Integrated Software for Professional Service Business

I have been running BlastAsia, a professional software service company since last 10 years and before that has been in-charge of running two other professional service organizations doing consulting work for business strategy and surprisingly never came across any good integrated software that would let me run my business and give me actionable information to make strategic business decisions. There are software which does point solutions like accounting, HR, payroll and Project Management, which we have been using for all the three companies at various stages, however when it came to making decision like:

- what is our current resource utilization rate? (how many of the billable resource are being billed)
- in the next 3 months are we going to need more people or will we have excess people on the bench? do we need to plan certain training or hiring people with specific skills that would be needed for upcoming projects?
- will all the committed expense over the next 6month be covered by the cash-flow or are we going to need to arrange alternative financing to cover some of the strategic expenses?
- how is our performance compared to our yearly budget? are we in proportion or some areas are running out of control?
- are we profitable for the various accounts?
- how are all the ongoing projects, are they more or less as per plan, when will the resources be free?

simple questions, and i am sure any of you running a company or is a decision maker in a professional service company would be asking the same every months. But you would also know how difficult it is to get the answer from one person let alone one screen, and I am not talking about companies that did not go for automation, they probably have a fully working accounting system, CRM system and HR, in addition to tools like MS Project and others. Most of the time different people help prepare the answer pulling info from different systems and reprocessing them in excel.

Isn't it an irony that 'professional service' companies also called 'knowledge service' companies have limited knowledge/information about their own business and not much has been done to help. Makes you wonder why? Since some of this category companies can actually do it themselves, build software and sell to others.

Actually on researching some more I found that there are some solutions emerging in the industry, a PSA or professional service automation and SRP, service resource planning are some effort in this direction, however they focus primarily to the need of IT service companies rather than the Professional Service Industry need in general.

So going back to the question how come there are not many/any solution to help provide the players in this industry with integrated information, my take would be the following reasons:
- majority of this companies are small to mid and can only afford to spend limited fund for automation.
- running a ERP type of system requires lot of hardware and support team in-house and most of this companies would consider those to be billable resource and putting them for internal use is always difficult.
- ERP type of systems have known to be difficult to learn and use, and most of the time they require dedicated resource to maintain data and produce reports per business unit, this is difficult to do for Professional Service Companies due to size of operation and billable roles of resources from business units.
- lastly lot of this companies, like Manufacturing and Distributions counterparts want systems to confirm to their business process and reporting, rather than adapting best practice that do not affect any of their strategic USP. This leads to the need of major customization, which equates to cost and complexities.

All of the above are legitimate roadblocks for automation, but the scenario has changed with 'cloud computing' which addresses most of the issues above well enough. Renting against owning, online over installing and running it in-house along with easy to use rich client interface enables adaptation easier. However the companies have to agree and let go some of their typical business process to adapt best practice as offered by system, as customizing would be the last thing any cloud provider would go for.

This is the thesis we are betting on for our next offering 'xamun', the integrated solution for Knowledge Enterprise Management. Visit http://www.xamun.com/ to know more, we are starting with CRM offering by August, soon to follow are Project Management and Human Resource, all integrated to the Decision Support System providing critical info to the decision maker in one screen. Integrated with various popular applications used by target market, we are looking at providing the solution the industry has been long waiting for. The system offered over the cloud, provides the infrastructure stability of Microsoft Azure Hosting and cost saving coming from majority of our operation being run out of Philippines. We at BlastAsia have been building world class commercial software products for ISVs all over the world over the last 10 years and now with Xamun we are looking forward to put the strength and knowledge of the organization to provide the service and stability that a great global cloud solution deserves.