Professional Services organisations (PSOs) live and breathe by healthy margins, a balanced billable workforce, sustained cash flow and the ability to secure predictable and repeat business from a happy customer base.
An important KPI is that of “utilisation” of your resource, where it is key to balance the time your professional consultants spend with on fee earning activities with legitimate non billable tasks such as presales or special customer projects. According to this article on essential KPIs for PSOs by Spire Research, optimum utilisation is 70% (or 1,400 billable hours).
For many PSOs, there is a shortage of skilled resource, leading to a risk of increased workload per consultant and resulting danger of quantity over quality. According to Alan Muse of RICS this is a growing issue: by 2020, “54% of the surveying sector’s 10,000 businesses will be turning down some 27,000 projects between them each year” due to the lack of resources.
How mobile technology can help mitigate risk and support your workforce
Cloud based technology that is able to be accessed through mobile devices is proven to be a key driver of employee productivity by enabling them to send, receive and update information to the main business management solution from their site visit; avoiding duplication of effort and real-time updates whilst providing a robust audit trail. By allowing consultants to have the freedom to carry out all their duties remotely in this way, it also gives them “thinking time” to deliver a skilled service and adding value.
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM are leading business management applications that are mobile-enabled, cross-platform and easy to use.
Mobile technology such as Mobility Suite from Prodware is also helpful for organisations to be able to effectively manage capacity and reschedule their consultants out on the road, alleviating stress for the employee if a project is over running, pre-empting a clash of priorities and of course helping with managing customer expectations.
Speak to Prodware how we are helping Professional Services organisations achieve KPIs and deliver value added customer service through the implementation of sector specific Microsoft Dynamics business management software.
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