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.

Streamline Operations and Execution

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:

  • Resource and project management ensures that the right people are on the right projects at the right time.
  • Time and expense management speeds up and increases the accuracy of the time collection process.
  • Financial management and project accounting should include a complete set of business finance tools such as accounts payable and receivable, revenue recognition, overhead allocation, multi-company and multi-currency support, and project and financial reporting.
  • Billing should support complex and diverse billing requirements, including time and materials, fee-based and percent-complete billing. Designed for the unique billing requirements of project-based firms, it should automatically capture every billable labor and expense transaction, apply rate tables and employee overrides, calculate fees, handle multiple currencies, generate draft and final invoices, and manage write-offs and adjustments.
  • Document management should foster information sharing by providing a single Web-based document collaboration platform for your team to share.
  • Sales opportunity management ensures there are consistent and effective sales funnel activity in order to keep a consistent level of growth of new business.
  • Inventory management ensures that equipment is ordered from the correct vendors at the right time for both project delivery as well as post sale service.
  • Service dispatch should include a full listing of client equipment lists, service call history, web access, and intelligent management of field resources.

Improve Business Performance

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.

Win More Business

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.