Rapidly Get and Keep Projects, Resources, and Finances On-track
Leverage enhanced Beats and Pulse project management to make intelligent services decisions. Maximize utilization with enhanced resource management.
Polaris for Project and Resource Management
The Polaris self-driving PSA platform serves as the system of record for your project based organization and helps manage service delivery. All project related information, budgets vs actuals, WIP, resources allocated to projects can be easily managed to get instant visibility and communicated to other teams involved.
New Beats & Pulse Methodology
- The system collects beats data from project users about work done, remaining work, estimate at completion and completion date on assigned tasks.
- Project managers can approve/edit user beats and give feedback to users on work done, remaining work and estimates to complete.
- Get an instant understanding of all critical project metrics including hours, cost, financials and other details.
Project Planning
- Use historical information to bid and select your customer projects intelligently.
- Automatically pull and plan for projects from your CRM.
- Set up complex work breakdown structures & come up with accurate costs, margins and billing information from historical projects.
- Generate accurate project timelines and resource requirements from previous projects to meet profit metrics.
SmartBeats and Receptors
- Businesses can leverage Receptors to continuously get input from other work execution systems like Jira, Asana, Slack and more.
- Get instant updates from project users as beats about work done, remaining work and estimates to complete on assigned tasks.
- SmartBeats’ lightweight desktop and mobile apps remind users to update status and make entry fast and easy.
- Project and task leads get a sense for any project issues in real-time.
Task Beats
- Project managers review work done reports on the project tasks.
- Approve/edit user beats and give feedback to users on work done, remaining work and estimates to complete.
- Project manager can review the beats information and decide to accept or edit work done, remaining work, and completion estimates.
- Teams are able to resolve project issues in real-time.
Project Pulse
- Get an instant understanding of all critical project metrics at a glance including hours, cost, financials and other details.
- PMs evaluate for early warnings based on user beats, task beats to take necessary action.
- Take control of your project delivery with a real-time view of project progress, resources, work done and work remaining to be done.
- Track resource inputs associated with projects and get a sense for actuals as well as completion estimates in real-time.
- Aggregate view of project progress and metrics.
- Generate weekly reports process for stakeholders.
Manage Resource Pool
- Resource manager can view global resources’ to determine their current and future allocation levels.
- Use the graphical calendar to easily spot underutilized or over-utilized resources.
- Report on utilization by various dimensions with dynamic charts and graphs.
- Layered time off, holiday calendars and schedules to determine availability.
Intelligent Resource Allocation with SmartMatch
- Project managers can create requests with resource managers based on their skill and project needs.
- Ability to mention criteria while requesting resources – availability, skills, location etc.
- Built-in recommendation engine brings ideal resources for the job to the top.
- Quickly locate resources based on availability, location, skill set, department, or other criteria.
- Built-in project manager and resource manager collaboration workflows for project resource fulfillment.
- Allocate resources to projects by percentage of total availability or by hours per day.
Capacity Planning
- Generate resource forecast reports to gain visibility into the future availability of your staff.
- Assign placeholder resource to pending projects to effectively account for resource requirements, and enable quick hiring/training.
Skills & Certification Management
- Track skills, certificates and expertise levels for each resource as needed by your services firm.
- Easily manage skill and certification updates with attestation.
- Create a reference catalog of skills needed by each role.
- Leverage skill and expertise while initiating and fulfilling resource requests.
- Analyze resource availability by skillset to proactively hire or retrain resources and meet future demand.
Advanced Analytics
- MissionControl gives real-time visibility into all your business metrics – profits, margins, revenues and more.
- Tailored views cater to every role within your project-based organization including project managers, resource managers, finance teams, practice managers, client managers and more.
- See the big picture using our dynamic summary charts and dashboards to take your services businesses to the next level.
- Drill down to analyze the underlying project, resource, costs and billing data to make proactive decisions.
- Configure and schedule reports to match your organization’s reporting needs.
- Leverage advanced API for BI and prebuilt Tableau, PowerBI, Google BigQuery connectors to meet specific analytics needs.
Business Governance
- Standardize projects, resources, billing, revenue and other processes across your services organization.
- Define projects with configurable project stages to ensure business process adherence.
- Manage full resource lifecycle from forecasting resource needs to managing allocations and utilization.
- Model billing and revenue plans as per your business needs to enhance collaboration between project and finance/billing teams.
- Oversee documentation requirements in projects, expenses, time off and timesheets to capture needed details as part of process.
- Get everyone on the same page to ensure consistent execution and growth.
Financial Modeling for Better Budgets and Bids
- SmartBudget ensures your proposals and bids are right at the start to ensure every project meets all business metrics.
- Factor in 100% of resource time and costs & overheads while creating rate cards to maximize margins and profitability.
- Predict business metrics based on rates under consideration to make smart decisions about projects.
- Leverage true utilization number against 100% of people time based on historical information, current and future availability.
- Arrive at project margins and profits based on a 360° view of your business.
Managing Your Clients
- Manage customers, vendors, fund sources, service partners or internal departments using the client entity.
- Leverage actionable insights with a consolidated view of all client-specific projects and engagements.
- Access real-time metrics like costs, billing, profitability, and more to better assess your client relationships.
- Bring transparency into project delivery by providing visibility to clients into what work is being done through configurable reports and views.
- Streamline costing, billing and consolidation processes w.r.t clients.
Managing Your Practices
- Roll-up similar projects into programs/practice and manage a variety of professional services practices in your organization.
- Set up key attributes for every practice including hours, costs, billing and more.
- Centrally view and manage all projects associated with a practice in real-time and gain instant visibility.
- Make proactive decisions and manage your service delivery in-the-now.
- Gain full visibility into practice profitability and performance.
Project Time & Expense
- Capture client project time and expense data anytime, anywhere as per your needs.
- Track billable and non-billable hours by project even when mobile.
- Create and automate intelligent approval workflows with all the stakeholders.
- Leverage real-time notifications on any device to ensure timely submission for processing.
- Consolidate all the time and expense details to understand the true costs for making informed billing decisions.
Getting Your Project Financials Right
- Leverage our versatile bill plan modeling to accommodate various client/project billing needs – fixed-bid, time & materials, flat or any combination.
- Build rate cards with effectivity dates for each role to model client engagements.
- Track financial health, understand WIP and improve visibility into cashflows.
- Configurable invoicing engine with multiple templates takes care of all your client billing needs.
- Leverage revenue recognition built as an extension of the billing and invoicing platform.
Seamless Integrations
- Quickly and easily integrate Polaris with any CRM, ERP, PM, HRMS system that your company uses.
- Share critical data with your ecosystem to enable project and resource planning, billing, and revenue recognition.
- Easily implement, deploy, and upgrade with turnkey and seamless cloud-based integrations.