How a PSA Solution Supports Consulting Firms

Management Consulting firms constantly face the challenge of optimally aligning staff while delivering projects on time profitably. The secret to operating a prosperous and profitable Management Consulting firm involves getting your right resource with the right skillset in the right place at the right time. A PSA solution is specifically designed to help your Management Consulting firms take the guesswork out of your complex projects for consulting teams. Our revolutionary PSA solution helps you make the best use of your most important business assets - your team!

Continuum PSA's resource management feature allows you to track the attributes of each of your consultants, including skills, competencies, preferences, and experience. With this module, you can assign people to projects, and then put your day-to-day data to work to gain insight into utilization, revenue, and profitability.

We are experts in developing, implementing, and customizing PSA solutions for leading Management Consulting firms that need to manage resources, activities, expenses, and profitability by project to project. Many PSA solutions are not designed for the special needs of Management Consulting when it comes to the challenges of capturing new customers in a highly competitive market, managing a business built on delivering complex projects that require certain expertise, and maximizing profitability in challenging times.

Continuum PSA is the best solution you could implement for your Management Consulting firm. You’ll immediately gain real-time visibility into the present and future projects at the touch of a button, which in turn helps you increase your firm’s overall productivity, grow faster, and maximize profitability. Continuum PSA is dedicated to helping Management Consulting firms to gain insight, clarity, and control to achieve their business goals with proven services and an award-winning PSA solution.

Features Offered to Management Consulting Firms...

Time & Expense Tracking – You will gain the ability to see the time and expenses associated with any project. Track time across teams, projects, and individual employees for real-time profitability and resource allocation insight.

Resource Allocation – With CrossConcept Continuum you have a central dashboard with a view of your entire organization’s resources, you can better plan for and bid on future projects, make staffing decisions on current tasks, and ensure that everything is done on time and within budget.

Billing & Invoicing – Integrated time tracking and invoicing. You can now create automated invoices and connect with multiple accounting solutions like Quickbooks and more!

Project Management – CrossConcept Continuum provides real-time access to project statuses to keep you in the loop and eliminate the exhausting task of chasing down update after update from team members.

CRM – You can now track and manage the entire sales pipeline and customer relationship, analyze sales performance across the organization and keep everything needed for a single client account on a single platform.

Customizable Dashboards – You can easily customize dashboards keeping you informed about what’s really going on with your projects in real-time. Set your dashboard as your home page and you can see and prove your team’s value and contribution in seconds.

Taking the above into consideration, let’s take a deeper look at 3 of the most important reasons companies have integrated our PSA software...

Automate Your Workflows

Competition for services firms is higher than ever! PSA helps you stand out from competitors by freeing time spent on manual overhead tasks and focus that time on more revenue-orientated tasks and projects. More advanced, robust PSA solutions also provide CRM and financial modules right out of the box. This eliminates the need for your resources to set up projects manually. Time saved on administrative duties can be better spent on customer satisfaction and ultimately greater turn-over.

Tight Control of Projects

PSA typically comes out of the box with an array of features around project management which allows you to effectively budget and plan. In addition to project visibility, your resources will also have the necessary insights to stay within the project scope and budget from conception to completion of each project. This is because PSA software allows you to track your project costs at a very granular level. You can easily account for every minute of time spent on each project and all the resources associated with it. Additionally, this allows you to analyze the productivity of your assigned resources to help you maximize your output.

Enhanced Decision Making

Incorrect or uninformed project decisions are a huge time waster and a risk for your service firm. PSA contains all your relevant information around a project in one unified solution. Any updates or changes made are global across the PSA solution giving all your resources access to view the changes avoiding manual edits. Additionally, PSA software enables your resources to track all your projects: you can view historical costs, risks, and pay-offs in order to get better insights on how to price in the future. Information is key for the effective management of your service firm, and PSA software provides the answer!

Standardized automated workflows can propel your service-based business to a new level of performance and growth. However, finding a workflow solution that specifically meets the needs of you and your team isn’t easy. Different companies have different requirements and use different methods to get work done. So when deciding make sure your chosen PSA solution matches your requirements closely.

