When services organizations don’t have a solution in place that dives deep into their internal projects and resources, day-to-day operations can quickly turn to chaos, resulting in inefficient operations, unnecessary expenses, poor service, and revenue leakage.
Given these material risks, professional services automation (PSA) software is a logical tool that can help manage a company’s assets and projects to deliver better financial results. But business intelligence takes these PSA capabilities to another level, empowering traditional PSA software with data-driven capabilities that offer more functionality, clarity and value to an organization.
Here are eight ways your business can benefit from a PSA solution combined with business intelligence.
1. Resource Management Is Dramatically Improved
A PSA solution offers easy visibility into your company’s entire resource pool. Instead of viewing resources on a project-by-project basis, you can allocate resources more effectively according to top business priorities.
Business intelligence delivers actionable insights and can automatically make recommendations regarding resource management.
2. Project Visibility Is Improved, in Real Time
A PSA solution with business intelligence offers comprehensive visibility into each ongoing project, including resource utilization, personnel management, timelines, and other information.
This information can also be viewed in real time, as well as documented in reports, allowing organizations to use such a tool to make business decisions with the latest information available.
3. Project and Task Management Is Standardized
As a centralized platform that can handle projects and other tasks, PSA software makes complex project and task management easy by using data to standardize the management process, end-to-end.
This improves the mobility of personnel when they’re being switched onto new projects as a means of optimizing resource management. It also makes it easy for managers to quickly view and assess projects and tasks without having to understand the unique management methods being applied.
4. All Actions Are Visible Through an Audit Trail
Visibility and transparency lead to better accountability for businesses, as well as improved quality assurance. If a mistake is made in the course of a project, for example, an audit trail can help you figure out where the error was made.
When combined with business intelligence, an audit trail can also identify markers of success, including KPIs that indicate strong performance on a given project, which translates to performance improvements across other future projects and tasks.
5. Built-In Analytics Can Inform Strategy Decisions
A standard PSA solution can help you manage projects and resources for better results. But when business intelligence is added to the mix, you’re able to use data from your reports to inform higher-level strategy decisions.
Reports can feature data visualizations for better presentation and analysis by executive decision makers, helping you turn your PSA software into an engine for better leadership.
6. Business Services Are Rendered Faster and More Efficiently
With better resource management and visibility into business operations, you can allocate resources and prioritize tasks to ensure that projects meet set deadlines, providing on-time service to your clients.
This speed also brings efficiency, because business activities are being optimized to best utilize resources and time in ways that keep revenue coming in the door.
7. Relationship Management Is Improved
Relationship intelligence is an aspect of business intelligence that can help you gather insights on client relationships and take proactive action when those relationships are in need of attention.
By assessing the relative strength or weakness of your client relationships, you can identify the keys to their success and make strategic adjustments to extend their longevity and value.
8. Expenses Are Effectively Managed and Reduced
Improved management of resources, client satisfaction, and other optimizations all combine to reduce expenses and increase the ROI of your business activities.
With these savings, you can either scale down your in-house resources to lower operating costs or increase your productivity to generate better margins.
Conclusion
If you currently aren’t using PSA software with business intelligence, you’re sacrificing valuable insights that could improve not just your business operations, but also executive-level decision-making that affects the entire company.
It’s time to find out how business intelligence can maximize the capabilities of your PSA software. Contact us today to find out how to bring your professional services to the next level.
