17 Reasons Women Make Great Leaders
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For any business, time is as important as capital, assets, and resources for its success. On average, employees contribute their time towards:
In the past, it has proved fairly complicated and time-consuming to manage projects, resources, and finances with complete accuracy. Thanks to the evolving technology, tools like Enterprise resource planning (ERP) designed for product-based businesses and Professional services automation (PSA) designed for project-based businesses now make this job much easier than ever by helping companies optimize the way they track, manage, and utilize their time. Let’s take a look at these software types to understand how they might help you and the differences between each.
Enterprise resource planning, known as ERP, is software that helps you manage your daily business processes like production, accounting, manufacturing, team and project management, and more. ERP links together many related parts of the business, enhances efficiency by eliminating errors, and ensures that data is not duplicated. ERP was designed predominantly for resource planning, budgeting, procurement, and sales.
Instead of having numerous databases and spreadsheets, an ERP software brings all of the data together to create, use, and store it in a protected and structured repository. ERP gives you:
Professional services automation, or PSA system, helps companies manage their processes. A PSA is the closest thing to an ERP in running daily business operations. Different PSA software vary in functionality, with a pretty broad range of options. A well-designed and customized PSA will have some critical functions, such as automated project, time, expense, asset, and resource management. With a PSA system, you can see and meet project timelines and milestones and allocate resources in a way that maximizes their utilization. A PSA solution can also track how much time an employee spent on various projects and tasks for billing. All this will help you project profits and identify inefficiencies.
Even with the advancements in technology, current ERP implementations lack flexibility and scalability to solve modern business problems. A recent example is the increasing remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic where ERP systems are falling short in scaling up and accommodating these types of employees.
Here are a few of the main differences between an ERP and PSA:
To sum up, ERP systems need to be used with other solutions to handle functions like resource management, timesheets, accounting, project management, etc; however, you can choose to use one solution that is PSA as all these functions exist in it.
The bottom line is that ERP implementations and patchwork solutions have left enterprise projects, resources, and time data fragmented in multiple systems like ERP, CRM, HCM, BI, and even Excel. Businesses lack a single source of truth for their project organization, which makes harnessing and managing the data a tedious process that ultimately costs businesses significant overhead.
To bridge the gap, companies are opting for a solution like PSA. Here are 10 reasons as to why companies are opting for PSA:
Currently, available PSA applications have almost similar capabilities like project management, accounting, planning, collaboration, etc.; however, they differ in the strength of those capabilities and user interfaces.
To choose the right PSA solution for your organization, you need to identify your business goals and needs. You need to know what features and capabilities will fulfill your requirements and lead you to growth. The right PSA system will keep you out of spreadsheets and manual processes, and make you more engaged with the data in real time to help you make decisions that drive better profitability.
Ready to learn more? Download our ebook about the Ultimate Guide to Operational Efficiency within the Professional Services Industry.