With recent growth at 20 percent a year, the professional services organization (PSO) industry is one of the world’s fastest-growing industry segments. Yet in this highly competitive field, maximizing efficiency during the life of a project or engagement is still a challenge.
Measuring the degree of project completion often undertaken in remote sites is difficult.. Employee turnover in the services
industry is high and adds ot the difficulty of forecasting and managing resource utilization. Global resource deployment capabilities are needed to ensure that the right skills are assigned to the right project.
PSO customers expect an increasing range of services, for
smaller budgets in faster timelines without compromise on quality and innovation. Project complexity comes with demanding accelerated schedules and expectations that PSOs will leverage knowledge and experience to rapidly produce results.
Because the value of any service firm is built on people and knowledge, PSOs need tools to build team synergy and to maximize the effectiveness of employees’ knowledge and experience.
With established project management tools and methods, PSOs can proactively organize projects and effectively manage time, equipment, capital, and human resources. Designed especially for PSOs, Professional Services for Microsoft Dynamics ® AX is a comprehensive
business management solution that integrates project, financial, and resource management capabilities to help companies increase revenues, lower costs, and simplify compliance.
Cost reduction comes from automating core business processes, improving invoicing, and streamlining administration and resource
management. One of the top reasons for investing in a PSA solution is the increased revenue and profitability that results from improved resource utilization, which ultimately leads to improved customer satisfaction and repeat business.
Timely and accurate access to resource and project data enhances business decision-making to prioritize strategic services, projects, resources, and funding. With the enhanced visibility that the PSA solution provide, project and operational managers can optimize resources and acheive on-time and on-budget delivery.
By accurately calculating resource time and expense and project progress, PSOs can reduce billing cycle times. Accurate invoicing helps to reduce customer challenges so that PSOs can speed invoice processing, resulting in reduced costs and a greater ROI.
When manual entry or separate systems must be used to invoice customers for services, you can lose funds through “revenue leakage”—the result of errors or incomplete or lost paperwork. Minimizing this leakage includes accurately accounting for all billable time, chargeback, or equipment and material usage on service-related projects.
This effective PSA solution aggregates and centrally exposes this data with key performance indicators (KPIs) and reports. By acting as a data provider, data consumer, and data presenter, the solution provides a single location where data is analyzed and presented to give a holistic view of the organization.
- Ceate and manage complex budgets based on time and materials
using a variety of customer-specific formulas or negotiated rates.
- Reconcile Project budgets in real time budget with change-control mechanisms to ensure profitability and customer satisfaction
- measure profitability at multiple levels—enterprise, office, customer, brand, product, contract, project, and even task
Use Professional Services for Microsoft Dynamics AX to:
- Generate contracts, quotes, agreements, and staffing, and to create customer records in your accounting and project management systems.
- Execute the project and manage the customer relationship.
- Close the projects or contracts.
Professional Services for Microsoft Dynamics AX includes contract and project setup routines that conform to your customer and company standards, such as a flexible work breakdown structure (WBS) and business rules that are configurable at the customer, project, or sub-project levels.
Professional Services for Microsoft Dynamics AX also provides you with reusable customer and project templates, multilanguage and multicurrency support, split billing, and configurable revenue recognition methods. Automatically create projects and budgets from approved quotations, and eliminate redundant data entry to save time and improve accuracy.
Professional Services for Microsoft Dynamics AX has bi-directional integration with enterprise project management systems like Microsoft ® Office Project Server 2007. The solution also provides scheduling capabilities based on milestones or tasks, configurable automated workflows, a document repository, and program alerts and notifications. In addition, customer contact records are centrally managed and accessible to the entire organization through the Customer Master.
Accelerate revenue recognition and formalize project closing with the ability to administer project review scorecards and review project metrics; electronically archive digital project assets; choose between
milestone, percent complete, or time-based billing; and manage retainages. The Revenue Recognition Wizard proactively reviews project data and proposes recognizable revenue so that you can manage by
exception and avoid client conflicts with accurate billing that is based on actual progress. The solution also provides tools to assist with time and materials reconciliation, and it supports your organization’s efforts to
comply with Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and customer- or contract-specific standards or requirements.
Increase business agility with the ability to:
- Create client, team, department, and project sites as needed.
- ssign resources, establish billing rules and revenue recognition
- Report at any level of detail necessary (including company, client, brand, product, project, sub-project, and task) with flexible planning and reporting WBSs.
- Capture and report project data through parallel financial and execution activity breakdown structures.
- Personalize and group the delivery of information
- Layer information so you can see both high-level (executive summary) and drill-down (detail) views of company and project information.
- Deploy multicompany and multicurrency support
- Create easy-to-use client profiles and templates with matrix rules for WBSs roles, rates, billing rules, and expenses.
- Customize powerful revenue recognition and project billing rules
- Track financial transactions within and between different departments and subsidiaries for an accurate overview of revenue and cost flows.
- Accurately calculate and compound burdens, overheads, and other indirect cost components and effective labor rates to help ensure full cost recovery and compliant billing.
- Identify aging accounts and projects.
- Monitor variations in estimates and costs to track trends in profitability.
- Check project financial status with inquires across your organization to view high-level or drill-down information
- Track items throughout the supply chain with full traceability.
- Reduce manual work and redundant effort when generating sales and purchase orders.
- Find and assign team members to projects and tasks from within the company using Inter-company Resource Sharing, which exposes resource data between companies.
- Quickly set up fee-based projects with a project wizard that helps ensure project information is entered completely and sequenced accurately.
- View and analyze proposed team member availability and workload before booking them on projects to avoid conflicts and over-allocations.
- Keep management and team members abreast of changes to projects, documents, and tasks with dashboard and e-mail alerts.
- Increase team collaboration and ease of use through full bi-directional integration with Microsoft Office Professional 2007.
- Synchronize project, personal, and team calendars with Microsoft Office Outlook ® and Microsoft Exchange Server
