Industry functionality for Professional Services Organisations

Professional Services for Dynamics AX provides professional services and project-based companies with an end-to-end solution that delivers a greater level of control over project accounting practices and resources, and improves usability with a familiar, Microsoft® Office like user interface.

Professional Services for Dynamics 365 leverages Dynamics 365 to bring new levels of project and contract management capabilities to users and administrators. Make the most of your resource utilization and revenue with a new scheduling engine that matches qualified resources to tasks based on task requirements, and create comprehensive, custom project quotations to meet client specifications. With significant improvements to project functionality, such as the ability to create complex visualization structures and track detailed project information and approvals, one can gain better business insight and improve productivity.

Professional Services: Uniquely People-Driven

Professional services firms are uniquely people-driven organizations depending on the knowledge and skills of their employees to sell and deliver a range of advisory and specialty services, develop and service complex systems and structures, or creating engaging analytical content.

The Services sector spans IT services, engineering, management consulting, accounting, architecture and marketing and advertising, and other professions engaged in research and development, business optimization, training etc.

The most critical success factor for professional service companies are and must be perfect execution for on-scope, on-time and on-budget delivery. It is the foundation on which successful project execution, client satisfaction, and financial results rest.

Success: An Integrated, Holistic Approach

SCALES believes that one effective pathway for obtaining outstanding results is to implement an integrated performance management solution that ties together all key business focus areas and roles within the organization. By taking advantage of integrated business capabilities in Dynamics 365 that work across multiple business focus areas like CRM, HRM, CPM and PSA and individual roles, professional services organizations can get a 360-degree view into project and cost controls. Dynamics 365 can also offer better expense management and can provide practice managers and CFOs with up-to-date, detailed operational insights that can lead to better, more-informed decision-making and impact.

The result of intentional commitment to implementation of integrated systems is a holistic view of clients and of work conducted, past and present. With this view, professional services firm leaders can chart future engagements for both current and prospective clients with a higher degree of confidence than before, and they can forecast delivery capacity requirements and costs, bringing greater predictability to business results.

Dynamics 365 can help firms capitalize on all available talent by enabling assignments and balanced utilization across time zones and business units. For example:

• Human resource directors the ability to maintain central profiles of employees and subcontractors that can be shared across subsidiaries and locations to make it easier to identify human capital assets that may be tapped to deliver services.
• Schedulers can quickly find and assign the right resource for the right job at the right time and place. In addition, at an even deeper level, resources can be hard-booked or soft-booked to client engagements or project proposals in-process.
• Practice managers can focus on client relationships while easily delivering project estimates based on accepted and adjusted templates for common project requests.
• Project managers, in turn, can focus on team dynamics while taking advantage of work-breakdown structure templates for project planning, sophisticated budgeting and cost controls, time and expense entry and approval workflows, and project analytics.
• Financial leaders in particular can build on integrated project management and accounting, sales and marketing, and human capital management functionality to obtain a complete and holistic view of their business and streamline reporting and improve accountability across the organization.

Functionality includes:

• Automated Vendor Payments
• Resource Scheduling
• Budget Revision & Tracking Tools
• Compliance Management
• Customisable Project Billing Rules
• Project Quotations with WBS
• Integration to Project Server
• Sub-contractor Management

Benefits Include:

• Work faster in a familiar interface
• Streamline access to critical project information with Role Centres that present relevant tasks and information, including powerful business intelligence tools for reporting, key performance indicators (KPI's), and data cubes.
• Easily monitor project finances and tasks.
• Assess project progress using flexible reporting to gain a consolidated, real-time project view, and build custom quotations for clients with the ability to create more than one quotation per project request.
• Optimize resource utilization.
• Quickly match qualified and available resources to tasks with a robust scheduling engine to help maximize profits, reduce costs, and increase client satisfaction.
• Reduce non-billable time with workflow.
• Minimize physical paper routing and reduce invoice cycle times with automated workflow for Project Request, Timesheet, Expense, Quotation, and more.