Why service-based firms need an integrated ERP for profitable project management
If you’re still not convinced that your firm needs an integrated ERP system to manage operations, projects, and resources - this blog is for you.
We would like you to think about something you probably don’t think about in detail that often, even though you spend a lot of time doing it: your job. Or, rather, the things that drive the day-to-day processes in your firm.
A ‘day in the life’ is a complex thing to balance for professional services as a given day will tend to vary considerably based on the maturity of the projects you’re working on. We’ll instead explore this from the point of view of the project lifecycle.
Let’s start from the beginning: before the project starts.
Considerations for successful project management
Even winning a contract today often requires presenting an in-depth breakdown of your team, their capabilities, their contributions, and the costs associated with all their work on the project.
After a bid is won, the level of management and data organization required to staff a project and maintain profitability is quite extensive when it’s broken down, here are just a few examples:
- Who is available to work on the project? When are they available? Where do they need to be?
- What’s the rate you have to charge their time to ensure expectations are met without eating into your profits?
- What projects are staff focusing on? You need to minimize bench time and ensure a high utilization rate without risking burnout.
- What resources will need to be made available to each team member to ensure their success?
- What regulations must be complied with during this process?
Once the project is underway, Project Managers, finance, and HR leaders will need to keep a close eye on how things are progressing to keep actual progress in line with estimates, track expenditure, and work completed, to keep an accurate record of skills used and gained and take stock of your people’s wellbeing.
They will need to be aware of the ongoing availability of those not involved in the project, and how other work demands might affect its smooth running. This will ultimately help to ensure utilization remains optimal and engagement and morale remain high.
After a project is completed, it must be billed promptly to reduce DSO (days sales outstanding) and ensure earnings are realized, and financial resources can be allocated to pay staff, and suppliers, and provide funding for the next round of bids.
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Project management will suffer without proper data management
With legacy systems, data management can overwhelm successful project management.
To ensure a project gets the resources necessary, a firm needs clear methods to gather, manage, and utilize data across their organization, from HR to Finance. These various bits of data will most likely live within data siloes currently, requiring large amounts of manual effort just to consolidate it, let alone apply it.
The disconnect between these systems and the resulting lack of visibility can easily create problems at any stage of the project lifecycle. Especially, when the time comes to invoice the customer, as both project managers and finance teams need accurate information to bill correctly.
There are typically thousands of different points of connection between HR, Finance, and Project teams across the life of a typical project. Isolated systems with limited integration and visibility require manual data consolidation and this itself will require resource allocation.
What’s more, even the “best of breed” solutions for each of these disciplines often lack some of the functionality that would allow them to be used as a single port of call. In this environment, an integrated suite of tools that brings together all of the data and capabilities your teams need to do the job is the only sensible solution.
Unit4 ERPx – the ideal solution
Unit4 has developed ERPx specifically to create a solution that has best-of-breed capabilities for Finance, Project, and HR teams, drawing from a unified data source for a single source of data truth. These capabilities enable our solution to be capable of managing your entire project lifecycle within a single shared ecosystem.
And it’s not just a unified ecosystem – it delivers a simple, automated, and multimodal experience that can be accessed from any device at any time, with specific functionality for professional services. All wrapped in a user experience that makes it simple and intuitive for even the most casual of users.
Talk to sales about ERPx any time, but if you want to know more about what it’s capable of and how it addresses the specific challenges of professional services check out this capability overview and this interactive eBook.
