If you’re running a professional services firm, you know that time is quite literally money. Every hour your consultants, accountants, lawyers or specialists spend working an engagement directly impacts your bottom line.
But tracking and maximizing those moneymaking hours is a whole lot easier said than done. Between juggling multiple client projects, dealing with constantly shifting requirements and pivots, managing expenses, and handling dreaded benchtime when people are underutilized, keeping your services machine humming at peak efficiency is a massive challenge.
I’ve seen the ugly spreadsheet mess many services organizations resort to for tracking time, financials, and utilization across their client accounts and internal projects. Just keeping all those moving pieces in sync is an operational nightmare. Then there are the constant headaches around inaccurate time and expense capture, lack of visibility into billable work, revenue leakage, and delayed client invoicing.
The madness has to stop! Integrated professional services automation (PSA) technology is a must for any services firm wanting to run a tight ship, operate efficiently, and maximize those all-important billable hours. Which is why I’m a huge advocate for NetSuite’s Services Cloud Support offerings and their comprehensive PSA toolkit.
In this article, I’ll give you a tour of how NetSuite completely transforms and automates all the key pillars of services success – from prospect-to-engagement pipelines and resource management to time/expense tracking, project financials, and analytics. No more operational headaches or leaving money on the table. NetSuite’s PSA tools will have your team firing on all cylinders to drive maximum billable utilization.
The Golden Ratio: Services Resource Planning For any services business, the name of the game is optimizing your largest asset – your people and their skills. That’s why services resource planning (SRP) is the centerpiece of NetSuite’s PSA approach, bringing together all processes, real-time data, and tools for efficiently staffing engagements.
Within NetSuite’s SRP capabilities, resource managers get a unified view into current staff headcounts, role capabilities, billing rates, employment statuses, and upcoming project requirements. You can model hypothetical staffing scenarios by visualizing how different resource mixes would impact deliverables, budgets, and timelines.
The key is NetSuite’s skills management engine that provides a rich database of resources’ experience areas, technical skills, industry knowledge, credentials and other differentiators. No more scrambling to find the perfect person for a client engagement. Robust search capabilities and smart filters allow you to quickly locate appropriate resources based on skills, languages, employment status, billing rates, experience levels and other criteria.
That central resource repository combined with interactive forecasting tools is a game changer for planning purposes. You can map out engagement staffing and allocate the perfect team based on skills, location, utilization targets and more. No more over/understaffing or inappropriate resource placements.
Of course, having all those capabilities in a centralized hub also gives upper management total visibility into their “bench” at all times. They can monitor current and forecasted utilization metrics, identify potential resource constraints, make strategic hiring decisions, and optimize schedules to minimize costly benchtime and overages.
Supercharging Project Execution Once the right team has been assembled, the real work of delivering successful client engagements begins. This is where NetSuite’s broader professional services automation suite really shines.
At the core is NetSuite’s integrated project management, time and expense tracking, project accounting, billing, and revenue recognition functionality. Having these critical processes unified under one umbrella allows for end-to-end engagement management with seamless data flow.
From day one, the engagement team can access the latest project specs, tasks, budgets and schedules directly through NetSuite. Approved time and expenses incurred can be effortlessly captured and automatically routed for review, invoicing and revenue accounting based on contract specifics.
The sheer efficiency and accuracy gains from this automated time/expense capture alone are immense compared to traditional manual practices with rampant data re-entry errors. Tight governance is also enforced – for example, team members may be blocked from entering charges against an engagement if work falls outside certain thresholds defined by the statement of work.
But NetSuite takes the automation far beyond just tracking time. Project managers are empowered with advanced resource scheduling tools to appropriately allocate work, monitor deliverable progress and iterate project plans on the fly as situations change. Client- and executive-facing dashboards provide real-time visibility into engagement financials like total costs, billed revenue, and profitability factors at any given milestone.
The entire engagement portfolio is visible through interactive roadmaps for advanced planning and forecasting. Automated early warning systems and notifications can flag project managers on potential risks, like if an engagement is trending over budget or resource utilization isn’t lining up with projections.
With all these unified services execution capabilities combined with the skill-based resource optimization engine, NetSuite gives services firms the insights and control to proactively course-correct and ensure every engagement is firing on all cylinders. That’s how you maximize those precious billable hours.
Streamlining Client Delivery Of course, delivering successful engagements requires more than just internal execution. NetSuite’s Services solutions also equip services firms with all the tools to streamline client-facing interactions and processes from start-to-finish.
