Many Professional services and business models are at the risk of disruption due to revolutionary changes and evolving technology, enabling people to proposed new business models, thereby substituting conventional distribution channels and replacing the way people and businesses interact with each other. The pace of change will continue to increase and due to it, only a third of today’s megastructure companies and professional services are going to survive in the next two decades.
To cope-up with today’s technological requirement of a professional service industry, there is an imperative requirement in technological advancement to improve efficiency and profitability. ‘Professional service automation’ (PSA) is a groundbreaking solution for the professional service industry in today’s era of technological disruption. PSA, software is primarily developed to help professionals, such as Lawyers, Auditors, Contractors and IT consultants with, resource management and project management for client help. Typical professional service automation software’s contain functions such as project management and related documentation, time management, labor utilization, reporting and billing. These attributes can be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM), accounting and payroll in order to improve their efficiency of operations and a healthy share of profit from the total investment by preventing loss in revenue and slow billing cycles.
A survey report states- “organization that uses PSA software tends to have the better rate of on-time project delivery, increase in productivity, precise project estimate, through more efficient communication, scheduling and project related document arrangement”.
These are the five most groundbreaking reasons, why organizations required professional service automation software’s:-
- Assignment Planning and Implementation: PSA software’s provide assignment oriented 360° view, through which, executives can look at what projects are in pipeline and can forecast their resource requirements. Assignment managers can implement detailed assignment plans, match the right resource within the organization for work-done and can have all the mission-related important data at their fingertips.
PSA software can give the organizations, a closed loop communication channel between resources, managers, and the entire project team. Resources can communicate quickly with assignment managers regarding the status of their task, and managers can access the impact on the whole assignment schedules, budget, and staffing to resolve the issues as they arise during the assignment.
- Estimates and Assignment Cost: PSA software has the ability to track assignment costs at comminuted level. Every minute on every assignment can be easily tracked, and any auxiliary expense on assignments, like travel or third-party expenses can be accounted to give a holistic representation of investment.
PSA software tools even become more valuable, when managers are planning and executing assignment with a very tight budget. All the assignment oriented information is managed within the PSA software system, an assignment can analyze the productivity of their resources at any time to ensure each person’s contribution is maximized.
- Streamline the Assignment Lifecycle: PSA software is able to handle the assignment throughout every step of the assignment lifecycle, and doing so, gives services organizations the ability to focus on the important aspects and delivering appreciable services to their clients-instead of wasting considerable time on prosaic administrative tasks. This kind of importance on efficiency can quickly translate into sufficient time to spend on productivity and can have a direct effect on the cost of the assignment.
To pipeline this process, most professional service automation software’s can easily integrate with the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and accounting related packages to eliminate, the need for any manual assignment configuration. These kinds of solutions will help an organization to run like a deep well-oiled machine and lay focusing on the job that; drives advancement or growth.
- Improvement in Resource Productivity: Many, professional service automations software’s solutions also contain resources scheduling tools; that help organizations to balance the demand and supply of their resources. Managers who effectively leverage resources scheduling tools also get a clear picture of people who are engaged in work and who are not. It is also a well-known truth within organizations, that effective utilization of employees and resources can yield dramatic results on the organization bottom line. Using PSA software solutions will enable when resources and people with key skill sets are available, which will allow for real-time optimization of resource productivity.
In order to have more efficiency in projects, resource scheduling will give organizations, the tools required to ensure distribution of proper workloads across all their employees. Even with the US unemployment rate hovering around 4.3%, industries are still finding it more difficult to hire key specialized workers.
- Real-time Decision-making Power: Having a consolidated view of business is critical when making managerial decisions. As all the assignment oriented information that organizations need, resides directly inside their PSA software and management can easily get the insight that required for the development of organizations. Information on project, resources and organizational productivity is a simple click away, and managers can look, what the current status of the project is, with proper and up-to-date information.
PSA software’s have replaced worn-out spreadsheets and also has given the competitive advantage that has laid the foundation for higher client satisfaction rates, higher profitable share and sustainable long-term development.
Future scope of PSA
PSA software’s have reduced time consumption used in earlier tedious works such as documentation processing, file transfer and generating the invoice. PSA software still possesses much scope for improvement such as Artificial Intelligence, which will automatically arrange files and document in an array manner. AI will help in the retrieval of the document in a single click by self-calculation and can help in increasing efficiency by saving time and resources.
Drawbacks of PSA
PSA software’s uses cloud technology for their development and deployment in organizations. The technological advancement in PSA software also brings-in the problem of Information security as mostly cloud-based technology software’s are developed in an open source cloud technology which increases the probability of important information breaches. The security of document and files are the most prioritized step for the developers of PSA software.
Moving towards the ending note, PSA software’s have given a sigh of relief and time-saving technique to organizations. So, instead of cobbling together multiple IT business automation systems, PSA software incorporates applications such as billing, invoice tracking, help-desk ticket systems and technician scheduling into one interface. Within cloud computing platforms, managers can access their PSA applications through a Web portal run by their vendors, which run the software from their data centers allowing organizations to be more efficient in their work and producing high profitable share from the investment with proper cost cutting.
