Profit driver 5: Time and Expenses
How does your time and expense management impact profit?
IT Services organizations are under huge pressure to drive their propositions up the value chain and halt the relentless commoditization of their portfolio. Increasing value perception requires a shift towards creating innovative services, repeatable processes and attracting, hiring and keeping the very best minds in the industry.
Strong front and back office systems also play a crucial role, including tight control of time and expenses, understanding the pipeline and ensuring that projects are performed on time, within budget and to the highest quality possible. However these control mechanisms are often stand-alone applications which inhibits the connected view an IT Services organization requires across all aspects of its operations to ensure maximum profit from its journey up the value chain.
High performing IT Services organizations are not only able to view time and expense information but, crucially, analyze it in the context of every other back office control thanks to tight integration not only with their resource and project management but also their CRM systems.
Being able to place time and expense information in context leads to persistent profitability.
It’s time to profit
Our IT clients achieve persistent profitability through our Professional Services Automation system that goes far beyond the siloed management of billable and non-billable time & expenses. They get intelligent context thanks to integrated resource and project management with embedded CRM. It gives them a shot at maximizing profit from hard won value perception increases by:
- Producing better estimates with a clear view, up front of the margin sacrifice, if any and making intelligent revenue decisions
- Assessing the impact of current project overrun charges against other new projects in the pipeline for the same client
- Placing time and expense overruns on new services in the context of a client’s overall profit contribution to the business
- Identifying the true time cost of a new service in the context of the predicted cost and planning accordingly
- Comparing time and expense performance of different resources on new services and responding accordingly through training, mentoring or better allocation
Not only are we more efficient, but we’re more effectively scheduling our team members. Having access to real-time data allows us to balance work load and work assignments to ensure that the right people are assigned to the right projects. This leads to higher customer and employee satisfaction. As a result of the new tools, Perceptive has realized a 3% reduction in voluntary attrition across the
professional services team.
- Patrick Kearney, VP, Professional Services at Perceptive Software