It starts with NetSuite’s built-in CRM capabilities to proactively identify and nurture the best-fit prospects in your pipeline. Opportunities can seamlessly flow into the services automation system for rapid scoping, quoting, staffing and project initiation—no more context-switching between siloed apps and manual data re-entry.
Once an engagement has been initiated, firms can leverage client collaboration portals and self-service tools within NetSuite to streamline status reporting, document sharing, and other interactions. Client billing is also handled through automated, templated invoices based on actual time and materials expenditures for maximum transparency.
Integrated CPQ tools simplify the process of configuring complex bundles of fixed fee and time & materials engagements based on your services catalog. Client SRP functionality provides visibility into allocated resources and subcontractors, giving them peace of mind into your delivery capabilities.
All engagement touchpoints, communications, and financials are captured within a unified system of record, providing a 360-degree client engagement view. This fosters stronger client satisfaction through proactive interactions while ensuring accurate, timely billing and revenue recognition.
The Advanced Analytics Edge Perhaps the biggest value-multiplier NetSuite provides for services firms is advanced analytics for maximizing productivity, utilization, forecasting and profitability. Across all core services delivery processes, NetSuite captures granular real-time data that is aggregated into rich reporting dashboards and powerful business intelligence capabilities.
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Service leaders and project managers get interactive visualizations into the latest KPIs spanning both leading and lagging indicators, such as:
- Utilization analytics (actual vs. targets by role, employee, practice)
- Project pipeline forecasts and capacity planning trends
- Detailed profitability breakdowns by client, engagement, employee
- Key financial metrics including invoiced revenue, write-offs, costs
- Timesheet management and expense reporting compliance
- Resource supply vs demand modeling
- Revenue projections and revenue recognition
With insights gleaned from these analytics, firms can proactively identify and correct any resource imbalances, scope creep, or budget risks plaguing individual engagements. Utilization data can be analyzed to redistribute workloads for maximum billable coverage without burning out top personnel.
Likewise, the reports are invaluable for future planning – spotting areas ripe for hiring or expansion based on rising demand or growing practices. Profitability breakdowns shed light on the most lucrative types of work to prioritize business development efforts. And forward-looking forecasts ensure you always have enough staff bandwidth ahead of new signings.
The granular services performance data generated by NetSuite is truly a gold mine for uncovering hidden opportunities to streamline operations, slash costs, sharpen pricing, and maximize billable resource utilization for healthy profits and growth.
At an executive level, NetSuite’s comprehensive real-time reporting provides the transparency services leaders need to communicate status to clients and stakeholders. No more scrambling to pull fragmented updates from different systems. Board-ready financial statements, utilization trends, project portfolio dashboards – all the metrics driving service delivery and business performance are at your fingertips.
Bringing it All Together In today’s ultra-competitive services landscape, the race is on to provide the fastest, most efficient, and cost-effective delivery to clients. Firms that still rely on antiquated manual processes and fragmented systems frankly won’t be able to keep up.
By consolidating PSA onto NetSuite’s unified cloud platform, service organizations finally have the technology to truly optimize their operations across all critical functions:
- Streamline services delivery with end-to-end automation spanning prospect-to-engagement pipelines, resource management, project tracking, time/expense capture, billing, analytics, and financials.
- Maximize billable resource utilization through advanced skills management, staffing forecasting, capacity planning, and proactive engagement monitoring.
- Increase client satisfaction and retention by providing transparent engagement visibility, seamless collaboration, and accurate billing.
- Boost profits and growth with analytics that surface opportunities for higher margins, repeatable processes, and top revenue generators.
- Ensure governance and compliance across client obligations, revenue recognition rules, labor regulations, and audit requirements.
- Gain a unified system of execution and insight by eliminating silos across CRM, PSA, project management, financials, and billing.
The beauty of NetSuite’s approach is that it breaks down all those operational stovepipes endemic to most services firms. No more juggling disparate systems for each core process area like staffing, project delivery, financials, and reporting. Everything is unified and integrated within a single cloud platform with data flowing seamlessly in both directions.
This eliminates the huge headaches, errors, and lost productivity caused by fragmented systems, continual data re-entry, and manual efforts to stitch insights across different environments. With NetSuite as the core PSA engine, services organizations can operate as adaptive, real-time businesses by injecting efficiency and automation across the entire lead-to-revenue lifecycle.
