2012 ERP for Services Buyer’s Guide
The majority of services-based businesses, regardless of their market niche,
will find their typical business processes covered in this guide.
This guide addresses the software needs of services-based
companies that fall under the following example categories:
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Managerial and/or specific consulting services companies
Financial services and auditing firms
Research organizations
Law firms
Advertising, public relations, and marketing agencies
Customer-specific software development companies
Recruitment and staffing companies
Business Challenges of
Services-oriented Companies
The services provided by services-based organizations as
described above are commonly referred to as professional
services. Consequently, the software market segment that caters
to such businesses and provides specific application products is
known as professional services automation (PSA).
ERP for Services software is a type of solution that includes
support for both project delivery business procedures and backoffice processes that are not visible to clients but are still essential
for running a company.
Because of the project-based and people-oriented nature of
services organizations, this business segment requires software
applications that are capable of supporting services-oriented
business processes and adequately handling multiple internal
challenges that are intrinsic to this industry.
There are common internal business issues that professional
services organizations face regardless of their market area and
size. The most important of these are the following:
Billing. As professional services providers base their activities
on contracts and projects with clients, issuing the right invoice
to the right customer at the right time isn’t an easy task, even
for a small organization with several parallel contracts. So how
does a multinational business with hundreds or thousands
of multinational clients, multiple overlapping contracts and
delivery milestones, and various services and different contract
terms for each client do it? In today’s business world, where
an organization’s reputation oftentimes hinges on the last
interaction with its clients, mistakes or inaccuracies in invoices
are not acceptable.
Resource allocation. As professional services sell employee
knowledge and expertise, a project may span several disciplines,
so proper management of expert resources is vital to the project’s
success. For example, over- or under-allocation of expertise to a
given project can interrupt or impede the project delivery phase,
or the entire project. Multiple geographic locations, overlapping
demand for skills, and too often tight timelines all bring an
additional level of complexity to the task.
24 IT-Branchepublikation: ERP 2013
Document management and knowledge management. A
business providing professional services relies heavily on
the knowledge of each individual employee as well as on the
company’s corporate knowledge. Each project has to be properly
and systematically documented and stored in a central knowledge
base, with any employee granted access to that knowledge base
being able to obtain the necessary information for his or her
project. This knowledge usually consists of the expertise of the
service provider–amassed from the combined knowledge of the
organization’s professionals–and plays a key role in the provider’s
capability to deliver a promised service to its customers. The
knowledge base should be accessible from any location, be
flexible in its capabilities (enter nonstandardized information,
attach documents of different formats, etc.), have a search
mechanism, be easy to use, and provide practical information to
its users.
Project management and tracking. Services organizations often
practice a matrix management system, comprising a crossfunctional work team, which brings together individuals who
report to different parts of the company in order to complete a
particular project. In this management structure, employees
belong to vertical departments run by department heads, but
for each project they are managed by project managers who are
responsible for allocating and assigning certain tasks to them.
Considering the number of employees, the number of ongoing
projects, the complexity and duration of the projects, and possibly
the geographic reach of the services, it’s no easy feat to define
project management processes successfully.
Contract management. In most cases, the deliverables of a
services organization are intangible, and may be difficult to
describe and define in exact and quantifiable terms. Therefore,
the creation of a binding contract and the delivery of services as
contracted are an ongoing challenge. Indeed, it can be difficult
for potential customers to understand wha ^H\