The Professional Services Organization (PSO) landscape is changing — employees are harder to recruit and retain, a globalized marketplace increases competition for clients, clients want more for less, and management is often focusing on short-term firefighting instead of a long-term strategy. As Thomas J. DeLong (Senior Fellow at Harvard Business School) puts it, “In the past, the work of PSOs was a gentleman’s game — and now it’s a blood sport.”
In this article, we will discuss seven ways that Dynamics 365 Business Central and Project Service Automation helps you improve your overall organization and makes your business more dynamic.
Unify Your Business & Integrate with Other Microsoft Services
Microsoft Business Central is adaptable to extend business applications to other Microsoft Services such as Office 365, Microsoft Flow, Power BI, and Power Apps. Within Outlook, users can utilize Business Central’s quote-to-cash features from within their inbox, including the ability to generate quotes based on the content of an email and submit invoices. Having an integrated solution in your business completely connects your processes together making things similar and saving your company time. For example, using Business Central data as part of a workflow in Microsoft flow, or building powerful Power BI reports using Business Central as a data source.
You can connect your data across all corners of your business. With PSA, you can integrate with Office 365, Skype, D365, and . This allows you to go above and beyond with opportunity management, project planning, resource management, team collaboration, time and expenses, customer billing, & analytics and integration.
With any integration, there are specific requirements, which may mean you have different mappings or templates (if they exist) to complete a successful execution. When you complete the integration between your products, the adaptability available to your organization increases greatly, and there is no limit to what you can achieve.
Save Time with Task Automation
Manual tasks take time. Taking away time by performing repetitive tasks could be hindering your company greatly. This is where Business Central & PSA come in to help.
PSA literally has ‘automation’ in the name, but what does that mean? That means tasks such as resource management, project tracking, timesheets, expenses, project approvals now take less time. Business Central allows you to start your working day with all the data you need in one place.
Another advantage of automation in your organization is consistency and customer satisfaction. The consistency of automated processes means you can rely on your business processes to operate and you can offer reliable processes to your customers, maintaining a strong, competitive advantage.
Functionality Enhancement
Here are some of the great functionalities that PSA provides to help your business reach the next level:
- Sales/Opportunity Management — PSA offers extensions to opportunities and quotes to support the management of project-based engagements.
- Including the definition of project contracts, track labor rate and generation of a Statement of Work. (SOW)
- Project Planning — From very early in the engagement project managers and sales account management can work together to define and refine estimates.
- Gaining visibility of costs, effort and sales values for your opportunities.
- Resource Management — Assign / manage optimal resources based on skills and availability.
- Team Collaboration — Office Groups can be used to allow customers and project teams to communicate.
- Time and Expenses —Estimated, actual and billed time for resources is tracked.
- Ability to enter time and expense details via web, office and mobile apps.
- Customer Billing — Project managers can review, override and track overruns. And they can approve all costs impacting the project.
- Supports generation, approval and distribution of accurate invoices to customers.
- Analysis and Integration — Interactive dashboards provide insights into resource utilization etc.
- The powerful reporting capabilities of Dynamics 365 can be leveraged to report on profitability, revenues, expenditure, etc.
There so many great functionalities and enhancements that are provided in Business Central as well. These functionalities benefit your company’s financial management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, human resources, project management, etc. Not only does this system provide such functionalities, but it also provides a very easy-to-use interface which aligns with other Microsoft products.
Make Real-Time Decisions
Are you able to make confident, data-driven decisions about your services organization with instant access to real-time KPIs? For today’s modern Professional Services Organization (PSO) the ability to make quick and knowledgeable decisions are more important than ever. With Business Central and PSA you can guide your team to the right business decisions with easy-to-access, real-time data.
Price to win in a Complex Organization
Dynamic 365 for PSA helps create competitive bids with resources from within the organization, with a solid understanding of the required skill set, their cost, and the time taken to complete assigned tasks.
Dynamics 365 Business Central enables you to get the best price for your organization and your customers. You can expand the services you offer clients through the integrated suite of Microsoft solutions, including Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Power BI. Deliver key business insights to your clients using powerful reporting tools and custom dashboards.
Business Central and PSA integrated with your organization allow you to provide the best services for the price, enhancing both you and your client’s experience.
Maintain Good Customer Service
One of the most important things in maintaining a good business is having good customer service management. After all, customers are the fuel that keeps your organization up and running, and you want to maintain customer satisfaction throughout every business process. However, managing and tracking service is not always easy, and Business Central provides a set of tools to help. These tools are designed to support repair shop and field service operations and can be used in business scenarios such as complex customer service distribution systems, industrial service environments with bills of materials, and high-volume dispatching of service technicians with requirements for spare parts management.
With these tools you can accomplish the following:
- Schedule service calls and setup service orders.
- Track repair parts and supplies.
- Assign service personnel based on skill and availability.
- Provide service estimates and service invoices.
In addition, you can standardize coding, set up contracts, implement a discounting policy, and create route maps for service employees, organize campaigns, and integrate with Dynamics 365 for Sales.
Project Service Automation allows your organization to build trusted customer relationships by delivering outstanding project experiences. Good customer service goes back to our section on automation. “The consistency of automated processes means you can rely on your business processes to operate and you can offer reliable processes to your customers, maintaining a competitive advantage.” With PSA you can tie your business processes together keeping your organization on top of the competition!
