As remote employees become part and parcel of the new normal, most leaders are beginning to realize that they need a better way to manage their projects, people, time and profits. The common link here is time – each business must ensure that they can capture accurate employee time, as these hours ultimately tie into all business metrics. Collecting project time with complex processes, unique business needs, and remote employees has its own challenges, but it doesn’t always need to be a struggle. You just need the right approach.

Our webinar this week discussed how Replicon’s Time Intelligence Platform can adapt to any business and provide all the right capabilities for effectively managing people, projects, costs and profits. 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. Once it’s used up, you’re not getting it back – so it must be treated as the precious resource it is.
• But how much time does an organization actually have? It depends on the size. An organization with 500 employees will have 1,040,000 hours a year; 5,000 employees have around 10.4 million hours; 50,000 employees will have a staggering 104 million. Unsurprisingly, any one person or department would find this amount of time nearly impossible to manage. 
• The real trouble begins when time data is separated into numerous silos: CRM, PSA, HCM, payroll, project management, on-premise databases, and more – and not every piece fits neatly into the puzzle. As a result, the ecosystem becomes convoluted and fragmented.
• Even more noticeable due to work-from-home changes, these disjointed systems make it difficult to gain real visibility into 100% of an organization’s time, especially when there are employees working from home and on the road, contending with on-premise databases and hardware.
• When time capture isn’t housed in one centralized system, businesses wind up facing a myriad of challenges, such as:
  • Costing and billing delays and errors
  • Low utilization rates
  • Reduced billable hours
  • Limited planning capacity
  • Inhibited future pipeline and growth
  • Decreased profitability 
• But the complications don’t stop there. Different roles (e.g. finance, operations, delivery, and more) within the company use different metrics derived from employee time in many different ways – but have no consistent, single source of truth for time. Instead, each business leader looking for quick data will interpret the results differently, creating inaccurate, contradictory metrics.
• Replicon’s cloud and mobile-first project time tracking platform empowers businesses with advanced capabilities like:
  • Accurate Project Time Tracking as 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.
  • Intuitive Mobile Timesheets for you and your employees to enable time tracking, approvals, and expense tracking on-the-go with advanced capabilities like geo-fencing, GPS tracking, crew timesheets, Face ID and more.
  • Estimates Vs. Actuals Tracking so that you can set estimates for costs, hours, and billing. Easily compare estimates vs. actuals in real-time using dynamic in-context summary charts and comprehensive dashboards to make proactive decisions and manage business metrics.
  • Improved Billable Hours & Utilization can help business leaders map revenues to billable hours and set utilization targets at the organization, department, and user level. This added visibility enables resources to be aware of their billable targets, take more responsibility for billing, and improve average revenue per resource.
  • Accurate Billing and Invoicing so that you can manage fixed-bid, T&M or value-based projects. Accurately manage project costs with inputs from your resources and leverage multiple templates, discounting, and add ad-hoc invoice lines included in our flexible invoicing engine to bill with confidence every time.
  • Project Forecasting and Budgeting allows you to plan for future resource needs with full visibility into the project pipeline, resources, and skill requirements. Leverage historical information to more accurately predict resource needs for a project while bidding. Analyze resource availability by skillset to proactively hire or retrain resources.
  • Powerful Analytics that can provide a graphical representation of your project data and all other business metrics to help you understand trends. Configurable reports give you a consolidated view to easily manage budgets, costs, and resources.
  • Seamless Integrations that allow you to plug and play our project time tracking platform and share all project time data with the other solutions in your ecosystem, like CRM, Accounting, Invoicing, ERP, BI, HR and Payroll.

Top Questions:

Q: Can a project report reflect time and costs that have not yet been approved? 
A: With Replicon, every detail is completely configurable, including what reports can display. For example, a business may wish to avoid sending reports with unapproved hours or costs to billing and payroll; and they can customize reports to ensure this. Other businesses may wish to include all hours and costs, unapproved or otherwise. The choice is yours to make – Replicon’s flexible reporting is designed to support all unique business requirements.  

Q: Can we try Replicon before we buy it?
A: Absolutely! In fact, if you get in touch with us, we can create a customized demo just for your organization so you can see exactly how it would work. Then you can work with one of our team members to show you the ropes. After that, you’ll have free reign to explore everything Replicon has to offer. 

Q: Is there a process map for users, as there seems to be a vast number of tabs?
A: No worries. Everything in Replicon is permission-driven and role-based, so users only see exactly what they need to see in order to complete their work, whether it’s time tracking, approvals, costing, billing, admin or otherwise. 

Q: Can this add on to current software? And can it be customized?
A: Yes. Replicon is open source and highly configurable, so we can connect with a ton of different software. For any more specific questions about integration, please feel free to get in touch. We’re here to help!

Watch the full presentation:

On-demand Webinar