Maximize time and revenue with enterprise tech

Professional services organizations sell a product that’s very unique — specialized time. If they can make that time more productive, there’s a direct impact on revenue.

Organizations can often make billable time more productive by improving their business operations. Leaders can consider how to improve operations across five functions:

1. Revenue, expenses and financial processes
2. Connected planning and budgeting
3. Global scalability
4. Business insights and analytics
5. Talent identification and retention

Today’s competitive organizations should consider how technology can improve these functions. Tech solutions can help address several components within each of the five:

Often, organizations find so many ways to potentially improve business operations that they get lost in the options. Or, they implement individual solutions that are inconsistent and lose efficiency over time.

Streamline the tech

Enterprise business applications can help consolidate functional business processes into one technical environment. There, organizations can centralize initiatives that drive important benefits:

• Controls and risk management: Identify and implement consistent controls and governance around processes for risk management, control and mitigation.​
• Data consistency and analytics: Improve your data foundation to allow deeper insight and broader analysis across enterprise-wide data from every business function.
• Visibility and reporting: Develop dashboards, self-service queries, regular reports, alerts and other visibility to help daily users and managers make better decisions.
• Scalability, agility and resilience: Integrate processes into a single flexible design with advanced capabilities that you can adapt to address emerging changes and needs.​
• Efficiency and automation: Establish a central resource to eliminate labor-intensive processes, system integrations, offline routines and activities​.
• Workforce retention: Optimize your processes to improve workforce value and reduce talent flight.​

These benefits can play out across all five of the business functions.

1. Revenue, expenses and financial processes

For your core accounting processes, a common enterprise platform can help drive gains at several levels. The enterprise application’s data consistency and analytics can streamline and clarify your chart of accounts and smart ledger, improving spend management and especially intercompany management. This also helps improve your financial close and consolidation, which supports your regulatory and audit compliance. Your compliance will also be driven by the ERP controls and risk management capabilities.

2. Connected planning and budgeting

Your firm’s financial planning and analysis can benefit from an enterprise application’s improvements in data consistency and analytics, as well as visibility and reporting. Data that is more consistent, centralized and visible can improve workforce planning, capacity management, forecasting and scenario planning as you look ahead. When you analyze recent results to inform the next planning cycle, you can also gain better insight for budget variance analysis.

3. Global scalability

To scale your organization, you need to have a clear vision of your assets, capabilities and needs. An enterprise application’s visibility and reporting can give you insight that informs your decisions, along with scalability, agility and resilience that support organizational expansion. It can specifically provide scalable support for additional currencies, languages and compliance requirements.

4. Business insights and analytics

As your leaders and administrators track the firm’s daily operations, an enterprise application’s data consistency and analytics will inform visibility and reporting that improve insight into your current state. Management and reporting KPIs help inform leaders who are seeking high-level awareness. Insights into your resources, expenses, revenue and overall operations can give administrators quick feedback that improves their daily decision making.

5. Talent identification and retention

In your firm’s effort to manage talent, from recruitment to retirement, an enterprise application’s efficiency and automation can improve working conditions to support workforce retention along with scalability, agility and resilience. Efficient and automated HR services and delivery can improve employee acquisition, onboarding, administrative processes and manager engagement. Insight into talent and performance can inform workforce management, compensation and benefits, along with skills and resource identification.

Centralize the benefits

The business of professional services is a business of people, so you can improve your revenue when you improve how you manage your people’s time.

Some organizations approach enterprise applications with the goal of streamlining a process or solving a problem, often by consolidating transactional data and business insights to help manage, budget and forecast from a single source of data. They might even be motivated by securing that centralized data, since it can include client information that’s essential to protect.

Other organizations might want to improve their data quality, insights and analysis by centralizing those capabilities in a tool with real-time reporting for data-based decisions as they seek to innovate and adapt. Or, organizations might just want to reduce their technology management overhead by engaging a single enterprise platform for HR and financial teams.

Enterprise applications can help deliver all of these benefits, but the most important impact can be the impact they have on your people. A centralized platform improves employee experiences, streamlining their collaboration and process adoption with an engaging, accessible and consistent interface across business functions.

In a business of people, better personal experiences can lead to better business every day.