Protect your profits by reducing or eliminating the gap in ‘as sold’ and ‘as executed’ costs of your IT projects. Your actual profit can be lower than the profit estimated at the time of bidding for many reasons. It could be because of the wrong estimation of resource-hours.
Not considering travel costs could be another reason. In the post-covid world, business travel is on the upswing. It is now a significant cost factor. Inflation can also eat into your profit margins in case you have multi-year projects.
The best PSA software by ProductDossier provides you with tools to deal with all the above situations and more.
You need reliable data, standardized workflows, and collaboration between sales and delivery teams, and between finance, HR, and estimation groups. The collaboration must be based on a ‘single version of the truth’.
Use powerful tools provided by ProductDossier IT PSA to protect your profits. To estimate your project costs realistically, use the tools described below.
Templatize project cost estimation
You need a standardized process for estimating costs. The process should take into account different kinds of activities needed in your projects. You should be able to build an activity master that provides a quick and dependable way to configure your projects.
You need an enterprise-wide resources database with updated grade-wise costs of resource-hours. Travel cost estimation should be part of this workflow.
All the costs should get automatically adjusted for inflation applicable as per the timelines of your projects.
“The ProductDossier IT PSA provides all the above by templatizing project estimation based on a ‘single version of the truth’ across the enterprise.”
Another important benefit of better estimation of your projects in your deal pipeline is that it guides the talent acquisition activity.
Don’t go wrong about the indirect costs – use auto-calculation provided by ProductDossier software for professional services
Though indirect costs form a significant part of your project costs, they are ‘invisible’ to those working on project cost estimation. The problem becomes more complex in multi-unit or multi-location organizations.
ProductDossier IT PSA auto-calculates indirect costs based on data and factors determined and standardized by your finance department.
“The IT PSA makes the invisible indirect costs visible to estimation teams ensuring realistic estimation of project costs”
Let your finance department seamlessly update and apply the changes in indirect cost calculations across your organization using the IT PSA.
Establish a rule-based workflow for approving estimations using ProductDossier IT PSA
In an increasingly competitive IT services space, organizations need to take a strategic view of projects’ profit margins while approving their bids.
Some of the bidding decisions need to be escalated to a higher level of management. The IT PSA provides means of creating a rule-based (bid size, profit, contribution margin, etc.) workflow for approving bids.
Improve project cost estimation by using data on similar or same customer projects executed in past
It always helps if estimated vs. actual cost data on similar completed projects is available while estimating project costs. It prevents mistakes. The ProductDossier software for professional services provides such data readily.
“Apply your organization’s cumulative learnings not just in the costs but also in structuring project scope and contract terms to protect your profits.”
Enable collaboration between a project manager and sales during estimation and change requests using the IT PSA
Your salespeople and project managers need to collaborate during project cost estimation. They also need to collaborate during execution for managing change requests by customers.
The ProductDossier IT PSA makes their interactions transparent, fact-based, and quick. This speeds up their response to customers.
Managing waves of change requests by customers with a well-thought-out and quick response is a great way of protecting your profits. The ProductDossier IT PSA makes it possible.
Use IT PSA’s real-time feedback on the gap between estimated and actual costs
During the execution of your projects, the PSA software provides feedback to delivery teams, the delivery head, and the management about the variation of actual costs compared to the estimated costs.
“The ongoing cost variance feedback by Product Dossier PSA software enables pre-emptive actions to protect profits.”
Summary
Reducing gaps between ‘as sold’ and ‘as executed’ project costs is one of the biggest challenges for IT services companies.
There are big opportunities in these gaps to protect your profits. ProductDossier has the best PSA software that provides the required tools and workflows for meeting the above challenge.
To know more or witness a demo of ProductDossier IT PSA software, please write to us at sales@productdossier.com
