Why Are Large & Global Services Firms Looking to Manage Time as an Asset?
How do professional services firms drive growth in a world of disruption? With shifting business models, changing customer expectations, and intense business pressures, professional services need to rethink operations and business processes and drive profitability with a siloed ecosystem while meeting the demands of their employees with a need for digital tools. In the age of disruption, the focus for high-growth firms is to minimize costs and maximize innovation. These are some of the critical concerns that professional services leaders face every day.
Timesheets are the backbone of professional services firms. Now more than ever, every professional service firm must be agile and make sense of the staggering volume of data to anticipate the billable time spent across their projects and become an insight-driven company. You need to invest in technology to automate project tasks, bring intelligent processes to capture and process time and, integrate these with your existing business processes to accelerate your time to revenue process.
You might find that your ecosystem landscape is too complex and has disparate time tracking systems, multiple ERP platforms, and other home-grown systems to meet regional compliance requirements across your global enterprise. If your IT team is like most, they are already overwhelmed with managing multiple systems for your business. How is your project and finance team supposed to drive project profitability, optimize resource utilization and maintain project margin with project data spread across siloed time tracking systems?
As a CEO, CIO, CTO, CFO, Head of Project Management, or a transformational leader, you might be speculating how much time it will take to revamp your enterprise time tracking system. Thankfully, with the modern cloud-based professional services time tracking platform, you don’t have to worry about these challenges anymore. It’s time to move to the Cloud.
The Power of a Unified Time Tracking Platform
The pressure to change had been building for years in professional services firms. However, enterprise integration and real-time visibility are the primary challenges for enterprises that want to accelerate their digital transformation journey. Minimal levels of automation on the back-end of most professional services firms mean an increased volume of administrative tasks, lower productivity of employees, non-intuitive interfaces for time capture, improper flow of data, and redundancies. None of these spell employee-friendly. Along with this, many firms may be unprepared to respond to the emergence of new and non-traditional competitors or rising customer demands – putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
High-growth firms have realized how traditional time tracking is not serving their needs anymore, and cloud-based time-tracking is crucial to thriving in a digital workplace. According to Aberdeen, 65% of firms are prioritizing a centralized global time tracking for their enterprise. To gain real-time visibility into project data, a unified time tracking platform is the determinant factor for project management for billing, productivity measures and budget management for projects.
A modern cloud-based enterprise time tracking platform can transform your time tracking for fixed-bid or time and material projects. It enables you to monitor real-time project visibility, manage resource utilization, view project budget and costs to ensure project delivery on time and budget, and maintain project margins and profitability across fixed-bid or time and material projects.
With an unified professional services time tracking platform, services firms can benefit from an integrated landscape with plug-n-play integrations to multiple ERP environments, CRM systems and project management systems. This not only brings the speed of delivery and seamless integrations within your enterprise ecosystem but also comes with built-in compliance capabilities that enables enterprises to submit payroll for their global employee base and be compliant with a global pay rule library that supports 375 labor rules across 147+ jurisdictions in 85+ countries.
“At the outset of 2020, we wanted to treat time as an enterprise asset. Time tracking across our enterprise was one of the biggest pain points for our employees and leaders. The systems in place were not user-friendly, caused major headaches to integrate, and we had no real-time visibility into how time was being spent”.
EVP & CIO, $15B, IT Enterprise
Take Control of Project Time Tracking with End-to-End Automation
Enterprises are increasingly becoming aware that there is no silver bullet when it comes to aligning their business processes and operations with digital business strategies. The need is to streamline processes, digitize outdated workflows, with an intelligent platform that supports automation, machine learning, and AI for their business.
Estimating project accuracy and balancing resources upfront for productivity is critical to the success of a professional services firm. According to a survey by SPI, 59% of organizations achieved 70% or higher billable utilization which translates into higher revenue growth.
Intelligent project time tracking represents a radical new approach to one of the business world’s most essential but hated administrative tasks. At its simplest, it’s about getting a platform to tell you where your global employees spent their billable time instead of you having to monitor project time within a fragmented ecosystem. The platform holds some serious benefits— helping businesses reduce timesheet administrative tasks by 75%, recovering hidden billable time, as well as organizing resources and price work more fairly.
Realize the Potential of a Global Time Tracking Platform
Simplicity and flexibility are essential for a project-based organization. With a fully configurable time tracking solution, you will be able to capture the precise time data you need (billable and non-billable hours) to get a complete picture of the time spent across your projects. You can provide pre-configured templates, automated approval workflows that will result in a friction-free experience for time capture with a more engaged and productive workforce. The finance team can instantly receive the approved timesheets and quickly raise invoices, which can improve your billing cycle.
So, whether you are a high-growth professional services firm or a project-based organization with multiple teams delivering professional services across various projects and clients, professional services time tracking platform can significantly transform your profitability and productivity. A modern time tracking platform embedded with artificial intelligence can innovate business processes and derive insights from data to achieve a single source of truth for their business.
Enterprises are embarking towards cloud-based time tracking not only to gain a competitive edge but also to provide a future ready ecosystem to their stakeholders. Improving the employee experience with accurate project data for time tracking is a win-win for enterprises to thrive in a hybrid digital workplace. Get ready and be on board for your digital transformation journey to streamline processes, drive operational efficiency and productivity, reduce billing cycles and revenue leakage, and improve cash flow and profitability. Turn your time into a strategic asset.
