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 Situation
Solution
Benefits
Case Studies
SituationA challenge for successful professional services firms—with dozens of clients, multiple departments, and offices in several cities—is to organize a system to track the billable hours of hundreds of employees. Often these firms use financial activity codes to record billable hours by their professional staff. Each client project is assigned a financial activity code to track associated work. This quickly becomes the single most important identifier in a firm because it ties revenue and expenses back to client projects. Today, many companies still use manual, paper-based processes to generate multiple activity codes each week for new projects. Client teams request activity codes by e-mail, phone, or fax. The process is cumbersome and time consuming—not only for the project leader but also for the supporting departments that must create these codes. Additionally, once the activity codes are created, project teams lack the centralized collaborative infrastructure required for successful project execution. These manual processes lead to many challenges. Today in a typical professional services firm: | • | Slow setup of project and team work environments delays the start new projects. | | • | Ineffective tracking of billable time and expenses results in revenue leak or inaccurate billing. | | • | Lack of a central location to store project information means project teams can’t find what they need. | | • | The amount of information is overwhelming for the people and tools that support service delivery. | | • | Managing the rapid growth of project management sites is difficult. | | • | Inefficiencies exist in delivering quality and timely services to clients. |
By building a project initiation solution on the Microsoft Office System, these challenges can be overcome.
SolutionThe goal of a project initiation solution is to help professional services firms provide better customer service by simplifying activity code creation, organizing project information, and enhancing team collaboration. Accelerate Project Initiation | • | Quickly gather required project initiation information | | • | Automate administrative tasks required for project setup | | • | Standardize processes for activity code requests and approvals | | • | Reduce costs of administrative and support personnel |
More Effectively Structure Project Setup | • | Improve efficiency through standardized project setup methodology | | • | Integrate project setup with end user tools | | • | Quickly identify project engagement deliverables and resources |
Improve Team Productivity | • | Improve project visibility with a central collaborative project hub | | • | Provide better real-time access to project status | | • | Reduce the time spent searching for information | | • | Decrease dependency on e-mail and file servers administered by the IT department |
BenefitsA solution based on the Microsoft Office System enables professional services organizations to more effectively realize the following: | • | Streamline the activity code creation process | | • | Facilitate billing and reduce errors for faster payment and better customer experience | | • | Lower overall costs of service delivery due to standardization and coordination | | • | Create easy-to-find workspaces for collaboration and storage of project information. | | • | Lower the cost of IT operations, including cost of mailbox and file server maintenance |
Case StudiesSee how other companies are using the Microsoft Office System for their project initiation solutions: | • | Digitas
Learn how Digitas saved money by simplifying billing processes and cutting IT storage costs using the Microsoft Office System. |
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