Maximize billable hours with Dynamics 365 Project Operations

The number of billable hours for each employee directly correlates to your professional services organization’s profitability. Maximizing the number of billable hours per employee is critical to maintaining cash flow and increasing profits. However, the growing complexity and fast-paced nature of the industry can lead to unsatisfactory utilization and billable hours, costing your organization crucial revenue streams.

Larger organizations are able to support separate administrative and overhead positions devoted to the firm’s marketing, sales, and in some cases, management activities. However, for small and midsized professional services organizations, billable professionals are often tasked with these responsibilities while utilization expectations must still be met in order to maintain revenue and competitive standing.

Professional services organizations can leverage Dynamics 365 Project Operations to maximize billable revenue with intelligent resource scheduling that assigns the right people to the right projects and anticipates future resourcing needs to maximize resource intelligence. Ensure efficient time tracking and expense management to accurately capture all billable hours.

Easily create profiles of all your billable resources and store skillsets based on proficiency models that are easy to set up and adaptable to your unique business needs. Then, leverage Dynamics 365 Project Operation’s unified resource management capabilities to align the right people to the right projects based on required skillsets and availability. Additionally, you can anticipate future resourcing needs and quickly identify which skills you are lacking.

The unified scheduling engine gives you up-to-date visibility across all your projects and locations so you can make smarter assignments based on skills and real-time availability. Easily distribute workloads across your resources for optimal execution of project delivery needs. This ensures you book the right person on the project, improving the quality of work and resource utilization rates while staying on budget. Ensure all policy requirements are followed for all resource assignments with process governance features.

Resource reconciliation and utilization tools help your professional services organization better visualize schedules and identify bottlenecks so you can make more confident decisions and ensure timely delivery across all projects. Use easy-to-use drag and drop features to change assignments to update the schedule as changes or substitutions become necessary. With resource utilization optimization capabilities you can reduce scheduling gaps and downtime to maximize profitability.

With complicated time and expense tracking systems in place, errors are bound to happen. Dynamics 365 Project Operations empowers your team to quickly enter and record their project time and expenses with minimal effort and on the go with the mobile app. Configure rules and set up automated workflows to improve time and expense policy compliance with submissions, approvals, and reporting. With more accurate and timely time and expense tracking, organizations can improve compliance and avoid writing off billable hours in the fast-paced work environment.

Rand Group is an experienced solution provider that can help you select, implement, then adopt the best software or software solutions for your professional services organization. Our Dynamics 365 Project Operations support team will also ensure your software seamlessly connects with the rest of your business solutions and that all parties are trained on best practices. 

To learn more about how Dynamics 365 Project Operations can benefit your professional services organization, contact our team today.