Professional Services Automation (PSA) software includes a number of high level benefits. We can whittle this down into three groups of benefits; streamlining operations and execution, improving business performance and winning more business.
These PSA elements allow you to efficiently track and manage the procedures and processes within your business: resource and project management, time and expense management, financial management and project accounting, billing, document management, sales opportunity management, inventory management and post project service and dispatch. A brief explanation of each one follows below:
These include the elements of the PSA software system that will help you fine tune and improve your business performance such as dashboards workflow diagrams and reports. They will help you understand and stay on top of critical business challenges in a proactive manner. Dashboards should include powerful analytics and reporting that will provide you with key real-time metrics that offer visibility into all areas across the organization, and should give you the capability to drill-down to more detailed information. The interactive reporting environment such as real-time workflow diagrams should present potential problem areas allow users to access and analyze data backing up the reports – from key financial metrics and project analysis to sales score cards and resource utilization. The PSA software should include standard reports, both simple and sophisticated as well as an ad hoc report or query engine.
These elements provide you with the insight, tools and processes you need to help you win more business. They include client relationship management (CRM), sales cycle automaton, quoting, marketing automation and proposal generation. CRM automates the entire lead-to-execution project life cycle and through to post installation service by encompassing all of the tools you need to win new business and strengthen existing relationships. Part of winning new business is ensuring that sales cycle best practices are followed and that the project and services estimates that you produce are based on a sound analysis of the costs and the margins you are trying to achieve. And finally, sales score carding ensures your team is spending their time and effort on a the right mix of sales activity leading to better qualified prospects and more closings of the right kind of business.
All these elements are combined in and are the backbone of effective PSA software. It integrates your end-to-end business processes by automating the planning, tracking and administration of resources and projects.