5 benefits of implementing a resource management tool in your company IT services companies
Agathe Placet
Content manager
September 24, 2023
4 min
Rereading the 2022 edition of "Grand Angle IT services companies & ICT 2022"the annual study published as every year by KPMG France and Numeum, one figure catches our attention: 12%.
This is the record growth forecast for 2021 for Digital Service Companies (IT services companies) and Engineering and Technology Consulting (ICT) firms. Never before in the last five years has the sector seen such an acceleration in activity.
But it is also this growth that is driving a number of market changes, starting with the arrival of a growing number of competing companies.
If you're an employee or manager of IT services companies or a consulting firm, this complicates your sales and recruitment missions, leaving you even less time than before to conclude your customer projects or to convince the best people in the market to join, or even more simply, to stay with your company.
And while time is the first tangible benefit you'll gain from implementing a resource management tool, it's far from the only one.
Discover the 5 benefits of implementing a resource management tool in your IT services companies or consulting firm.
As you've probably already realized, what separates a flourishing IT services companies from a stagnant structure, beyond the quality of the team and their ability to execute well, is the ability to manage more or less well the most important resource within a structure like yours: time.
And it's precisely because this resource is one of the most crucial, that when it comes to choosing between developing your own assignment resource management software, it's often wiser to choose the latter, since the aim is to reap the full benefits of using such a solution as quickly as possible.
So you're already saving time before you even start using your assignment software. This goes even further once you get into the actual functionality of the tool.
Since your resource management needs to manage ALL your company's resources, the assignment software needs to centralize and collate ALL your data (number of FTEs (full-time equivalents) available, billable and non-billable FTEs, etc.).
Napta, for example, our assignment tool, offers centralized requirements functionalities that not only enable all the company's stakeholders to access the same information, but also eliminate the need to search for the right information.
There's also no need to cross-reference requirements from different business units or projects on multiple Excel spreadsheets, in order to get a global view of the company.
By bringing all your data and requirements together in one place, the resource management software becomes a daily ally in your quest for productivity, peace of mind and time savings.
From our point of view, it's a contradiction to want to measure your consultants' TACE (Total Excluded Leave Activity ), i.e. their level of production for your IT services companies, without yourself being able to be productive in managing assignment .
The TACE, also known as the assignment rate, gives you the percentage of your consultant's time actually spent on customer assignments. In this sense, it is one of the main indicators for measuring the ROI of a service activity.
And there's probably no better way to collect your employees' leave and other absences on the one hand, and the time spent on customer projects on the other, and then report on this information as part of your reporting, than by using a resource management tool.
Perhaps we should have started there, since we're talking about resource management. Your resource management software is, as the name suggests, designed to help you better manage your resources.
We're talking, of course, first and foremost about your consultants' time, but also about the technological tools at their disposal, the budget allocated to each of your customer assignments, and so on.
And behind the generic term "Management" lies the imperative of making resources profitable for your IT services companies. So, along with measuring and monitoring your TACE, your assignment solution will enable you - or at least, should enable you - to decide, for example, on which assignment to position which consultant with which current or future skills...
... taking into account the deadlines communicated to your customer, the assignments already signed and planned or those in the sales pipeline.
If we often say that "what gets measured, gets improved", we should probably add "thanks to better anticipation."
Let's take the case of your consultants' inter-contract periods. A frustrating period par excellence at IT services companies, both for the company itself, unable to make a profit from a paid employee during this period, and for the consultant herself/himself. Being idle and not feeling useful to your company can lead to a loss of confidence and motivation, which bodes ill for future assignments.
This is the situation that your resource management tool solves by enabling you to learn from past projects (which periods of activity proved particularly busy? which types of mission systematically required more human strength?...) but also by anticipating future missions.
But these benefits can only be realized if you have a dedicated person in-house, specifically in charge of assignment. Depending on the size of your company IT services companies, this may be a full-time job, or occupy only part of the person's day.
This is the case, for example, at Capgemini Invent , where each Business Unit has its own Operations Manager, who also acts as the assignment contact for a group of around 200 consultants.
This benefit dovetails perfectly with the one mentioned above concerning inter-contracting. Anticipating market trends 2 or 3 months in advance, as well as the type of assignments to come, enables you to offer your consultants training opportunities.
It's a win-win situation. Your employee develops professionally, while your firm saves on the cost of finding and hiring consultants.
At Napta, for example, from the very first steps of our assignment tool, we have put the development of team skills at the heart of the software. Each employee declares and self-assesses his or her skills , and indicates his or her training needs. This data generates a dynamic dynamic mapping of skills and aspirations as well as tracking skills development.
The strong pressure on the market, both from a commercial and recruitment point of view, reduces the reaction time you need to make the right decisions.
There are many issues at stake: ensuring the profitability of your consulting business, reducing your costs, retaining your best consultants... As the market matures, implementing a resource management tool has simply become a necessity.
Would you like to find out more? We've got plenty of resources to help you go further.
To complement this topic, read our template "The perfect load plan for successful deployment".
See also our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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