Your Get-Started Guide to Our New PSA Product: Polaris (+ Free Demo)
What’s in a name? As the old saying goes, a label is not quite as important as the intrinsic quality of the thing itself — and while this still rings true, a name can hold a lot of power. It can identify; it can define and characterize an individual, product, or brand; and it can even answer one of life’s most enduring questions: who are you?
Most professional services firms can already confidently answer who they are, and what motivates them. The problems begin when their infrastructure doesn’t — or can’t — do the same. When services organizations use a complicated patchwork of systems to capture and interpret data, the critical metrics used to drive business decisions are invariably siloed, stale, and inconsistent. The result is an incoherent system that jeopardizes quality, credibility, and revenue the longer it goes on. Without relying on a single source of truth, today’s professional services automation software can’t offer the accurate, real-time efficiency needed to manage profitability, revenue margins, and organizational targets. This is why we created Polaris, the world’s first self-driving PSA.
Known for its role as a northern star and guiding light, Polaris is a name that provides answers right off the bat. Used as a fixed point for navigation, Polaris is a global, unifying resource for those seeking the right direction; a consistent reference point across borders that helps set the standard for progress.
And just like a self-driving car, the self-driving PSA is enabled by collecting large amounts of real-time data to guide businesses and illuminate what’s going on around them. Polaris PSA was designed for businesses to see more results with less hassle. It does everything a traditional PSA does, and more.
Here’s how it works:
Real-time, Live Business Data
It’s clear that services businesses deserve a more centralized approach to managing the crucial metrics that determine the path forward to successful delivery. This requires unifying their operational data and subsequently making the right decisions based on more than error-prone, outdated numbers.
Polaris uses the powerful SmartBeats system to continuously harvest data from users, acting as a common shared data platform for 100 percent accurate and effortlessly up-to-date information. This provides a single source of truth so many professional services firms lack and eliminates data silos. SmartBeats gathers rich comprehensive details about the project status and can be easily updated using web, desktop, our modern mobile interface, or popular collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to get a live pulse of the project and the business. With the help of SmartBeats, professional services firms can continuously keep projects, resources, and finances on-track.
Driving Harmony Across Business Leaders and Groups
With this flood of data now at your fingertips, many project managers and supervisors may understandably feel a bit overwhelmed. This is where Polaris analyzes all the data to boil up any exceptions and alerts. MissionControl helps you make sense of all this information. Tailored to your specific role, our MissionControl center expertly sifts through information to ensure that you only see what’s relevant to you, including visualizations of KPIs around costs, resources, and delivery. It’s exception-based and provides proactive alerts, so you’re always aware of any potential problems before they happen. These valuable insights enable agile responses across an organization, ensuring on-time delivery, improved utilization, and increased profits.
Tough Decisions Made (Really) Easy
But Polaris doesn’t just enable intelligent decision-making — it can do it for you or give you serviceable intelligent advice. Built to handle the heavy-lifting of scrutinizing every potential angle on a tough business decision, Polaris looks at real-time data to recommend the smartest possible choices to decide from, solving problems before they even exist.
Here is an example of intelligent recommendations: On the resource management side, Polaris provides you with a global view of availability, location, skill sets, certifications, and more, so you can easily manage your talent pool. To help you fulfill a project requirement, SmartMatch, Polaris’ built-in resource recommendation engine, can revolutionize your resource management by pinpointing the right resources for you, reducing planning time, and liberating supervisors from the tedious manual selection process.
Revenue planning and pricing of resources for bids benefit from the same type of intelligent optimization. SmartBudget simplifies maximizing professional services revenue and pricing by accounting for all relevant metrics. Modeled around fully loaded employee and business costs, utilization, margins and billing rates, SmartBudget leverages historical metrics to make informed pricing recommendations and enable improved bidding for your organization.
Enterprise-ready, Configurable, and Scalable
Polaris offers the cutting-edge configurability and scalability that truly sets apart our PSA software solution from the rest. This is a four-fold effort:
- Rather than disrupting your workflow and routine, Polaris adapts to your needs instead.
- Our high-performance true-cloud platform scales with your organization and adheres to the highest security standards and privacy controls.
- Polaris was designed to integrate seamlessly into your existing ecosystem and share real-time information with Accounting, ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence, and other tools comprising your unique infrastructure.
- Polaris leverages advanced, state-of-the-art technologies to help you manage business intelligently.
Redefining PSA
So, what’s in a name, after all? Quite a bit, it turns out. By identifying itself as the true north for services businesses, Polaris is reshaping professional services automation. Rather than letting businesses fall short of their overall profit potential, Polaris was developed to help companies capitalize on the many undiscovered opportunities hidden in bidding, utilization, expenses, and billing processes. With a new category of self-driving PSA software, services firms can make the best possible decisions, based on a real-time, accurate, holistic perspective of their business across practices, clients, resources, projects, and roles.
Learn more about how Polaris can transform your services firm today.
