The Professional services automation solution is designed specifically to provide project-driven organizations with basic means of control on their projects. Integrated with Exact Synergy Enterprise, this solution places planning, hour entry, and billing, together with other processes that your projects depend on, into one web application. This provides your employees with convenient access to project-related information from anywhere.
The benefits of the Professional services automation solution include:
Note: If you are currently using the SDK Timesheet solution, you can migrate existing data from the SDK Timesheet to Exact Synergy Enterprise Professional services automation by downloading the migration script. The following data will be migrated:
To be able to use the Professional services automation solution, your roles must match the roles specified in the general settings. The same roles must be at the Corporate level.
A typical project planning with the Professional services automation solution may go through the following phases:
Defining General Settings
--->
Project Inception
Project Planning
Hour Entry
Invoicing & Correcting Invoices
Reports
You can also specify the invoice code that is used when importing the invoices in Exact Globe Next. It is possible to follow the invoice code of the division or the project. If division is selected, the invoice code can be defined in the division card (at the Invoice code field). Otherwise, you will need to define the invoice code in the project card (at the Invoicing method field).
Note: Before you specify the types of requests that will be used when requests are generated automatically by the system, it is recommended that you define the types of requests according to the settings shown at Chapter 2 in Exact Synergy Enterprise Professional Services Automation Solution Manual. Do note that it is also possible to set up based on your own requirements.
You can also define customer rates, which is the amount charged to your customers for services rendered by your consultants for a specific project.
Last but not least, you can define personal rates for your employees solely for reporting purposes.
These rates can be fine-tuned for different projects and service types and for specific timeframes. This ensures that a correct rate is always used for billing and reporting.
Efficient project planning often relies heavily on the type of the project and provided services. Nevertheless, it is always important to plan efficiently and quickly.
The Professional services automation solution allows you to plan the project from a single page that gives you direct insight into schedules of your employees and their availability. You can then select the employees to plan their schedules, based on different search criteria, such as skills, domain knowledge, department, etc.
An employee can be planned for a specific period directly from the overview of the work schedule. For convenience, you can also plan in bulk for multiple employees.
Hour entry can be entered via the Hours & expenses entry button in personal cards or Project à Entry à Professional services automation à Hours & expenses entry.
Hour entries can be approved or rejected via requests generated as a result of hour planning by the managers or Project à Reports à Professional services automation à Approve hours.
Hour entries that have been approved can then be invoiced.
Errors in invoices can be corrected by creating correction and/or credit invoices at Project à Reports à Professional services automation à Credit invoices.
There are other various overviews that can be obtained and searches that can be performed from Exact Synergy Enterprise:
The Professional services automation solution has a background job, Exact.Process.exe, that handles the invoicing process. In order for the invoices to be imported successfully into Exact Globe, the back office settings for the division need to be set up correctly. For more information on the requirements, invoicing process, or troubleshooting issues, see Chapter 12 - Importing Invoices in Exact Globe in Exact Synergy Enterprise Professional Services Automation Solution Manual.