Case Study Series: How Services Organizations Succeeded With Accurate Time-Tracking

Advanced technology and a data-driven approach can unlock business growth. However, technology alone cannot help your services business drive project profitability and a competitive advantage. The success of your modern workplace is directly proportional to how interconnected your systems are and how great your employee experience is.

Organizations around the globe have a cocktail of systems and house various teams that perform various functions. These multiple disparate legacy systems have redundant data that don’t communicate with each other, and this further leads to:

• Inability to deliver projects on time and within budget
• Multiple time-tracking systems with outdated UI 
• Operational business inefficiencies causing revenue leakages
• Overlapping functionalities adding to increased costs
• Lack of real-time visibility into time data
• Poor governance and lack of compliance
• Disconnected ecosystem with multiple integration touch points

A fundamental shift from siloed systems to connected ecosystems is the beginning to permanently change the way professional services organizations are delivering and gaining new business opportunities. 

Therefore, to stay ahead of the curve, professional services organizations need to evolve – from merely adopting new technologies to defining how employees interact with these new technologies. And, this can be achieved by fostering efficiency and growth, and by breaking down obstacles that hamper seamless communication. The need is to gain access to a unified and future-ready solution that provides a single source of truth. A unified system ensures easy access to information and collaboration, reduced response times, and enhanced capability to make the right decisions in real time.  

To pursue a bolder vision of digital transformation and to survive the future of work and innovation, services organizations need to adopt a more holistic approach. To drive project profitability successfully, they need to unify processes, reduce billing inefficiencies and accuracies, enhance compliance, and most importantly eliminate silos. 

Proven Power of Replicon’s Unified Time-Tracking Platform

By adopting Replicon’s unified time-tracking platform, professional services organizations have gained from seamless plug-n-play integrations with multiple ERP, CRM systems, and project management systems. This not only enhances the speed of delivery within their current enterprise ecosystem but also adds value with built-in global compliance and a library of predefined pay rules across more than 147 jurisdictions, in over 85 countries.

Replicon has been working with large services organizations to provide a unified, secure, scalable, and cloud-based platform for time, project costing, and pay to create a single source of truth. Intelligent automation leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to streamline processes, drive operational efficiencies and productivity, reduce billing cycles and revenue leakage, and ensure project delivery is on time and within budget.

Handling the data-driven journey needs right planning and approach to get the best possible outcome. A trusted partner like Replicon can help you do this. Here are a few case studies that prove how an intelligent and unified cloud-first platform, powered by advanced AI/ML technologies, can help you pave the way for your own transformation journey.

Case Study: How a Leading Fortune 500 IT Enterprise Hastened Their One Ecosystem Journey 

Challenge: A prominent IT enterprise had a dispersed and fragmented ecosystem of over 20 time-tracking systems – both commercial and homegrown. In addition, the enterprise had invested heavily in several ERP-based timesheets in over 60 countries, HCM-based timesheets in over 10 countries, and regional tracking systems in several countries. This was causing severe delays in payroll and billing. Furthermore, a lack of real-time visibility into employee time and multiple data silos impacted project profitability, and operational and business efficiencies.

Employees of the large IT enterprise also disliked the user interface and confusing time-tracking process. In addition, they were manually recording their time spent on projects, which caused a significant delay in payroll and billing.

Solution: Our customer realized that building a time-tracking platform internally, from scratch, to meet their unique requirements, would have been a multi-year project. The project would be more time and resource-intensive, and would require the enterprise to commit to huge IT expenditure, resulting in further delays, impacting their ERP consolidation strategy. 

Replicon’s unified time-tracking platform with built-in global governance, and local optimization, enabled a faster rollout within a few months. The enterprise gained increased transparency and accountability using an enterprise-ready, global time-tracking platform.

Partnering with Replicon has enabled them to unify global time-tracking and significantly simplify their technology infrastructure, further streamlining connectivity with SAP S/4 HANA. We added significant value by standardizing data, modernizing UX and eliminating employee pain.  

The implementation of a single platform dramatically improved the quality of their data and enabled them to better manage billing and profitability. In the past, they had to manage multiple ERPs, but with Replicon’s unified global time-tracking platform, they were able to uncouple time-tracking from their ERP systems and turn their attention to an ERP standardization and transformation program. 

Result: Achieved a Single Source of Truth for Time With Streamlined Billing and Enhanced Transparency Through Local Optimization and Global Governance

Replicon’s time capture rollout began the broader cloud transformation journey for the large IT enterprise. Their overarching goal was to get a global view of employee time information. 

