The Four Biggest Challenges Stifling Your Profitability
It’s safe to say that 2022 has been a challenging year for businesses across the globe. Maintaining an organized revenue stream and ensuring a steady cash flow has never been easy. However, since the pandemic came knocking, business leaders have tirelessly investigated ways to remain profitable, while ensuring employee safety and well-being.
Defining what is impeding profitability is a great start. But we know your time is precious – why we have compiled this article for you. We asked over 150 services and project-based business leaders from the world over to name the most significant challenges they faced in managing remote workforces – and we have outlined them below. So read on and learn how to reinvent some of the greatest challenges into unique opportunities for positive change.
Businesses reveal their biggest challenges in managing remote workers. Read our Ebook for more information.
1. Forecasting, Future Project Bids, and Resourcing Issues
Anticipating potential hiccups and missteps is the key to generating accurate revenue forecasts and ensuring overall project preparation. Poor planning can send all this spiraling in the wrong direction toward budget overspending and underperformance. This also ties in with effective resource utilization, as a project can’t succeed without allocating the right resources. But there must be prior knowledge of who is available with the right skill sets, or team members are benched, stretched too thin, or matched with the wrong project for their expertise.
Supervisors and executives can manage resources effectively and make data-driven business decisions when they gain real-time visibility into billable and non-billable resources’ time. Investing in a solution that offers advanced analytics, reporting, and dashboards will help visualize and forecast resource availability, time off, and more. In addition, these metrics empower leaders to understand historical trends and real-time billable target progress to streamline business performance with improved forecasting and budgeting.
2. Manual Processes Causing Timesheet and Billing/Payroll Errors
Businesses that rely on manual processes get caught between the numerous information silos that get created when there is a clash between multiple disparate systems to capture time. There are further complications around inconsistent metrics, inflexible timesheets, and ad-hoc solutions due to a massive influx of remote workers that over-burdens unprepared ecosystems with delayed inputs, access complications, and legacy infrastructure issues. Finally, this inaccurate time data directly affects pay and billing processes for the worse, with unhappy customers down the line.
Embracing intelligent, cloud-based and mobile-enabled project time-tracking solutions can play an important role here. Businesses should expect cloud delivery models to dominate the business landscape as companies continue to expand remote workplace alternatives and accelerate automation. Today’s organizations require scalability and near-constant uptime as the world continues to evolve at lightning speed – and the cloud can deliver that security. In addition,mobile capabilities allow instant visibility into remote and deskless employees’ productivity and facilitate rapid decision-making by capturing real-time data.
3. Keeping Track of Remote Employees’ Time
Effectively tracking remote employees’ time has long been contested by those who prefer manual processes, despite its popularity. But now, they don’t have a choice. Many businesses were forced into a sudden telecommuting nightmare and lacked the transparency, context, and collaboration that an in-person workspace offered. Limited or inadequate communication between team members and supervisors leads to misunderstandings and setbacks without real-time insight and input that directly ties into all other project metrics like cost,project scope, productivity and profits.
Intentional communication between sales, finance and delivery teams is vital for meeting the client’s requirements and ensuring that everyone stays on the same page as information rolls in. Moreover, enabling a more standardized process by using intelligent workflows and shared metrics can help managers set expectations and enhance consistency across an organization. This mechanism, ultimately, helps create a more holistic, collaborative approach across the board.
4. No Real-time Insight Into Budget vs. Actuals for Costing and Billing
It happens – sometimes projects go over budget or miss a key deadline. As soon as a supervisor sees the warning signs, they can work to turn things around. However, there can be delays in fixing the red flags without real-time visibility. Moreover, repeated instances lead to problems like increased costs, reduced margins and lost profits.
When something goes awry, managers need to know the issue and immediately address it with a solution. An all-inclusive solution will provide on-the-minute estimates vs. actual tracking, helping managers make proactive, not reactive, decisions, set estimates for costs, hours, and billing, and measure performance in real-time. This setup ensures that nothing under their watch can spin out of control. With a solution that enables real-time project status, supervisors can create task hierarchies, define budgets and track timelines in minutes, and access instant information around time, cost and billing performance against budgets.
Overcoming Adversity
Edging out competitors and enhancing profitability is difficult, even in a non-disruptive marketplace, without a global health crisis that is underpinning every resolution. However, knowing the greatest challenges businesses face today – and, more importantly, how to overcome them – gives you a strategic advantage. Moreover, the changes in the marketplace and customer demands and behavior require organizations to embrace resilience and agility to pivot their business toward growth.
Investing in the right cloud and mobile-enabled project time-tracking solutions empowers business leaders to face these project and business challenges with strategy instead of panic and ultimately view results as opportunities.
Streamline Your Project Profitability in Real-time
Robust project time-tracking solutions can help organizations with global teams and multiple products and services drive profitability. Organizations need an intelligent time billing solution to make smart decisions and deliver profitable results. In addition, accurate project time tracking data improves employee experience and helps organizations thrive in a hybrid-digital workplace by creating a win-win situation for both organizations and employees. Now is high time to start your digital transformation journey and streamline your business processes, reduce revenue leakages, shorten billing cycles, increase cash flow, and improve overall profitability and cash flow.
As an industry leader, Polaris PSA has helped several organizations efficiently assess the profitability of their projects in the pipeline, the revenue they will generate, and the actual costs associated with delivering projects successfully.