Polaris Provides the Single Source of Truth for Readiness IT to Power Digital Transformation

Before Polaris:

A Lack of Visibility into Project and Resource Management

Readiness IT is a project-based company. Service delivery is critical to their business. For every new project, they need to allocate project managers and resources who have the required functional and technical skills. Project progress is regularly reported to a Sponsor who represents Readiness IT in a specific contract. Project planning and resourcing is a key aspect to ensure project success.

They needed a solution that could give project managers and leaders complete visibility into project and resource management. While there was a tool in place to track project time and manage resources allocation, the value for money wasn't satisfactory. Managers spent more time collating the information they wanted for analyzing how their employees spent time on projects. They needed a solution with flexible reporting capabilities to get adequate control of the execution of projects.

Another challenge was with resource management. The company had a siloed system to track resource skills and availability. A lack of consolidated data made project managers manually match resources to projects. The entire process was time consuming and inefficient.

Accounting Team Spent A Week Every Month To Recognize Revenue

Revenue recognition is a critical business process for Readiness IT. However, the manual process of recognizing revenue on projects was complex, time-consuming and not 100% accurate. At the end of every month, project managers had to share the project completion status with the portfolio team manually. Using this information, the portfolio management team spent several hours running through line items and calculating values on spreadsheets to reconcile the month-end close or completion of projects and after to communicate it to the accounting team.

Revenue recognition on different types of contracts - lump sum or fixed price - was complex without data accuracy and automation. Recognizing revenue too fast or too slow created accounting issues. Managing the entire process on spreadsheets was highly inefficient, and recognizing revenue took almost a week every month.

After Polaris:

Achieved Single Source of Truth for All Projects, Resources, and Billing Information

Carlos Paiva, the portfolio manager of Readiness IT, explained that Polaris was their vendor of choice because it provides advanced capabilities to meet everything they need to run the professional services business to profitability. He said, “Polaris gives us real-time visibility into our business with a single source of truth for all projects, resources, and billing information. Now, our resource and project managers don’t have to log in to any other tool for planning.”

Polaris gives real-time visibility into all project related data

Polaris provides deep insights into projects and service delivery across the organization with a robust dashboard and reporting capabilities. Carlos and his team use various weekly and monthly reports to get the pulse of their business. “The flexibility of reporting allows us to have information to have adequate control on the progress and execution of projects,” he said.

Carlos uses the insights from the reports to perform capacity planning and optimize the use of resources, analyze project health, report the monthly revenue to be recognized, control the bills issued every month and estimate future billing, and track payments.

Readiness IT improves staffing process and resource management

With Polaris in place, it’s the only tool the resource managers now need to get all resource related information, pool databases, manage resource requisitions, view resources allocated to projects. The instant visibility helps them communicate better with other project managers and other stakeholders. Carlos said, “Polaris solved the staffing process issues we faced with our earlier solution. The workflow designed in Polaris for the staffing process, matches 100% with the process desired by Readiness IT.”

Intelligent resource recommendations from SmartMatch feature in Polaris greatly reduce the time to assign resources by helping resource managers identify and allocate resources quickly based on the skills, competencies, availability, location, and other project requirement criteria. Resource management capability also provides complete visibility into resource availability and helps plan for incoming project and skill needs.

Reduced Revenue Recognition Processing Time From One Week To One Day

Polaris PSA allowed Readiness IT to automate the entire revenue recognition process, reduce the time required to complete the whole process, and precisely regulate revenue recognition policies.

“The automatic revenue recognition process helped us a lot in the transversal adoption of good practices of project replanning, inducing project managers to replan the estimate at completion at least on a monthly basis. This practice helped immensely to detect the tendency of deviations in projects earlier and to act in time to maintain the good health of each project.”

The automation of the whole process has helped our portfolio management team reduce processing down to a single day from a whole week.

Before Polaris, time was spent on producing the results and almost none on the analysis. Now the Portfolio Management team focuses on the analysis of the health of each project and with confidence in the data it analyses.

Also, since Polaris PSA solution handles compliance with accounting standards like ASC 606 and IFRS 15, we can rest assured that the integrity of our financial reporting is maintained.”

Automated revenue recognition helps Readiness IT track profit and loss margin accurately in real-time to ensure managers know which projects are going off track and make course corrections. Furthermore, Polaris PSA enables the organization to seamlessly manage different types of contracts.

Hassle-free experience right from the first engagement

Polaris is a cloud-based, scalable solution that supports hassle-free implementation. This is exactly what Carlos wanted for his organization. Carlos said, “A cloud solution is mandatory for us because we don’t want to have concerns with the management of internal systems and issues related to availability and information security. Our basic requirement was to have secure access every time and everywhere. We could achieve this with Polaris.”

Readiness IT has subsidiaries in Portugal, Chile, Peru and New Zealand. Polaris gives their distributed teams a hassle-free way to record their time and attendance. “With Polaris in place, project tracking errors and defaults have reduced considerably,” Carlos said.

Carlos feels the support they received from our implementation team was recommendable. He said, “I appreciate the way the implementation team managed the process from the beginning until the end.”