The market for professional services is growing faster than any other aspect of the IT market, driven by the need for companies to rein in their costs and outsource non-core activities to specialists. With this in mind, Solit iNovations, the affiliate partner for Lawson in Africa, has launched version 5.0 of Lawson's Professional Services Automation (PSA) module.
Lawson PSA 5.0 is designed to compress the length of time taken from identification of business opportunity to closure and billing. It maximises a workforce's productivity and efficiency; enhances a company's ability to forecast revenues accurately; and improves cash flow and profit margins.
"The market has never been more competitive, while alive with opportunity for well managed professional services companies," says Gerhard Visser, GM of Solit iNovations, "and teams working on project bids must be provided with best practices, cost control and tight management of resources. Lawson PSA 5 fulfils these requirements. Correctly implemented and used, it will increase the efficiency of a professional services company, enhance processes and impact positively on the bottom line."
Lawson PSA 5.0 automates and streamlines the entire project management process. It allows the members of a project team to:
* Manage their opportunities;
* Forecast potential revenues for any new project;
* Evaluate moving revenues in any project;
* Closely manage their resources; and
* Tightly manage their project accounting, all the way through to invoicing.
Key attributes of Lawson PSA 5.0 include new analytics functions, OLAP-based data cubes for resource utilisation and time and expense analysis, designed to give users detailed views of utilisation rates for better financial visibility and forecasting.
"This reflects a wider trend in the enterprise software market to add analytics to applications to gain a greater understanding of business activity," Visser says.
Access to Lawson PSA 5.0 is through a Web portal, allowing all members of the team, no matter how widespread, to remain in synch. Staff, managers and clients can access project status, in real-time, making for detailed, accurate communication and billing.
Key benefits of Lawson PSA 5.0 include:
* The ability to access information anywhere, any time, as it is browser-based;
* Improved, accelerated real-time resource assignment and tracking, which leads to accurate billing and expedition of payments;
* Improved employee performance and retention, as employees get to choose projects suited to their skills and career objectives;
* More efficient processes as it enhances the capabilities and effectiveness of skilled workers by facilitating the dissemination, sharing and reuse of critical information; and
* Enhanced client satisfaction through gaining access to real-time project status updates for improved project management.
"PSA software integrates a range of service-specific activities such as opportunity, project and resource management, time and expense, billing/charge-back, analytics and reporting," continues Visser.
Other new features of PSA 5.0 include offline access so disconnected users can access time and expense reporting; enhanced work request functionality to improve the overall flexibility, intuitiveness and approval process; and enhanced resource management to deliver deeper visibility to resources through performance management features and weighted skill-searching.
"Lawson PSA is used to optimise resource management and work request capabilities, making it easier to organise, track and manage all work, resources, time and costs, with a view to improving the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce," adds Visser.
Solit iNovations has extensive Lawson product experience, having successfully delivered many large Lawson implementations at sites across Africa, focused on specific business verticals providing expertise in service industries. These include retail, professional services, financial services and healthcare. Solit iNovations has also announced Lawson Services Automation 5.0, which shares much of the functionality of the PSA module but is designed for the management of internal services operations.
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