Webinar Recap: The New Normal – Cloud and Mobile-enabled Project Time Tracking
A hearty thank you to everyone across the globe that joined us for last week’s webinar on cloud and mobile-enabled project time tracking!
Our experts led the discussion with an overview on managing the most prevalent project time tracking challenges organizations face handling WFH, productivity, costing, and integration issues. Check out the recap below with our key takeaways and some top questions. If you’re looking for more details, you can click here to watch the recording of the full presentation.
- Time, one of our greatest strategic assets, is finite, and it filters into every single aspect of an organization. But how much time does an organization actually have? Depends on the user base. An organization with 500 employees will have 1,040,000 hours a year; 5,000 employees have around 10,400,000 hours; 50,000 employees will have a whopping 104,000,000. With this much time at your disposal, you need a way to understand how this time is being used.
- The trouble begins when time data is separated into numerous silos: CRM, ERP, HR, project management, on-premise databases, and more. Even more noticeable due to work-from-home changes, these disparate systems make it difficult to gain real visibility into 100% of an organization’s time, and consequently, understand true project profitability.
- This results in numerous time, costing, billing, and resource management challenges, such as low utilization rates, chargeback errors, reduced planning capacity, decreased profitability, and more.
- This is further complicated as different personas within the company use different metrics derived from employee time in many different ways – but have no reliable system of record for time, and don’t calculate this data based on 100% of resource time. Instead, many businesses just equate their billable hours to total hours, leading to inaccurate metrics.
- With remote workers at an all-time high, organizations should seek out a flexible platform for project time tracking offering capabilities like:
- Streamlined Project Time Tracking – Project resources can see the exact projects and tasks they need to work on and are able to provide accurate inputs that directly tie into all other project metrics like costing, productivity, profits and more.
- Intuitive Mobile Timesheets – A user friendly mobile app that can provide time management on-the-go. Employees should be able to track project time and managers can easily validate and approve timesheets anywhere, anytime.
- Accurate Project Costing – Real-time attribution of time to projects gives you a clear comparison between the estimated and the actual hours and costs. The ability to group projects into programs helps organizations understand the bigger picture and manage costs at an aggregate level.
- Maximizing Productivity – Enable project managers to understand skills, resource allocation, and current utilization. Ensure high-value resources are mapped to high-revenue projects and ensure an overall reduction in non-project time for resources across the board.
- Real-time Estimates Vs. Actuals – Set estimates for hours, costs and billing. Easily compare estimates vs. actuals in real-time using dynamic in-context summary charts and comprehensive graphs to take proactive decisions to manage project costs.
- Powerful Analytics – A graphical representation of project data helps businesses understand trends. Configurable reports can provide a consolidated view of the critical metrics to manage budgets, costs, and resources.
- Seamless Integrations – Plug and play capabilities allow seamlessly sharing all project time and cost data with other solutions within your ecosystem like CRM, Accounting, Invoicing, ERP, HR and Payroll.
- We asked over 150 services and project-based businesses from across the globe to name the greatest challenges they anticipated in managing a remote workforce, and the results were illuminating. The largest concerns were not so different from those we routinely saw pre-pandemic. At 31%, many believed that they may face issues with forecasting, future project and resource planning. Timesheet, billing, and payroll errors caused by manual processes (27%) also made the list. Tracking remote or WFH employee project time (21%) and lacking real-time insight into costs and billing (20%) followed close behind. On the whole, services businesses are grappling with familiar concerns, exacerbated by a surging remote workforce.
- It’s clear that owning complete visibility into ongoing project progress through digitalization and automation initiatives remains a top priority.
Replicon customers use our comprehensive suite of products to manage a plethora of key business elements including labor costs, resource utilization, project tracking, and profitability to reduce billing errors, improve invoice turnaround, and more. Read more about some of our happy customers.
Top Questions:
Q: How is compliance handled within Replicon?
A: We actually have a team of legal and product experts that are manually tracking every single change in the global workforce. We have pay rules for over 80+ countries and 110+ locations including provinces and states. These get updated in real time, so any time there is a change, it gets updated in our platform. All you have to do to remain compliant is click a little box that says “Yes, I accept” and your compliance will be continued in that pay rule area.
Q: Where are the Replicon servers located?
A: Replicon uses the best infrastructure available (AWS) to support our servers across multiple global locations.
Q: What integrations does Replicon have with Accounting Software packages for billing purposes?
A: Replicon is open source and highly configurable, so we can connect with a ton of different accounting software including SAP, Oracle, ADP, Microsoft Dynamics/365, Quickbooks, Xero, FreshBooks, and more. For any more specific questions about integration, please feel free to get in touch. We’re here to help!
Watch the full presentation:
