Forecasting and planning can determine your destiny when you’re selling time
Professional services is all about leveraging human expertise, experience, effort and creativity to solve real client problems. Businesses that operate in a professional services capacity need to make forecasts in an uncertain environment and use data to make effective decisions around utilisation, profitability and hiring.
To make this happen, you need a set of tools that can plug directly into your financial back-end, delivering the data transparency you need to understand the reality on the ground. That’s where we come in.
Common challenges
Operational planning
Professional services firms must focus on optimising the needs of their clients and minimising internal constraints relating to personnel in order to remain profitable.
Resource utilisation
Professional services companies must try to balance the demand for, and supply of, their personnel according to the work they receive in the market. This utilisation not only impacts costs, revenues and bottom-line margins, but also has implications for the long-term morale of staff who, after all, form the core of any professional services provider.
Demand mismatches
When personnel resources are mismanaged, companies can find that their personnel are either sitting idly, chewing up fixed costs, or are overworked, which increases churn and hiring costs. These mismatches can damage overall profitability and can negatively impact the quality of the service provided if they’re not rectified.
Powerful forecasting
Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 provide a comprehensive suite of forecasting tools that can take in real data and assist with planning personnel, costs and revenues. By optimising these components, professional services firms can get a hold on their hiring challenges and make strategic decisions that maximise profitability.
Internal cost allocations
Effective performance measurement within professional services relies on accurate cost allocations that map precisely to the reality of the work performed.
Inaccurate cost mapping
To understand the true return on any particular service engagement, professional services firms must be able to accurately map costs to specific revenue-generating activities. This can be challenging, especially when you add central costs to the mix that must be allocated out in a way that is fair to all teams or units.
Hidden inefficiencies
When costs and revenues aren’t accurately attributed, professional services firms risk missing out on key analysis that can impact their decision-making. Certain projects might look more profitable than others based solely on accounting conventions and this can skew things in ways that obscure reality. All of this can lead to suboptimal strategic planning that can, rather insidiously, hurt your business over the long term.
Driver-based cost allocations
Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 can help you derive true causal links between costs and revenue so you can accurately allocate your costs according to key drivers and assumptions. This can all be done within your planning framework – meaning it can inform all decision-making from a data-backed perspective. See the truth and then act on it to take your business to the next level.
Hiring strategy
Knowing when to hire and how to utilise your human resources are core to growing and expanding a professional services firm.
Measuring personnel requirements
As you look into the future, your hiring and training needs should be based on key data that you receive from your existing and future projects. As the market changes – and your services evolve – you need to understand how you should hire or train looking forward in order to service available demand without overwhelming your salary bill.
Lack of agility
When you hire too aggressively or too passively, you limit your company’s ability to respond flexibly to market demand. Your long-term hiring strategy needs to be based on real data rather than gut feel so you can make the right strategic decisions for long-term growth. Investing in people can range from (re)training to hiring or contracting in the right skills.
Efficient strategic planning
Cubewise and IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 offer powerful technology to enable strategic planning across every aspect of your business. Combine your financial and operational planning so you can make the right recruiting and training moves to grow your firm.
Advanced resource planning, forecasting, and performance management tools
Here at Cubewise we can help you leverage the power of IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 to radically shift how you think about professional services. Make use of advanced forecasting, nuanced personnel utilisation and strategic planning functionality to facilitate better precision and reduce wasted time.
With real data-backed decisions, the only thing limiting you is your imagination. Why not get started today?
Talk to us today and let’s overcome the challenge together.
When a system is unable to adapt to changing business circumstances, it can be tremendously frustrating for all who work with it. Things must go on, of course, and so users will resort to building tedious workarounds, simplifications and shortcuts that only serve to kick the can down the road.
Don’t accept that your business processes are incapable of adapting to fast-moving market changes. Contact us to find out how easy it can be to implement efficient and practical planning, reporting and forecasting workflows.
