Do you find yourself spending weeks finding the right resource for your project? Is your project going over budget? Are you missing project deadlines? Are you unable to keep up with ongoing and outgoing cash? If you answered “yes” to any of the questions, then it’s time to consider PSA integration. Not to be confused with enterprise resource planning, PSA software manages intangible assets like staff and consultants, whereas ERP manages tangibles like products, goods and stock. Let’s take a deeper dive into PSA integration specifically.
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A PSA system integrated with ERP provides any business with enhanced financial visibility and the highest form of integration. Today we will be covering the basics of PSA and what features you should look for to successfully implement it in your organization.
What This Article Covers:
- What is PSA Software?
- Primary Benefits
- Key Features
- Other Features
- Tips For Successful PSA Integration
- Conclusion
What is PSA Software?
PSA (professional service automation) software is a comprehensive combination of software suites. A PSA solution breaks down data silos by making information accessible to every department in the organization. By integrating different systems, siloed data is no longer an issue and data accessibility becomes quick and easy.
PSA software provides a complete picture of the business performance. This boosts transparency, efficiency and trust within the company by breaking down data silos and making sure that data overview is available across all different levels. Project and service-based companies find it effective in managing delivery, resources, time tracking, finance, billing, collaboration and reporting all in one place.
Primary Benefits
There’s no doubt that a standalone PSA platform can provide numerous benefits to your business like:
- Reducing Administrative Work: It automates repetitive tasks and frees up significant time, energy and money for the core business objective.
- Simplify Project Management: By providing a holistic view of the different aspects of the project, it ensures that the budget is monitored, resources are tracked and the business can forecast the future.
- Enhance Client Communication: It improves internal communication and enhances customer relationships by providing real-time, transparent communication. Ultimately, it revolves around the issues immediately.
- Reduce Overhead: By automating traditionally manual tasks like billing and invoicing, you eliminate the need for a dedicated administrative assistant, reduce the overhead cost and free up your staff’s time.
PSA software is indispensable when integrated with the organization’s finance management application and other processes.
Here are a few reasons why it’s so helpful:
- It provides all the team members one source of truth to know what affects the bottom line.
- A financial integration enhances visibility and business control.
- It’s a centralized point of information, with real-time data accessible to the entire team.
- Since it bases integration decisions on real-time fact and not intuition, it increases the agility and transparency of business operations.
- The impact of fact-based decision-making is more beneficial to the organization.
Key Features
Now that you know what PSA is and how its integration can help the organization on a profound scale, let’s dig deeper into finding the right software for your business. We bring you the features to consider before making a final decision.
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Integrations
CRM Integration
A PSA system tightly integrated with the CRM system has many benefits. This close-knit integration automates the quote to cash process and provides greater visibility into the active projects, quoting process and more. While you should always ask for customer references to cross-check the robustness of the integration of PSA and CRM, it’s vital to steer clear of the beta site for first-time integration because it makes the implementation process challenging.
ERP Integration
Select a system that integrates with your existing ERP system to automate project billing, vendor-specific objective evidence, and more. The tight integration solves the billing problems which affect the bottom line. To find the right software, seek enterprises with the same ERP as yours and have implemented software.
Check for the integration requirements as well, as this has a huge impact on your project design. Modify other systems accordingly so that you can leverage all the functionalities of PSA tools.
Built-In Analytics
Professional service organizations want to move away from excel sheet reports because they’re time-consuming, waste employee potential and increase the cost. Enterprises need real-time visibility into project performance. A proficient PSA system gives a live view of the business metrics to help the management better understand the situation and make a well-informed decision. Look for systems that offer real-time dashboards and analytics.
Other Features
Cloud Deployment
An increasing number of organizations are inclined towards the cloud model as there’s a lower upfront investment and there’s no cost associated with the ownership of the platform. While PSA solutions are available in three different forms — on-premise, hosted or cloud — you must select one that meets IT resource and functionality requirements.
Mobility
Consults spend a lot of their professional time running to and from the appointments. Traveling makes investing in PSA tools with mobile capabilities essential. PSA professionals want appreciate being active on the go and not hampered due to limited resources. Mobile clients, offline access, and collaboration tools are the three areas you need to concentrate on when investing.
Tips for Successful PSA Integration
Now that you know the important features to find the right system for your business, let’s talk about how you can successfully implement a PSA solution in your organization.
Consider Every Employee
Take employees from every area and department into consideration. Understand and communicate how the implementation is going to affect your staff and the work they do. Include workers from every department in the project planning to align the process with your organizational objectives successfully.
A PSA platform brings multiple functions and departments together, which means everyone can be involved in the decision-making and held accountable for how their system works. It helps project managers succeed by giving them insight into what is working for them and what is not.
Another vital aspect of implementation is how you adopt it in your organization. Training and monitoring can prove beneficial in such instances. We’re not talking about generic training but software lessons specific to each department and the employee’s role in it. For positive reinforcement, ensure that the employees get the correct training material that’s updated as the work evolves.
Focus on the Data
Ensure that the PSA system creates and customizes reports and a dashboard when the need arises. Make it a point to use all the reports and dashboards in the meeting to get resource allocation done immediately. You’ll immediately see the impact of your decision. This helps the team understand the importance of data and they’ll control everything under their umbrella.
Since a PSA tool provides previously unavailable insight, you can look at areas that need improvement and changes. Make it a habit to continuously review the reports and proceed with modifications according to the business needs.
PSA software offers possibilities to decentralize and drive accountability throughout the organization, which means you can foster reporting skills in-house, as reporting not only requires technical skills but business knowledge as well.
Get a PSA Platform With Excellent Interoperability
You need PSA software that can integrate with other tools of your organization such as a CRM, ERP or other legacy systems. Always go for programs with a declarative approach, because it’s easier to test or easily allow modifications and lower the cost of ownership. Your team won’t have a hard time learning the functionalities without the complexity of coding.
Make sure to go live with the minimum viable configuration that is beneficial to the organization. This way you can test, iterate and make sure it gives you the functionality that your business needs.
Conclusion
Integrating PSA decreases the burden on the staff by minimizing administrative tasks and better resource utilization. It provides organizations with full data visibility and improves predictability. Furthermore, a successful PSA integration enhances customer satisfaction. But this is only possible when you choose the right PSA software with features aligned to attain the goal and objectives of the business. The features and steps mentioned above can help you find and implement PSA tools successfully and leverage benefits at a larger scale. In the meantime, read more about PSA requirements for a better understanding of what you should look for in a system.
In your opinion what are the most important features when integrating PSA? Leave a comment below!