A CIO’s Checklist for Driving a Successful Time-tracking Transformation

Last year, nearly 1 in 4 projects missed their deadlines and overruns spiked 18% compared to the year before according the SPI Benchmarks Report. As a result, professional services firms are feeling the strain of resource crunches and operational roadblocks. In the backdrop of a slowing global economy, shrinking profit margins and an evolving technology landscape, CIOs must recalibrate their digital transformation strategies, beginning by overhauling their organization’s time-tracking processes.

A recent Havard Business Review study found that teams using AI tools saw productivity gains of more than 40%. Professional service firms can find similar efficiencies by incorporating AI into their time tracking processes. Transitioning from manual systems and disparate systems to track employee work time data with AI can help unlock productivity gains with actionable data-driven insights.

AI-powered timesheet software like Deltek | Replicon can simplify time capture by automatically filling in work hours based on project activity, calendars, and collaboration tools your team is already using. This not only saves employees time but also gives organizations access to more accurate data, improving project profitability by eliminating payroll, costing and billing errors.

As CIOs, choosing the right time-tracking solution to drive sustainable growth is now a strategic priority. The following are a few key considerations when selecting the right time-tracking solution.

1. Accuracy: Can the solution accurately capture work time data from multiple collaboration and productivity tools?
2. Workforce needs: Does it help manage a diverse and global workforce with capabilities like a multi-lingual interface?
3. Scalability: Can it scale in line with the firm’s business growth into new markets/geographies, or as the headcount increases or decreases?
4. Flexibility: Can it adapt to unique business requirements, such as the time capture process, overtime and leave policies?
5. Analytics capabilities: Does it offer real-time insights into projects, people and other key metrics?
6. Compliance management: Does it help manage diverse local, state and federal labor laws and wage compliance requirements proactively?
7. Integration capabilities: Can the firm seamlessly integrate the solution with any existing CRM, PSA, HR, accounting software or other proprietary systems?
8. Performance and reliability: Does the solution offer high uptime SLAs, low latency benchmarks and robust disaster recovery capabilities?
9. On-cloud solution: Is it an on-cloud solution? With on-cloud solutions, employees can access their timesheets anytime, anywhere. They offer greater flexibility, improved security and are more environmentally sustainable.
10. Self-service capabilities: Does it offer self-service features? The self-service feature empowers employees to manage their timesheets, lowering operational costs by eliminating multiple approval layers.

Why Data Silos Hurt

Data silos are a common problem for firms tracking employee work time data using disparate and motley mix of ERP, PSA and CRM solutions. Such setups do not offer real-time visibility into key metrics, such as resource utilization and employee productivity. Invoicing and payroll errors, missed billable hours and revenue leakages are other key challenges with a fragmented time-tracking ecosystem. Firms often face integration issues, which affect their agility, flexibility and scalability.

Business functions across a firm have different versions of data, which complicates the decision-making process and impacts the ability to see the big picture.

The Risks of a Delayed Time-Tracking Transformation

Deltek’s Clarity 2024 Report reveals that 67% of professional service organizations (PSOs) expect to lose market share within two years if their digital transformation initiatives do not succeed. Even more alarming is the fact that 75% of PSOs are concerned about competitors implementing tech faster than they can.

Despite these palpable concerns and a growing realization that they must revamp their time-tracking processes to align with stakeholder expectations and remain competitive, most PSOs continue to rely on a fragmented tech ecosystem. This delay is not only costing firms hard dollars but also jeopardizing their long-term ability to compete effectively. Below are some other key outcomes of delayed time-tracking transformation on a firm’s growth and profitability:

1. Reduced customer satisfaction from inaccurate time tracking leading to billing and payroll errors
2. Revenue leakage due to missed billable hours
3. Reduced employee utilization due to higher administrative overhead and context-switching between multiple systems
4. Increased non-compliance risk due to manual, siloed and non-compliant time capture
5. Higher operational inefficiency and costs due to non-standardized time tracking
6. Increased security risk due to the usage of legacy systems

How Capgemini Unlocked Greater Efficiencies With Deltek | Replicon

Capgemini is a global business and technology transformation partner, with 340,000 team members in more than 50 countries. The consulting giant used distinct time-tracking systems to monitor billable hours and handle employee time-off requests. Additionally, managing various leave types, accruals, and balances across multiple countries while ensuring labor compliance posed challenges.

Capgemini undertook a digital transformation initiative to converge onto a single time-tracking platform. With a user-centric approach, the “One Minute. Once a Week” campaign encouraged employees to fill in weekly timesheet entry (instead of monthly). By encouraging their employees to spend one minute, once a week, user adoption skyrocketed, hitting close to 100% in the first test market with almost zero follow-up.

Switching to Deltek | Replicon’s unified time-tracking platform helped Capgemini:

1. Reduce timesheet errors because of in-built validations
2. Improve global visibility to make informed decisions quickly and pivot faster
3. Converge to a single system, which lowered the total cost of ownership

Want to learn more about how Capgemini undertook this massive digital transformation initiative? Read the full customer success story here.

Drive Your Digital Time-Tracking Transformation With Deltek | Replicon

By leveraging an AI-powered solution to automate the time capture process, firms like yours can liberate employees to focus on high-value tasks. Deltek | Replicon’s unified AI-powered time-tracking software empowers businesses to manage time, projects, pay and labor compliance in one unified solution. Gain accurate and real-time actionable data and insights into key organizational metrics like costs, utilization, billing, pay and other metrics to make the right business decisions quickly.

PSOs often see gains of to $26,500 in revenue per employee annually, a 10-15% increase in employee productivity and a 90% reduction in administrative overheads with Deltek | Replicon. Capabilities include Automated time-tracking: This means no manual time-tracking and 100% accurate and automated work time capture across 100+ productivity and collaboration tools like Slack, Jira, Asana and Zoom.

1. Advanced analytics and reporting: Built-in reports and dashboards to help make fast and informed decisions.
2. Seamless plug-and-play integration: Seamless integration with new-age and legacy software stacks. Now, integrate with any existing project management, HR, payroll, accounting and ERP systems, such as JIRA, SAP, Zendesk and Xero with ease.
3. A scalable solution: An agile and flexible solution that can adapt to changing business requirements and workflows on the go. Designed for small, medium-sized and large PSO firms, ranging from ten to thousands of employees.
4. Compliance support: Supports industry labor standards and ever-evolving labor laws across 76+ countries and 147+ jurisdictions in 30+ languages.