From more accurate forecasting and staffing to streamlined engagement execution and billing, NetSuite’s unified cloud PSA approach paves the way for services firms to run far more productively and profitably. Top-line services revenue grows through better utilization and on-time delivery. Operating costs shrink by eliminating non-billable overhead like PO approvals, invoicing delays, overcapacity, and resource downtime.
Simply put, NetSuite provides the cohesive services delivery platform that high-performing firms need to rise above industry norms. Instead of wasting time and budget wrestling with disconnected systems and processes, your resources can focus on higher-value client delivery and new revenue opportunities.
The Path to Optimizing Billable Utilization While NetSuite provides the ideal services automation engine, our partners understand that optimizing billable utilization and engagement profitability is an ongoing journey of continuous improvement. Even after implementing NetSuite’s robust PSA tools, there’s still work to do:
- Processes must be documented, mapped, and optimized
- Delivery methodologies and leading practices established
- Governance models deployed for auditing and compliance
- Users trained on new roles, measures, and accountabilities
- Ongoing measurement and benchmarking instituted
- Necessary integrations configured with other satellite systems
Our consultants work hand-in-hand with services leaders to provide strategic advisory, process transformation, and change enablement to fully maximize NetSuite’s PSA capabilities. From designing an optimized service delivery framework and KPIs to reengineering processes and harmonizing systems, we’ll help you extract maximum value from NetSuite’s PSA toolkit.
The path to running a world-class, high-utilization services machine is within reach. But it takes more than just new software to enable that transformation. With our services and NetSuite’s unified cloud PSA platform, you’ll possess the powerful combination of technology AND optimization to truly revolutionize your billable delivery operations.
No more leaving money on the table or struggling to juggle the complexities of services execution through fragmented systems and processes. Let’s talk about how we can partner to maximize your services profitability and uplift your performance into the top tier of your industry. Your billable hours are too precious to waste another day.
FAQs:
NetSuite’s PSA toolkit is an integrated suite of tools designed to streamline and automate key processes for professional services firms. It covers everything from prospect-to-engagement pipelines, resource management, time and expense tracking, project financials, and analytics. This comprehensive approach helps firms maximize billable hours, improve operational efficiency, and ensure accurate client invoicing.
NetSuite’s Services Resource Planning (SRP) capabilities provide a unified view of staff headcounts, skills, billing rates, and upcoming project requirements. It includes a skills management engine and interactive forecasting tools that help resource managers allocate the right people to the right projects, ensuring optimal staffing and minimizing benchtime.
Yes, NetSuite automates time and expense tracking by capturing and routing time and expenses for review, invoicing, and revenue accounting. This automation reduces errors, enforces governance, and ensures that charges are within defined thresholds, enhancing accuracy and efficiency in capturing billable work.
NetSuite offers integrated project management tools that include resource scheduling, deliverable monitoring, and real-time financial visibility. Project managers can adjust plans on the fly, access dashboards for up-to-date project financials, and receive notifications for potential risks, ensuring smooth execution and alignment with client expectations.
NetSuite includes built-in CRM capabilities, client collaboration portals, self-service tools, and automated billing processes. These tools facilitate seamless client interactions, transparent engagement visibility, and accurate, timely invoicing, thereby enhancing client satisfaction and retention.
NetSuite’s advanced analytics offer interactive visualizations of key performance indicators such as utilization rates, project forecasts, profitability breakdowns, and revenue projections. This real-time data helps firms proactively manage resources, plan future engagements, and uncover opportunities for increased efficiency and profitability.
By consolidating all critical functions onto a unified cloud platform, NetSuite eliminates the operational silos common in many services firms. This integration ensures seamless data flow between CRM, PSA, project management, financials, and billing, reducing errors, improving productivity, and providing a single source of truth for all service delivery processes.
NetSuite enforces tight governance through features like approval workflows, automated revenue recognition, and compliance with labor regulations. Its governance models ensure that all processes adhere to audit requirements and regulatory standards, providing peace of mind and reducing the risk of non-compliance.
NetSuite’s PSA toolkit boosts profitability by maximizing resource utilization, reducing non-billable overhead, improving accuracy in billing, and providing insights into the most lucrative services. Its advanced analytics and unified platform help firms streamline operations, identify cost-saving opportunities, and optimize pricing strategies.
NetSuite, along with its partners, provides strategic advisory services, process transformation support, and change management to help firms fully leverage the PSA toolkit. This includes documenting processes, establishing leading practices, deploying governance models, and ongoing training and benchmarking to ensure continuous improvement and maximum value extraction from the platform.