• Our unified time-tracking platform enabled friction-free time capture and provided a connected landscape for tracking employee time across projects, costing, billing, leaves, and payroll. 
• The configurability of our platform with flexible workflows empowered the enterprise to accommodate local business practices related to payroll and compliance.
• The modern UI eliminated the fragmented employee experience along with the pre- configured templates and automated approval workflows, resulting in a friction-free experience for time capture with a more engaged and productive workforce.
• Business leaders and senior executives found it easier to get real-time visibility into their employee time using the comprehensive dashboard and custom reports with better decision-making for the leadership team.  

Case Study: How a Global Services Organization Unleashed the Power of a Connected Ecosystem

Challenge: One of the Big 4 consulting firms operating in 157 countries with over 300k employees had no consistent method for gathering and analyzing employee time across various governance structures, organizational models, and operating process taxonomies. The organization wanted to take an innovative leap outside of a traditional timekeeping system and focus on designing a modern employee experience to drive employee satisfaction and increase productivity. 

Thus, selecting the best software for accurate time capture became their global priority to reduce dissatisfied users, profit leaks, and inefficiencies. Additionally, they needed a best-in-class time-tracking solution to complement SAP, Oracle, Google, and Salesforce.com; one that had the breadth and depth of capabilities to support a worldwide business while remaining responsive to the needs of each regional site. The organization was looking for a time-tracking tool that their workforce could quickly adopt as part of their digital transformation effort. 

Solution: Kickstarted Digital Transformation Through Cloud

Replicon’s Time Intelligence platform empowered the organization to implement a configurable platform and adapt to the changes across all their locations worldwide. Our platform also brought flexibility to their operating model and reconfigured connections with their entire ecosystem to thrive in a digital economy. With a connected platform, leaders within the organization could view global employee timesheets in a centralized manner to drive more profitability. Their decision to invest in a platform-as- a-service model offered significant savings in terms of time and cost. 

Result: Enterprise Time-Tracking and Interoperability Throughout Their Network

Replicon time capture rollout was a part of the broader cloud transformation journey within the organization to build a configurable enterprise that could continuously adapt to change. “Timesheets are the backbone of business,” was something that key stakeholders expressed. This meant that the critical factors that influenced their decision were consolidated time capture across projects, accurate client billing, and driving revenue and profits.

• Replicon’s Time Intelligence Platform is now a part of the organization’s standard tech stack, offering security, reliability, and scalability to 157 countries encompassing 300,000 employees. 
• Our mobile-first time-tracking platform provided a consistent user experience across all devices for both employee timesheets and manager approvals. Our platform rendered granular information and correctly captured time for the entire global employee base.
• With zero-touch time capture, project resources can automatically look at previous timesheets, schedules and project information, and receive pre-populated timesheet data mapped to the entries of project codes in the ERP systems. The pre-population of data not only saved employee time but also improved billing accuracy across all projects.
• Further, the ability of seamless plug-and-play integration with multiple Oracle, SAP, and Workday environments offered speed of delivery and seamless integrations within the entire ecosystem. 
• In addition, the new connected landscape considerably reduced entry errors and operational costs, gained real-time visibility, eliminated manual processes and increased employee productivity.
• Employees can now receive pre-populated timesheet data using the AI-enabled, automated harvesting feature to intelligently complete timesheets and map the entries to project codes in their ERP system. 
• The real-time sync of billing rates between the Replicon platform and the organization’s tech stack allowed a faster invoicing process and improved billing accuracy across all projects within the organization.
• Moving to a unified platform with a modern UI has provided a single source of truth for time across all projects, with reduced profit leaks and minimized operational inefficiencies. 
• A configurable platform, built-in rules engine, pre-configured templates, and automated approval workflows for time-tracking have eliminated manual processes within the operating model. 
• Our cloud-first platform also offered economies of scale for adding new users across the globe and has contributed to saving millions of dollars on operation costs, lost productivity and plugging profit leaks.

Becoming Future-Ready With Replicon

The cloud has established itself as a game-changer for prospering in the ecosystem of large services organizations. Businesses that implement cloud-based solutions have an advantage over their rivals as they can operate more flexibly, productively, and affordably.

The final blog series of enterprise time-tracking will discuss 3 more case studies of the accelerated approach taken to transform the enterprise ecosystem, how it got implemented with a unified platform to drive profitability with value-added benefits.