Like most industry sectors right now, professional services companies are dealing with a fair number of business challenges—some of which barely existed just 3-4 years ago. Operating in a $6.4 billion market that’s posting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6%, these companies are called upon for a wide range of services, including research, design, consulting services, legal services, accounting services and more.
While the opportunities to tap into new markets are vast for professional services firms, the industry is also facing some headwinds right now. Highly reliant on labor, for example, professional services companies are dealing with the ongoing labor shortage and turning to more technology and automation for help. Other stressors include the uncertain economic environment, changing customer requirements and, for certain sub-sectors, extremely high levels of competition.
Professional services firms also have to commit to a certain level of continuous improvement, especially when it comes to training team members on new skills and competencies. Through a blend of sophistication and agility, professional services firms can both tackle the “now” and start planning for success in the future.
Some of the biggest issues keeping professional services leaders up at night right now include inaccurate, unreliable data that doesn’t support good decision-making; the constant push to improve resource management and utilization; and the fact that spreadsheets and legacy systems struggle to accurately present cash flows and other financial data across the organization. Forced to resort to spreadsheets for information-sharing, for example, professional services firms can quickly find themselves in the “red” on projects that were expected to be profitable.
With the national unemployment rate now at 53-year lows, labor availability is another pain point for professional services firms. To make better use of their existing labor resources while leveraging technology as a tool, more companies are automating processes that would otherwise have to be handled manually. This not only ensures higher levels of accuracy and speeds up the process, but it also allows valued team members to focus on more important projects and clients.
As a professional services firm itself, NetSuite Solution Provider and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) partner, ScaleNorth, fully understands the challenges and opportunities that organizations are facing in today’s marketplace. As a long-time NetSuite Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) user, we also know precisely which of the platform’s functionalities address professional services firms’ biggest challenges.
ScaleNorth has also customized NetSuite Project Management in a way that allows it to track all project activities. For example, we track all phases of our implementation and have created tasks and case tasks that help consultants understand what steps need to be taken (and in what order). Using automated dashboards, we provide excellent project and task visibility—both for ourselves and for our professional services customers.
Managing a successful, profitable professional services firm has never been easy, but it has become more difficult over the last few years. The good news is that with the right ERP platform and implementation partner on your side, you’ll be able to position your firm for success now—and well into the future.
