Team availability for projects at a service business is a bit like a constantly shifting puzzle. New projects are created in each team schedule and necessitate their unique combination of time from different specialists. Teams must remain organized around a timeline and a budget.
Scheduling is only one of many tasks in a service industry firm that benefits from being organized within a system capable of automating most of the more tedious elements involved in coordinating a team's projects.
The amount of value that companies can derive from the automation process is staggering. Firms using software to automate in the professional services realm are seeing incredible boosts in their average billable utilization rate — gains of 68.3% to 70.9% across many sectors.
Customers have also come to expect better outcomes in many areas, from a higher quality of serice and faster delivery, to cost and transparency.
Achieving stronger outcomes in all of these fields requires discovering and removing any wasted time and effort, allowing excellent work to be delivered on time, under budget, and with a clear demonstration of value in the form of transparency.
How does scheduling availability automation work and how can you get started? Here are some important factors to consider.
Consider for a minute what must be considered to allocate team resources effectively:
It's no wonder that delays occur when teams are scheduled without automation. It's actually more impressive that projects are completed at all, given the many moving parts in the scheduling realm!
Automation takes time to implement, but once it is in place it optimizes all of your inputs: scheduling is a problem that automation can solve well.
Accelo, for instance, allows you to input the different companies that you work with, incorporating projects, tickets, sales, and retainer periods within a single platform.
Using Accelo to organize the many tasks of a project and ensure that they are effectively allocated allows you to take full advantage of the time allotted to your team. Accordingly, you can use forecasting to make smart business decisions regarding what tasks or projects to prioritize next.
Accelo starts with tasks. These have due dates and specific time allotments. Tasks are allocated to particular milestones, entailing that they can be scheduled with a particular person/team.
Creating these kinds of plans and manually assigning them to each person could be as time-consuming as reviewing all of your team's individual calendars or gathering the team in a scheduling meeting.
By contrast, having everything automated through a central location like Accelo is a time-saver.
Moreover, once tasks are assigned in the central system, your team members can modify their schedules and you can finesse tasks as needed. Filter out specific types of work, including Scheduled, External, Committed and Auto-Scheduled. Automatic scheduling saves the time that the back-and-forth on most projects uses up. It also gets everyone down to business faster due to its clear visibility.
Service industry groups are realizing more and more that their core products — the services that they can do better than anyone else — are extremely important.
As a result, they work to trim costs in every other area, building as much efficiency in the running of the business as possible to allocate resources into the work itself.
Automation helps smooth the scheduling process and offers every team member the project work that they need. It also reduces the time required to forecast which new client work should be given current or future priority.
In sum, automation allows you to identify how the next few months and years will take shape, which timelines are reasonable for sales representatives to offer to new clients, and what availability you have for particularly in-demand skillsets within the team.
Accelo helps your team effectively manage and efficiently schedule everything in one place through the assistance of powerful integrations with other important enterprise software.
If you are ready to automate your service industry firm's scheduling of teams and tasks, it is critical that you select the right productivity and profitability solution to boost overall efficiency.
Accelo offers the scheduling automation power that you need alongside many other tools. These integrate seamlessly to provide you with a big-picture, up-to-the-minute snapshot of where your company is and where it is heading.
Get to know our user-friendly, powerfully data-driven platform with a free trial of Accelo today!
