It’s 2021, any business that wants to be successful in today’s economy will need to understand the resources that it uses, the way they function in its business model, and how to utilize them best. As a business director or owner, it’s up to you to decide how to best utilize your available resources, figure out what additional resources you might need, and determine where your resources are being wasted. Resource management is a necessity for your business in 2021 if you want to remain competitive with your rivals.
However, as your service business scales managing your resources can become very messy without the right solutions and workflows in place. Lucky for you, an integrated PSA software solution with resources gives you the ability and visibility to…
- Kick start your projects much faster and more professionally
- Identify your resource needs with the highest accuracy
- Improve your resource utilization by matching your teams skill-sets with different projects
- Improve your team’s spirit and retention by taking skills, preferences, and professional development needs into account when making a decision when assigning to projects
- Ability to see the future of your resources with visibility into future hiring and skill development needs
Using an integrated resource management module provides you with an intuitive, data-driven UI for matching projects with your right resources. It also combines future resource projections with historical actuals in a single solution, giving you 20/20 visibility into your entire project’s profitability and performance against the budget, even before your client’s project is complete. This provides you and your team with an early warning prompt on potential problems so you can act on them appropriately before the damage is done.
Taking the above into consideration, let’s take a deeper look at 5 ways you can utilize a PSA solution to automate resource management…
1. Take Control of Your Supply & Demand in One Simple Solution
PSA software gives you the necessary tools to understand the overall supply and demand for resources and skills within your business. With PSA, you will have a real-time dashboard that will quickly show how busy resources are projected to be and what sort of projects are currently in motion. It also brings to light which resource needs have yet to be met and what kind of skills is required.
2. Simply & Easily Match Your Team with Projects
PSA software allows for scheduling workflows to be created and configured to allow your managers/team to request resources to fulfill or approve requests. You and your team with the right permissions can search for resources by skills, location, title, or other criteria to help get the perfect skill for a specific project. PSA software gives you an all-in-one solution where you can quickly identify resources matched by skill levels and availability.
3. Seamlessly Align Your Financial Forecasting Across Your Business
Reports and dashboards consolidate day-to-day scheduling data to show you who’s projected to work on what, who’s available, and who’s overbooked. This also helps you understand performance to budget at completion, instead of just performance to date. PSA software gives you the ability to measure the profitability of fixed-price projects before they’re complete.
4. Optimize resource utilization
PSA software gives you insights into what your team is working on throughout each day. You can use this feature to quickly identify who is working on what is billable or non-billable, allowing you to close the gap in revenue leakage. Normally you may wait until meetings or a weekly/monthly analysis before you know what’s going on, with PSA software your resources tasks can be updated daily for your review. Think about the amount of time you could save and the increase in your team’s productivity with this ability.
5. Collaborate quickly and easily across teams
Good PSA Software combines all departments, offering an effective and natural destination for communication, organizing, and collaboration across the team on a project level or a full business level. With PSA software you can easily move tasks between projects, assign people, upload assets as files, comment, and get the right eyes on the matter. It’s quick, easy, and done within one simple system allowing your team to increase productivity.
The New & Improved Way to Manage Billable Resources
Having an excellent team and delivering high-quality technology products doesn’t automatically set up your business for success. Some businesses still face unsatisfactory results. The combination of the human component with cutting-edge tools can’t really be effective without efficient and standardized delivery processes. Process standardization is a strategy focused on establishing a set of validated procedures that define the best and most reliable practices to be carried out within your business. At the same time, it allows the maximum use of human resources and technology, while maintaining a service quality adapted to your customer’s needs. This type of strategy is indispensable, promoting synergy between people and materials to achieve the most effective service methods for your business.
The truth is standardized processes are the backbone of your business performance. It gives you a baseline to track and measure performance, telling you whether you’re utilizing all available resources, allowing you to maximize revenue. Standardization will also put in place the structure for your team to execute high-quality work efficiently as well as provide a scalable infrastructure for the future growth of your business.
The demands and workflows of a services business are very unique in comparison to most businesses. Your core services/products are your resources and the skills they bring to deliver projects from conception to completion. So, you need a purpose-built solution such as PSA software to support and take the complexity out of your key workflow processes and one that works in tandem with process standardization.
In a nutshell, professional services automation software is an end-to-end solution for running a service-based business and managing the data generated by various business processes, which is why some have referred to it as the ERP software of the service industry. PSA software is designed to automate and manage your common business tasks. The goal is to ensure that customer projects are delivered on time, on or under budget and meets the customer’s needs and requirements. PSA software is primarily used by service-based companies – i.e. companies that produce something other than physical goods, such as any consulting-based firm. A service company’s challenge is to balance front-end service delivery and customer satisfaction with back-end operations (resource planning etc.). If your part of an industry that is project-focused and client-accountable you will likely benefit from PSA software. Companies that take the step and implement PSA have proven track records of beating out their competition.
Below are 3 ways you can utilize a PSA solution to automate the management of your billable resources…
1. Manage Supply & Demand
PSA software gives you the tools to understand the overall supply and demand of your resources and skills. With PSA, you’ll have a real-time dashboard that quickly shows you where resources are projected to be and what sorts of projects are currently in progress. It also brings to light which resource needs have yet to be met and what type of skills are required.
2. Align Your Financial Forecasting
Reports and dashboards consolidate day-to-day scheduling data to show you who’s projected to work on what, who’s available, and who’s overbooked. This also helps you understand performance to budget at completion, instead of just performance to date.
PSA software gives you the ability to measure the profitability of fixed-price projects before they’re complete.
3. Easily Match Your Resources with Projects
PSA software allows for scheduling workflows to be created and configured to allow your managers/team to request resources to fulfill or approve requests. You and your team with the right permissions can search for resources by skills, location, title, or other criteria to help get the perfect skill for a specific project. PSA software gives you an all-in-one solution where you can quickly identify resources matched by skill levels and availability.
PSA Software is built to address the entire resource management cycle in one unified, simple-to-use application. With a central dashboard view of your entire organization’s resources, you can better plan for and bid on future projects, make staffing decisions on current tasks, and ensure that everything is done on-time and within budget. Our innovative scheduling module is intuitive, flexible, and highly configurable that adapts integrates with your organization’s people, projects, and finances. It allows your project managers to define resource needs and helps resource managers to quickly identify how they can fill each requirement at the touch of a button.
If you can relate to the issues above, then it’s time to consider PSA Software. Regardless of the complexity of your business or the basic tools you currently use to get by, PSA software will help you streamline as a business.
PSA Software like CrossConcept Continuum is built to address the entire resource management cycle in one unified, simple-to-use application. With a central dashboard view of your entire organization’s resources, you can better plan for and bid on future projects, make staffing decisions on current tasks, and ensure that everything is done on-time and within budget. Our innovative scheduling module is intuitive, flexible and highly configurable which adapts and integrates with your organization’s people, projects and finances. It allows your project managers to define resource needs and helps resource managers to quickly identify how they can fill each requirement at the touch of a button.