Let’s look at how a PSA Solution helps with Billable Resources!

Resources and skills are the backbones of every organization's success. Effective resource management is a priority for all professional services executives looking to optimize their profit margins, improve billable utilization, retain top talent, and increase client satisfaction.

Unlike traditional resource management approaches, with PSA software you see a complete view of what you need to efficiently and effectively manage your billable resources. Good PSA software includes built-in resource management capability that gives you a simple-to-use solution for the ongoing task of assigning people to projects. This helps you efficiently turn day-to-day information into the answers you need about utilization, revenue, and profitability in real-time.

In a nutshell, an integrated Resources management gives you the ability and visibility to:​

· Kick start projects faster and more professionally

· Identify resource needs with extreme precision

· Increase resource utilization by matching the best skill-sets with different projects

· Increase resource morale and retention by taking skills, preferences, and professional development needs into account when making a decision when assigning to projects

· See the future of your resources with visibility into future hiring and skill development needs​

Below are 3 ways you can utilize a PSA solution to automate resources management...

Manage Supply & Demand

PSA gives you the tools to understand the overall supply and demand of your resources and skills. With PSA, you'll have a real-time dashboard that quickly shows you where resources are projected to be and what sorts of projects are currently in progress. It also brings to light which resource needs have yet to be met and what type of skills are required

Align Your Financial Forecasting

Reports and dashboards consolidate day-to-day scheduling data to show you who’s projected to work on what, who’s available, and who’s overbooked. This also helps you understand performance to budget at completion, instead of just performance to date. PSA software gives you the ability to measure the profitability of fixed-price projects before they’re complete.

Easily Match Your Resources with Projects

PSA allows for scheduling workflows to be created & configured to allow your managers/team to request resources to fulfill or approve requests. You and your team with the right permissions can search for resources by skills, location, title, or other criteria to help get the perfect skill for a specific project. PSA software gives you an all-in-one solution where you can quickly identify resources matched by skill levels and availability.

If you can relate to the issues above, then it’s time to consider PSA Software. Regardless of the complexity of your business or the basic tools you currently use to get by, PSA software will help you streamline as a business.

PSA Software like CrossConcept Continuum is built to address the entire resource management cycle in one unified, simple-to-use application. With a central dashboard view of your entire organization’s resources, you can better plan for and bid on future projects, make staffing decisions on current tasks, and ensure that everything is done on time and within budget. Our innovative scheduling module is intuitive, flexible, and highly configurable that adapts integrates with your organization’s people, projects, and finances. It allows your project managers to define resource needs and helps resource managers to quickly identify how they can fill each requirement at the touch of a button.

To learn more about how PSA software can help with productivity, check out our other blog - Professional Services Automation: Everything You Need In One Solution

Trial the PSA Software Built by Service Professionals for Service Professionals!

CrossConcept Continuum goes beyond traditional PSA solutions available today by incorporating cutting-edge UI technology making the solution more user-friendly, resulting in fewer clicks within the solution and time spent logging data. CrossConcept Continuum has been built from the ground up to integrate with all major accounting systems to seamlessly synchronize projects and accounting within one unified system.

Our innovative PSA solution allows organizations to maximize profitability by integrating connecting projects and financial accounting, enabling you to manage all stages of your project from conception to completion and deliver on your promises. CrossConcept has decades of experience helping service organizations automate their processes. Clients have ranged in size from a handful of people to over thirty thousand. The founder's and team’s real-world experience is what drove and shaped the creation of CrossConcept Continuum.

Our solution is a simple, yet powerful PSA solution built with the end-user in mind - fast, flexible, powerful, and user-friendly! We are offering all new clients a free 2-week trial with no contract obligations. This is a great opportunity for any business to try out the solution and decide if PSA software is for you!

To book a free 15-minute consultation, email: marketing@crossconceptinc.com or call: 1-888-528-3898 x110.