Global Professional Services Firm reduces request to revenue time by 40% using ProFinda

The Challenge

This professional services (PS) firm was seeking a way to improve its quality and speed of delivery to its customers, ensuring there was a far more optimal match between workforce supply and demand and allowing the firm to respond quickly to changing events through a data-driven, efficient and transparent manner.

Ensuring teams have the right skills, attributes and qualities to successfully deliver any project or task would in turn increase the team fit and profitability of operations. Our client wanted a far more skills-focused, data-driven approach that would combine multiple considerations (employee preferences and skills, location, employment costs, type of employment) to create these optimal teams.

This approach offers a transformational two-sided benefit outcome. Firstly, the benefit of vastly enhancing their employee’s experience. Since our platform can digitize all projects and the array of work, our approach can fully align their staff’s learning, development and career goals with the actual work, projects and roles inside the firm. The second is we can simultaneously ensure the workforce was at optimum levels of utilization and productivity.

The challenges faced by this PS firm were complex: how do they accurately understand their universe of skills (supply), how do they own a view of their work (demand), how do they orchestrate the matching of this supply and demand, how do they also appreciate their employee preferences, how does all this live and sync into existing workflow, and improve the integration strategies of ‘system consolidation’, ensure this all aligns with the culture, and drive all these complex elements, in tandem.

And how do they do so in a way that would make a fundamental and lasting impact on their business as a whole?

These challenges are each complex, they are all critical but moreover, fundamentally interlinked. And the legacy systems and approaches in place were often too fragmented to enable them to make the changes that they required.

To give an example of this, let’s focus on the challenge of profitability. One of the ways of implementing profitability is by having a blended team of both on-shore and off-shore resources. However, if both resources are managed by a different department or system, compiling together a hybrid workforce for any given project would become a slow, protracted process, increasing delivery times, while decreasing the quality of said delivery.

Key Challenges faced:

• How to ensure the quality of delivery
• How to increase the profitability of operations
• How to maximize workforce utilization
• How to enhance the employee experience
• How to drive all four elements in tandem

Solution

This PS client turned to ProFinda to aid in the innovation of its skills and resourcing processes and ensure these challenges were overcome successfully. With the help of ProFinda’s Workforce Optimization solution, the PS firm was able to interlink the data required to carry out all four of the key challenges by bringing together said data into a single end-to-end solution.

With ProFinda’s resource optimization function, the firm could locate and intelligently rank the best people, from any delivery centre, for any work assignment, in seconds. Resource managers now had access to any data (employee preferences and skills, location, employment costs, type of employment) required for consideration of a role in a single platform, making the process faster, more transparent and of a higher quality.

This was true even if combining a mixture of on-shore and off-shore talent for a certain project, if there were multiple stakeholders involved or if the parameters of the project changed in real-time. The result of this was the ability to deliver work of much higher quality and as such increase the overall profitability of operations as well as operational efficiency.

While ProFinda’s resourcing module handled the challenges of quality of delivery, project profitability and staff utilization, ProFinda’s Opportunity Marketplace (OM) module enabled the firm to then optimize its employee experience. With this OM, employees were given visibility over the complete spectrum of workplace opportunities, enabling them to personalize their own career paths. The firm was able to accommodate the personal growth of its staff by giving them access to stretch roles/L&D projects while simultaneously creating a more adaptive work environment that could support an internal ‘gig’ economy, and also provide employees with better work/life balance.

With ProFinda, the firm was able to:

• Increase the efficiency and quality of teams staffed for roles, projects and tasks
• Increase the operational efficiency and profitability of the organization
• Maximize workforce utilization while simultaneously improving the employee experience
• Create full visibility over their entire organization’s talent pool
• Drive all four changes required through a single end-to-end system

Outcomes

Since the implementation of ProFinda in late 2021, the PS firm has seen a clear and drastic improvement in its resourcing and delivery function. By utilizing ProFinda for its Workforce Optimization, resourcing has shifted from a slow, reactive function within the business, to an agile, strategic and fundamentally essential one. Some of the key results seen 12 months-post implementation are as follows:

• An average reduction in request to revenue process of 40%
• Decrease in use of external contractors by 7%
• 35% increase in the use of offshore resources
• 4.5% reduction in attrition
• 50% increase in employee preferences
• 10% decrease in travel expenses OPEX
• 2% point overall in average profitability per project on average

If you would like to know more about how ProFinda can help you achieve your WorkForce Optimization goals, click here to book a demo.