It’s a pretty familiar tale, really: a software company decides to increase revenue by growing their professional services business. Despite how common such a move is, though, it is often unanticipated. Instead, it can happen almost spontaneously in order to help at a tricky moment in the business’ growth as it climbs a particularly steep portion of the curve to success. And because professional services often grow like this – as an adjunct to the core product business – they often begin their growth without the kind of conscientious attention and infrastructure support that allows them to be grow into all that they can be.
For example, a startup software company might begin with professional services staff of two or three people who are there to simply and directly support the company’s core product – until the company hits an all-too-common cashflow challenge.
That’s when a lot of companies begin to back their way into expanding their professional services practice. While they remain focused on and dedicated to being a product company, they also need to manage cashflow and boost revenue.
For many companies in that situation, it’s easy to see that even a tiny professional services wing of the business has real growth potential. And so they begin to grow their professional services. They gain new revenue, provide excellent value to customers, while their team, often having expertise around their software product’s specific domain, command respectable rates. And so, without ever wavering from it’s focus on its core software business, a software company can find its professional services team growing quickly from just a couple of people to more than 20 or 30.
And as the team and its revenues grow, many companies find their newly burgeoning professional services teams begin to suffer growing pains. For example, even as revenues may grow, costs grow too quickly to achieve the kinds of margins you might expect to see.
No where else is the expression “time is money” more true than in services. So one of the first things a services operation has to do is schedule its time efficiently. At some point in the growth of any successful professional services team, the need for new tools designed to facilitate maximum efficiency begins to arise.
And the need for a Service Resource Planning (SRP) solution such as OpenAir becomes clearer and clearer the bigger a professional services team grows. As a services business grows, often the most obvious and painful symptoms come when management doesn’t have fast and simple access to current data about who is working on what, if a given project is progressing as planned, or when any particular resource is going to be free to start a new project.
By providing better and more current information, an effective SRP solution decreases bench time while avoiding overbooking – both of which can be costly and demoralizing. Also, without a good SRP solution, it’s almost impossible to keep resources allocated so that their highest value skills are leveraged to their maximum. And that’s just the beginning.
Traditionally, professional services teams spend time manually logging time and expense – often in inconvenient formats that still have to be analyzed and manipulated by accounting resources to work with back office applications. Each of those steps and all of that manual work and transcription creates opportunities for errors – errors that are difficult to detect and difficult to trace. If one time sheet for one employee goes astray, for instance, that can result in a loss of up to $12K – or more! Not only does this error-prone manual work create the possibility of hard-to-track errors, it also requires unbillable drudgery and overhead hours.
All that manual effort slows down the time between accepting, beginning, and accomplishing the work, and issuing an invoice. Plus, it can even slow down a customer’s speed in making payment. Customers are often quicker to pay when invoices have detailed records of how billed time was spent and what was accomplished. A well-integrated SRP eliminates these bottlenecks, opportunities for error, and delays while establishing a scalable basis for healthy, efficient growth in margins, projects, and resources.
When OpenAir is integrated into a business by an experienced team like Innovergent, it automates coordination between your professional services team and the rest of your enterprise. Your professional services team doesn’t have to know or learn anything about complex ERP solutions such as NetSuite. They can log time sheets, allocate resources, issue invoices, and conduct planning – all within OpenAir. Meanwhile, OpenAir and your ERP are coordinated to seamlessly share and exchange pertinent data.
The business processes of the professional services team are integrated end-to-end throughout your company. OpenAir integrates with CRM applications at the sales end, and into financial applications such as NetSuite, Intacct, or even Quickbooks at the accounting end. Communications among all phases of the business are enhanced.
NetSuite dashboards are designed and deployed to quickly reveal pertinent metrics from OpenAir about the professional services group and its individual consultants to distinct audiences such as the Professional Services Director, the sales team, and accounting and finance executives- and OpenAir dashboards are created to convey key information from NetSuite. The professional services team itself is presented with an intuitive and easy way to not only capture their time and expenses – but also a convenient way to capture and map best practices in a shared repository that can be used across multiple projects by the entire staff.
And all of this functionality creates an environment in which high-value projects with the best outlook for success are identified early, accomplished efficiently, and billed and paid quickly. In many cases, the cost of such a well-integrated SRP project can be recouped in as little as six months.
And how has Innovergent perfected its SRP integration expertise? Innovergent itself uses OpenAir to capture successful methodologies and to automate, track, plan, implement, and conduct its own professional services projects.
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