Businesses have been using time keeping, expense tracking, project management, and service ticket systems for years, but comprehensive project and service management systems are often isolated and treated as separate tools for specific business units and work teams. TimeLinx provides a way to bring everything together within a company’s CRM system while improving collaboration among co-workers, partners, vendors, and customers – thus offering an alternative to traditional professional service automation suites.
TimeLinx incorporates real-time functionality – including time and billing, expense tracking, asset and resource utilization, project tracking, and accounting integrations – into a company’s CRM system and by extension, its current workflows. It’s an investment that will improve productivity and availability, save money, and increase user and customer satisfaction.
Professional service management(PSM) comes at a cost. A typical PSM rollout entails an expensive upgrade of older systems and the deployment of new software and hardware. And many PSM products are complex to deploy and require organizational changes and extensive product customization and integration. If a strong ROI can’t be demonstrated, top executives may balk.
Cost reduction and avoidance, as well as revenue gains, are easily defined. However, many PSM benefits are more intangible ones, such as productivity gains, and can be more difficult to quantify.
On the tangible side, while most PSM systems will reduce the costs and time associated with managing projects and service operations through automated and integrated software applications, few can truly address the cost of deployment concerns mentioned previously. Since TimeLinx operates within the native CRM system that most employees are already accustomed to, TimeLinx can streamline PSM operations while allowing adopters to maintain their current CRM systems, saving considerable costs for conversions and new software. By integrating PSM with CRM, companies can benefit from reduced deployment costs and user adoption.
In our experience, the greatest intangible returns come from improved service delivery, which can have several benefits, including enhanced customer service and revenue acceleration: faster information results in projects completing faster and invoices being sent out sooner.
The goal for business leaders is to determine how these productivity gains can be aggregated into benefits measurable at the group, division, and corporate levels, and then include the aggregate benefits in calculating ROI. Our advice is to first understand what tangible and intangible benefits are most important to your company. The best business case for adopting a PSM system comes from streamlining the mission-critical service and project delivery processes that drive your business.
# # #
About TimeLinx
TimeLinx delivers innovative project & service management software as a complete solution that perfects the sell-track-manage-support-bill cycle that services organizations must have to delight their customers; TimeLinx brings the cycle together in a single application that offers less frustration, better project management, complete reporting, and improved profitability – all specially designed for Infor and Sage.
