How a Global Time Intelligence® Platform can Help Large Professional Service Firms Achieve Hybrid Digital Workplace Transformation

The success of a modern workplace is determined by how connected your employees and systems are. Integrated systems ensure easy access to information and collaboration, reduced response times, and enhanced capability to make the right decisions in real-time. No wonder that the companies that have embraced digital transformation to increase workplace proficiency and innovation have been well ahead of their competitors.

However, technology alone will not be able to help your service business attain digital transformation. How you choose and combine these new technologies with your existing ecosystem will make a difference and transform the way you operate your business. To stay ahead of the curve, your professional service firm will need to evolve – from introducing new technologies to defining how employees interact with these technologies. This can be achieved by fostering efficiency, innovation, and growth and breaking down obstacles that hamper communication.

Employee experience is a typical example of how digital transformation can help improve your processes. A recent survey by Gartner has found that 74% of CFOs plan to move some employees to remote work permanently. Employees shouldn’t feel burdened with a hybrid working environment due to complex systems, poor communication, and repetitive work that may hamper productivity. A seamless employee experience in the work environment will increase employees’ trust in your organization and go a long way in guaranteeing that there is no breakdown in communication, ensuring higher employee productivity.

The key to implementing successful digital transformation – that can drive organizational and cultural change and, at the same time, deliver business value – is to choose a platform that will bring that same ease and insight to employees when they’re doing their mission-critical work.

Addressing the Problems

The greatest misunderstanding around making a change in any organization is that you can achieve success and growth just by implementing the latest technologies and trends. In reality, implementing these new tools can just worsen the situation as you have multitudes of systems without proper connectivity to the ecosystem. These systems are further dumped on the employees, causing data silos and making their work more tedious and repetitive than before.

There are massive disparities in the daily processes that occur in any professional service organization like:

• Inefficient Operations: Organizations with a siloed ecosystem and multiple tracking tools are extremely inefficient and poorly integrated. These inefficiencies hamper employees’ work as they are unable to find the right tool to do their jobs – which further leads to time loss.
• Increased Costs: As the organization uses multiple systems which may have overlapping functionalities, the maintenance and support costs for each software will pile up the total cost of ownership for the different time tracking systems in use.
• Clunky Employee Experience: The daily employee experience gets frustrating as they need to use multiple systems, which take most of their time and make the process clunky and baffling. Switching between different systems to track and view data is a burden for the employees, which makes them vulnerable to making mistakes.
• Poor Governance: Making changes and applying policies and guidelines within a disjointed software ecosystem needs more effort and time. Without a proper real-time system of record, the chances of risks increase multifold.
• Zero or Too Little Support: Multiple and fragmented systems also lead to support issues for which you will need to maintain a high volume of help desk resources. This inefficient and broken digital experience also means employees need to set many passwords for each system, making them vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Also, most of the issues and questions around the siloed and fragmented systems end up with the involvement of users other than the helpdesk teams – which causes delay and time loss for everyone involved.

CIOs and most leaders find it hard to handle and address the silos caused by the use of multiple broken systems. This further results in communication disputes across teams, leading to misunderstandings and frustration among employees.

Therefore, it will be challenging for professional service firms to use and implement transformation and achieve desired results without sorting out the fragmented and disparate systems. These systems make the organization a stressful place to work and can even cost your organization your best employees.

To build a great digital workplace, your professional service firm should bring together people, processes, and technology to provide a reliable, consistent, capable, and efficient employee experience anywhere and anytime. You need to look beyond traditional workplace ecosystem models and consider how your employees can use modern technology to improve customer service and drive a great overall experience. A comprehensive digital business strategy will allow your organization to attain higher revenues, attract and retain employees, and surpass the competition in this hyper-connected world.

Bringing Order to the Fragment and Soiled Systems of a Large Services Organization

One of the large enterprises we work with lacked a standardized system to act as a single source of truth for time data as they had different governance structures, organizational models, and operating process taxonomies. Their processes were also manual, which further delayed their time tracking and obscured their decision-making. All this limited their flexibility to capture high-volume use cases and meet unique requirements for time capture.

Building a platform from scratch would have taken them over two years, including assigning considerable IT resources and subject matter expertise from the business. They were looking for a platform that could provide them with global governance and ensure that existing business use-cases are fulfilled. In addition, it needed to support any unique local requirements that may arise in the future.

Replicon helped them have a consistent user experience across all devices for both employee timesheets and manager approvals. The mobile-first platform and plug-and-play integrations to multiple Oracle, SAP, and Workday environments provided them with the speed of delivery and smooth integrations within the entire enterprise’s ecosystem. With the help of Replicon, the organization has chartered a brand-new course that unifies its global time tracking requirements and significantly simplifies its technology infrastructure.

requirements and significantly simplifies its technology infrastructure.

Their new digital workplace was able to achieve:

• Streamlined, accurate, and improved operational data, invoicing, and billing
• Reduced Overall Operational Costs
• Faster ROI and Time-Savings

Areas to Accelerate the Digital Transformation Journey

To begin with, CIOs must start analyzing their ecosystem and flag any potential inefficiencies. The next step is to recognize and implement the right tool that can simplify and streamline your processes. An integrated enterprise-wide solution will not only accelerate your digital transformation journey, but it will also help you in:

• Identifying and breaking down silos: A single, connected system reduces complexity and dependency on multiple systems. Employees no longer have to switch between platforms for their work which automatically increases their productivity.
• Improving the decision-making process: With the help of an integrated solution, you can view data across the organization and generate meaningful insights and reports. This helps you identify any potential issues beforehand so that you can build your business strategy accordingly.
• Reduces dependency and maximizes resource utilization: Instead of the multiple dispersed software systems and databases, digital transformation brings together details of resources all into one place through a unified system. It also integrates current software and databases into a central repository for business intelligence.
• Flexible with Seamless Process and Operations: With a unified tracking system, all of your processes will be fully automatic, saving time and reducing human error. The processes that take hours to complete can be done with a few clicks of a button. There will also be no need to re-enter data as all the systems will be integrated and synced to enable easy sharing between the systems.
• Real-Time and Accurate Business Metrics: As all the time will be tied to business data from billing to resource utilization, key business metrics to make an informed decision will be available on the go. You will also be able to tackle any problem before it occurs.

Accelerate the Success with Digital Maturity

Every business leader needs to analyze the maturity of their business initiatives to know where they stand in today’s world and deal with issues.

What we have discussed in this post is just an outline. Improving the messy structure of your professional service is a crucial step. We know it is challenging, and you can’t rectify it overnight. But at least you can get started to sort out the complex and unpredictable parts of your business operation to make lives easier for employees and reap the benefits for your organization.