Home - Case Studies - Professional Services Automation - Case Study
Professional Services Automation - Case Study
Business Challenge
One of the UK´s leading Business Process Outsourcing Companies implements and operates world-class HR, Procurement, Accounting and Customer Administration Services for corporations. With 1200 employees they are able to take an entire back-office, specific functions or a particular business process and turn them into a fit for- purpose service.
Starting life with just 11 employees the company provided business process outsourcing services to a handful of clients. As a small start-up company, chargeable time could easily be managed using spreadsheets and paper-based records. To cope with the rapid growth, they restructured their business into dedicated business units called enterprises. Such growth and the restructuring of the business introduced problems relating to:
- Volume of paper based time and expense records
- Inability to accurately bill external clientsin a timely manner
- Inability to accurately cross charge employees across enterprises
- Inconsistent view of cost and revenue across the entire business
- Inability to manage budgets in an effective and timely manner
- Excessive administration
Solution
Following a review of their business requirements, they turned to Atlantic Global to help address their business problems. Group Service employees were the first areas for the initial roll out of Atlantic Global´s Time and Expense Tracking solution to 500 users, on their Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Internet Information Server. Implementation began with a series of workshops to understand the Group Services business structure and requirements. The workshops uncovered an implementation framework that addressed the complex working of Group Services division by modeling 3 distinct levels of Cost Centre:
- Staff work with a Cost Centre (standard cost and charge model)
- Projects are performed for Clients which relate to a Cost Centre
- Service Items are performed on projects relating to a Cost Centre
Identifying and modeling this structure within Atlantic Global´s Business Solution provided accurate billing, cross charging and budget analysis at the touch of button to both the accounts department and senior executives.
Business Benefits
The whole process from initiation to going live took just 4 weeks. Resources in both the Group Services division and Atlantic Global worked together to identify structure, cleanse and model the company data to provide a flexible immediate and long term solution. The quick deployment together with the easy user adoption has allowed the accurate capture and analysis of the company financials. In addition, senior executives within the company now have full visibility of the financial health of Group Services in real time as the company operates in an ever-competitive market.
Atlantic Global´s Business Solutions has ensured that the company is now able to plan and manage projects more efficiently. The standardisation of the companies planning and resourcing processes into one integrated business solution has radically improved project cost accuracy enabling the timely recharging and billing to internal and external customers. The result has been a dramatic increase in the number of billable hours realised and improvements in cash flow.
Atlantic Global´s Business Solution real-time web based reporting technology has helped the Outsourcing Department reduce administrative time spent on management reporting. Analysis of project performance has been simplified and accuracy has been dramatically improved with the implementation of easy, customisable reporting options, reducing complications and eliminating guesswork. Critically, Atlantic Global´s role based reporting has given executives personalised one click access to every report relevant to them. Centralised reports have allowed managers to measure real-time project performance and to deal with any roadblocks that may be impeding the success of a project.
The ethos of "radical improvement´, enables its clients to move safely from the control of resources to the control of tightly defined services. In sum they believe that world beating performance depends on standardisation, repeatability and moving best practice between industries.