucial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as:

• Year on year revenue growth
• Utilization rate
• Project margin
• Annual revenue per employee
• Non-billable project hours
• Project profitability

By managing your operational data within an integrated system, you can provide dashboards tailored for each role within the organization, enabling these team members instant access to the vital information they need to be successful.

Lower Costs and Increased Productivity

Administrative tasks are a necessary burden for all PSOs, but these tasks are also time-consuming and result in additional admin costs and lost productivity. As research shows, this lost time is a problem for many organizations impacting their bottom line. The study from Sage revealed that U.S. based businesses waste 5% of their time just on manual tasks. However, using automation helps solve both problems. Automation reduces admin time by removing the need for manual updates, tracking, and reducing repetitiveness because there is more than one system that needs the information related to PS operations (i.e., Financial system, CRM system, etc.).  A robust automation tool such as NetSuite OpenAir can easily be configured to automate tasks that were once manual, allowing you to shift that time to tasks that contribute to generating revenue or improving client satisfaction.

A further way automation can improve productivity is through time management and project management tools. With Project management and time management as an integrated part of your system, you gain the ability to manage monitor projects and track how long each task takes.  This, in turn, will help identify any areas of billable activity, while also tracking non-billable hours. When this information is acted on, it can then be used to boost efficiency and identify those that are profitable and those that are less profitable.

The overall positive impact on the business is that with higher levels of profitability, you then have the ability to hire and retain the highest quality employees, command the highest billable rates, and can invest in growth. For any PSO, this is key to remaining competitive and long-term survival.

Improved Collaboration and Workflow

One of the main challenges of a PSO in today’s digital world is that we are rarely working in a traditional office environment. In fact, your staff and project teams may include people located in different countries, time zones, as well as subcontractors. This can sometimes limit communication collaboration and access to vital client and project information, while also further hindering productivity. When PSOs introduce automation, it can improve workflow in several ways, including:

• The tracking of employee and client tasks
• Providing everyone on the team with easy access to up-to-date project information
• Facilitating interaction with team members
• Enhancing customer service
• Optimize resource planning and utilization
• Integrating time and expense reporting

When considering a PSA tool, it is important to ensure it is cloud-based and can natively support a virtual team.

Summary

The digital transformation has led to many companies restructuring themselves from the inside out and rethinking how they approach common processes. One way professional services organization services are achieving this is through automation tools like NetSuite OpenAir.

Whether you are an experienced NetSuite OpenAir user, or you are just starting out, Top Step offers NetSuite OpenAir PSA solutions and services to help you at every stage. We have 12 years’ experience deploying and optimizing NetSuite OpenAir and have established a strong customer base of hundreds of satisfied customers.