How can the Intelligent Enterprise Impact Professional Services Companies?

In today’s digital economy, there is immense pressure on professional services firms to do more for less. Firms are facing new price pressures and competitive threats. New entrants into the marketplace have changed the way firms deliver services, forcing them to either adopt new approaches or face stagnant or declining revenue growth and margins. Firms must be able to respond rapidly to these challenges yet still comply with the pressure of new reporting standards. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Strategic Priorities in a Digital Economy
The digital economy is disruptive. Professional services firms must use market dynamics to create and capture new business opportunities and enable their strategic objective of nonlinear revenue growth.

Outcome-based engagements
The simple “time and materials” business model that proved highly profitable for professional services organizations in the past is being replaced by outcome-based models. Clients are increasingly focused on the business outcome of an engagement, rather than the effort involved, and are negotiating prices and relationships accordingly. The key lever for firms is to adopt a superior bidding process resulting inaccurate proposals that will ensure predictability and repeatability of outcomes and thus minimize delivery risks.

Knowledge as a service
Professional services firms are realizing that they have valuable expertise and content that can benefit their customers beyond the typical face-to-face engagement model. In the past, intellectual property (IP) was available for customers only in formal engagements and was a key point of differentia-tion. However, innovative service firms continue to productize their service lines, create knowledge “vaults,” and monetize their institutional expertise. To keep pace, the quote-to-cash “process infrastructure” must be adapted to the emerging business models and address the full lifecycle of the new delivery models for digital expertise and IP services.

Leverage talent networks
Digitalization of talent has made new business models possible by identifying, classifying, and attracting talent on an as-needed basis outside the boundaries of a firm and effectively integrating talent into one team based on powerful virtual learning and collaboration platforms.

Professional Services Capabilities with the Intelligent Enterprise

• Understand and optimize engagement profitability - Reduce service costs with full, real-time insight and automated accounting, time and expense processes, while recognizing more revenue through integrated project delivery and billing processes.
• Assess staffing levels anytime, anywhere - Onboard critical resources in time for upcoming projects, track resources continuously, and access contact details quickly to support collaboration between teams, organizations, and partners.
• Simplify time entry in the cloud - Streamline time-entry processing to notify employees when their time entries are rejected and allow them to correct their timesheets and resubmit them – anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
• Enforce limits on time and expense billing - Boost your clients’ confidence in your services by staying within the defined limit for time and expense with the addition of an upper cap amount to your sales agreements and service contracts.
• Reimagine bid management - Speed bid creation dramatically and improve project margin, with more effective planning, then move smoothly into project execution with consolidated real-time and historical insights. 
• Streamline quote-to-cash - Create customer contracts with competitive pricing, personalized payment plans, and multiple methods of billing, while simplifying billing through consolidated invoicing across all engagement types. 

The intelligent ERP
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core will result in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. To achieve next-generation business processes and business models, companies need an intelligent ERP solution that can be continuously enhanced and extended with innovative business services and applications built on emerging technologies, including machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

View the full blog post: https://www.approyo.com/single-post/2019/08/08/How-can-the-Intelligent-Enterprise-impact-Professional-Services-Companies