You’ve put everything into growing your professional services business. It’s been a life of many lessons learned along the way but here you are. Many years ago, you would’ve been able to succeed without too much technology, instead relying on a “paper trail” when the phrase meant physical pieces of paper for tracking your business information. Maybe you even customized a legacy, on-premise business solution to manage operations. Regardless of the tools you used, they’ve been effective at getting you this far.

But do all these age-old processes still bring benefits to your business? Sure, they “work.” But growing up hearing, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” means the concept of moving your business to the cloud is off your radar. But will you survive in a future where digital transformation is taking over?

Looking at current technological innovations and how they affect your industry, leading professional services companies now realize how automation makes it easy to conduct tests, verify business operations, identify pain points, and solve these problems. In turn, you can finally reduce errors and expand your service offerings.

So, what’s holding you back?

Seek Automation And Modernization

The role of automation is unifying all the functions of a professional services business by automating the said processes, thus, making project management and customer satisfaction easy, efficient, fast, accurate, and profitable.

Here are some key findings that may be keeping your Professional Services Business from growing

A professional services automation solution offers your business an extensive system that supports all the business services within a central platform. As a result:

• Projects are completed and delivered within schedule
• You account for and bill your projects appropriately
• You’re able to track the availability of skills and resources
• You stay within your budget

In a nutshell, automation and modernization provide the visibility you need to run your business productively and in real-time from start to growth. This span includes ensuring your project billing and invoicing remain accurate and updated to ensure you generate a profit– the first step to leverage automation and modernization for your professional services business.

Optimize Your Resources

Your most significant asset of a professional services business is its resources. Your skilled resources determine the quality of services you deliver to your clientele. These resources include your employees, monetary assets, and tools you use for business, including your business software.

See what a cloud-based ERP solution do for your Professional Services Organization

Managing and utilizing resource pools is challenging, especially when using siloed or manual processes. Actions like allocating projects, planning for capacity, tracking skills, and streamlining the resource requests are time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to human error.

But with machine learning and artificial intelligence, it becomes easy to automate all these processes and tie them to sourcing and delivery services. As a result, you improve the time it takes to enhance your team performance, increase the utilization of resources, and gain intelligent recommendations for your business. This efficiency and insight improve profit margins.

Focus On Client Management

The pandemic hit professional services industries especially hard. As demand reduced, new and renewed competition emerged, meaning service businesses needed to get agile.

For starters, determine how your service delivery assets are working. Do you think you can offer more value to your customers? Look at your communication habits and how they work for your clientele.

How do you communicate to clients to manage their expectations and profitability? Are you able to send real-time notifications? Are you clear, open, transparent, and concise in your communication? What do you do when changes concerning service delivery happen?

The goal is to look at your entire service portfolio, find opportunities to do better, and use automation and modernization to make your processes efficient. As you manage your customers’ expectations, don’t forget to evaluate your profit margins.

Practice Intelligent Price Bidding

Proposals are necessary to get the most sought-after projects, but you need data like revenue and profit projections to determine how your proposal will perform. Here are some of the price-bidding challenges you face:

• Using spreadsheets for resource planning, cost analysis, and project estimations causes your team to move to and fro before concluding
• If your team members are unaware of your offerings, a breakdown between execution and billing becomes evident in the outcome

With automation and modernization solutions, you gain visibility into your indirect, direct, and administrative costs. These resource costs also include your margins and resource utilization costs. As a result, you get resource prices and revenue projections that are more accurate.

Not only do these determinations make it easier and faster to draft more effective bids, but now every member of your team operates in unison and with the big picture in mind.

This is what a modern Professional Services Business Solution is designed to do

“Broken” is Relative

Seek to adopt technologies that future-proof your professional services business and give you a significant competitive advantage in your industry.

Change is inevitable. The wisdom against fixing things that aren’t broken is not always good advice. With change exposing new inefficiencies, you have to consider how many of your processes still perform. And with digitization causing sudden changes in how you work, automation and modernization are the keys to ultimate efficiency and growth.

FAQs

What is a professional services automation system?

A PSA is designed to help workers in professional services businesses manage projects and resources from the beginning to conclusion.

What is automation and modernization?

This new system steers the operations of a professional services business from housing legacy applications, rigid databases, and an aging mainframe towards a more modern IT infrastructure driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, thus enhancing automation.

How can professional services businesses leverage automation and modernization?

You get a professional services automation solution that streamlines all the processes and services to give fast, transparent, accurate, and insightful results.