New Era Solutions has entered the professional services automation (PSA) arena with its local release of Epicor for Service Enterprises.
The company aims to assist services organisations with its new solution in a market that sees a slow, but improving general economic climate, recent events that have changed and challenged the market and an increased emphasis on cost containment.
"Viewing the status of a project in real-time through professional services automation allows project managers to solve problems on the fly, ultimately leading to improved customer service and profitability," says Scott McKenzie, MD of New Era Solutions.
Aberdeen Group research shows that companies can expect a 100% five-year annualised return on their investment in PSA. Invoice cycle times of 10 days also become possible, according to the research firm.
Other benefits include:
* Usage increase of over 8%;
* Payback in typically less than three months; and
* Increased management visibility and effectiveness.
These were cited as the main reasons for the success of PSA by 55 end-user services organisations interviewed by Aberdeen Group in 2001.
The target market, services organisations, are those that sell, deliver and invoice for services external to the enterprise, support internal enterprise clients and embedded services organisations.
"Services organisations face a number of business challenges that Epicor for Service Enterprises resolves," says McKenzie. "Many companies lack visibility across all operations, specific challenges such as efficiency, control, bids and proposals and planned growth and economic issues and corporate governance, such as complying with tough new regulations, stringent cost controls and difficult markets with increased competition."
PSA addresses some of these challenges: in recent times it has been expanded to include many of the back-office functions typically found in ERP solutions. Aberdeen says the merger of PSA and ERP has created a broader market termed ESA (enterprise service automation). The ESA market has become especially appealing to those organisations that prefer their entire enterprise solution infrastructure to come from one vendor on one platform.
McKenzie says there are six pillars of collaborative ESA:
* Opportunity and bid management;
* Resource management;
* Engagement management;
* Project management;
* Project accounting;
* Performance management; and
* Knowledge management.
What these do is assist the:
* Sales force in selling;
* Staffing manager manage resources;
* Delivery team engage with the client;
* Project manager manage the project;
* Billing manager with accounting;
* Finance department with performance management; and
* Executives analyse the portfolio.
PSA leads to six gains - efficiency, cash flow, realisation, utilisation, visibility and satisfaction.
The product is Microsoft-centric and developed on the .Net platform, ensuring that it is an effective remote solution and easily integrated with all enterprise Windows and other platforms.
Share
Editorial contacts