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"One of our biggest wins was pushing in utilization. Now we couldn’t live without it. It is ingrained in what we do. Being able to work out headcount and utilization split by region/practice/group has impacted the whole business, not just Services Operations."

Mark Conklin, Director Services Systems and Tools, Salesforce

Founded in 1999, Salesforce is the world’s #1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company and THE Customer Success Platform. Salesforce was an early adopter of FinancialForce PSA, using the product to successfully run their professional services business. With the acquisition of ExactTarget, Salesforce decided to consolidate the professional services organizations and run them as a single organization exclusively on FinancialForce PSA.

IN-DEPTH PDF

Products in Use: FinancialForce PSA

Previous system: Netsuite OpenAir

Location: Global

Industry: Technology

Business Issues

  • Running two different systems with no overall view into projects
  • Extracting key information was time consuming
  • Difficult to share information in real-time across the business
  • Services Operations acted as single point of contact for all project queries causing bottleneck

We couldn’t have made the move over to PSA without the support we received from FinancialForce. With premier support we get responses to our cases within 2 hours. This has saved us a lot of time internally.

Mark Conklin, Director Services Systems and Tools, Salesforce

Benefits & Results

Sustaining a professional services business with FinancialForce PSA

  • Utilization up—more focus on utilization targets has increased utilization
  • Improved margins—Correlation between visibility into project margins and increase in project margins
  • With PSA, Salesforce has more visibility into project profitability
  • Having all formulas calculated within PSA has meant substantial time savings

Deeper insight into projects

  • Real time project status now visible to all, from management down, through a color coded dashboard
  • Ability to bucket time into billable, non billable/non utilized, and utilized gives new visibility into hour allocation and how to free up capacity for more projects. Can also address issues and anomalies where time isn’t being billed
  • New insight into project margins have allowed Salesforce to focus on bigger projects with higher margins

Greater efficiencies

  • Double the amount of projects can be created in the system each day now that project creation is automated
  • Expenses, which are pushed from Concur into projects, can now be billed with time and materials together from PSA
  • Running projects smarter using filters in Resource Planner—Project Managers can apply and save their own filters allowing them to see when resources become free rather than waiting for information from Services Operations team
  • Services Operations freed up to work smarter with Customer Success team and able to focus more on project success vs. project administration
  • Resource planner and assignments in PSA mean less resources are needed and hours saved per week
  • Monthly utilization calculations are now generated in 2 days, not 2 weeks

Project Management Improved

  • Having visibility into hours entered vs. hours assigned allows Project Managers to adjust swiftly if budgets heading off course
  • Better aligning bookings with billings has improved operational performance

One team, one tool

  • Enhanced communication on projects across organization
  • Project burn reports which used to take half a day to extract can be pulled from PSA by anyone in seconds
  • Real time information has led to self sufficiency—Project Managers are able to respond to customer questions directly
  • Instant access to see hours left on a project
  • Efficient and speedy timecard approval through 3 levels of management
  • The executive team can see a complete picture of global projects, known as global project pulse

Managing subcontractors with PSA Communities

  • Subcontractors are able to view/manage projects and submit time within PSA leading to even greater time savings and efficiencies
  • Teams can share, store, and manage specific project related files with customers and subcontractors