The adage “time is money” was never more applicable than to today’s service organizations. Effective project and human capital management is critical to maintaining a competitive presence in the market, and subsequently service organizations are constantly searching for new methods to achieve optimum productivity.

The hours spent matching personnel to projects could be spent growing your client base. The arduous task of tracking time and expenses, and preparing comprehensive billing scenarios could be automated—freeing time to evaluate, analyze and execute more strategic portfolio decisions. New technologies are available to help automate these tasks and enable service organizations to put their focus on their core competencies rather than on building custom applications to automate their business.

A New Generation of Applications: Enterprise Services Automation

Just as an enterprises’ sales force can now call upon sophisticated sales force automation (SFA) software to better manage their ever more complicated role and provide mission critical insight to managers and the business as a whole, so too can the professional service organization, internal IS or research and development department. Software for service enterprises, often referred to as professional services automation (PSA) software, developed out of the need to improve administrative efficiency, moving the workforce away from paper and spreadsheets. It’s about instilling best practices management and placing emphasis on a service firm’s lifeblood: accurate, timely and complete billings.

Enterprise services automation marries SFA with PSA and with the back office to create a well-defined and carefully integrated solution that improves client satisfaction and leads to new and profitable engagements. In the past, service organizations have had to look to many different types of applications to automate and optimize their business—they typically implemented disparate customer relationship management, supplier relationship management, and enterprise resource planning applications. These applications have now been woven together to create the concept of enterprise services automation (ESA).

ESA delivers an enterprise-wide solution through which every element of a service-based organization is managed, monitored, controlled, measured, reported, benchmarked, and improved—in order to achieve maximum operational productivity and profitability. The real payback comes from an integrated single-source solution. At the end of the day, service organizations just want a single tool to help them plan, sell, deliver, bill, and analyze.

Web services technology is the ideal backbone for an ESA solution. With technologies of the past, implementing a system of this magnitude would be daunting. With Web services, however, the job is much easier due to the collaborative nature of the technology. The component-based nature of a Web services architecture satisfies the need for an organization to be more collaborative with customers, suppliers, contractors and employees.

With Web services architecture, an organization is also able to easily customize both applications and processes. And, Web service-based applications inherently support any user interface that can connect to the Internet via a browser, making the real-time enterprise a reality. The use of handheld computers, smart phones or kiosks allows real-time entry and query of data virtually anywhere, anytime.

Today’s midsize businesses (MSBs) operate in a dynamic and competitive environment, often making it difficult to look beyond short-term objectives. The world of the Internet is changing the shape of business, making it even more crucial for businesses to focus on longer-term strategic goals and long-term customer relationships in order to remain profitable and competitive. As a result, MSBs must mandate best practices across the value chain, and invest in solutions that drive efficiency and performance—ESA can help them increase efficiency right across the value chain.