The Features & Benefits of Services ERP

Consulting firms and other professional services companies evaluating a services ERP system should always begin with identifying which features and modules that system needs.

We help thousands of businesses in the services space including engineering firms, consulting practices, law firms and software & SaaS companies to find the best ERP systems based on the features they need to run these people and project focused companies.

In this article we’ll share our knowledge and expertise on some of the most important services ERP features that professional services firms, project-centric and people-centric companies request.

If you're building your services ERP requirements, then you can use our free template to speed up the process:

Project Management

Many services companies work on a project-centric model and people are their key assets and expense, making project management a key ERP module for them.

Some of our services clients want to be able to integrate their ERP systems with best-of-breed project management solutions such as Microsoft Project and others. This is often because of the long time use of these dedicated systems. Indeed, many ERP systems provide this feature and maintain tight, out-of-the-box integration with these platforms.

Project Management in SAP Business ByDesign Cloud ERP

On the other hand, you may also choose to adopt an integrated project management module within your ERP system, and many solutions will provide fully fledged project management features. This can decrease the cost of integrating multiple systems and simplify your IT architecture, but does require additional change management and end user training if you have project management systems already in place.

However you do it, integrated project management systems help services companies to monitor customer projects, assign resources with the right skills, manage and meet critical millestones and proactively navigate any disasters. Critically, this helps professional services companies meet client expectations and optimize their resource utilization rates.

Project Accounting

Managing your people and materials on projects is important, but equally important is the ability to have integrated project accounting features within your services ERP software. It’s key that however you manage your projects that your data integrates easily with your finance and accounting modules.

Project Accounting Module in Oracle Netsuite

Project accounting features within your professional services ERP can reduce the administrative burden placed on your finance and accounting team as well as on your consultants, engineers and other employees, as well as enable you to adhere to any local compliance and accounting standards you need to.

Human Resources

For most services companies, Human Resources is a key module or integration point for their ERP system. The first choice you should make when selecting a services ERP system is whether or not you’d like inbuilt HR functionality or if you need to integrate with best-of-breed HR software or suites.

Services ERP systems with integrated HR modules can make integrating workforce data into your financial and projects data a breeze, whereas using a seperate HR platform could bring you better functionality and productivity.

Human Resources Features in Workday

Regardless of your choice, Human Resources should be a key consideration and typically the professional services companies we advise require timesheets, absence management and leave requests as well as talent management tools including recruitment, onboarding, learning and development and more.

Field Service Management

If your professional services firm leverages multiple engineers out on the ground, then a field service management module could help you generate new efficiencies.

Many ERP systems provide out of the box field service management functionality which can create and schedule jobs for your engineers, plan routes and send mission critical information to and from your head office.

Services ERP software including field service management capabilities enables you to easily integrate data from the field directly to your ERP system – and vice versa. This enables your engineers to access any critical customer, project or work order data and send images and video or other feedback to HQ.

This services ERP module can help your organization to increase customer satisfaction by resolving issues faster, decrease carbon emissions and increase productivity.

Billing

Professional services companies typically require strong billing features within their ERP systems. If you deliver commercial projects for your clients, you may want to consider milestone billing capabilities.

Other services companies require more dynamic billing features, depending on their business model. Increasingly at ERP Research we see professional services organizations demand meter based or usage based billing in ‘as-a-service’ like models. First and foremost, many professional services companies consider themselves high tech or software companies and require a billing module which can deal with monthly, quarterly or annual billing cycles, in addition to usage or consumption based billing and collection features.

It’s therefore often the case that your billing ERP module will need to integrate with others third party or proprietary software to measure usage and bill for it.

Expenses

If your customers pay for the time of your employees, then it’s highly likely that your employees time is valuable and also likely that they’ll be travelling frequently.

Expenses Management in Sage Intacct

Expenses management is a key feature for professional services ERP systems as this module allows your employees to quickly and compliantly create expense requests and have them sent for approval based on rules which you can define.

This ERP module can also allow you to bill these expenses back to your clients easily and compliantly, leveraging optical character recognition (OCR) in many cases to transfer data from an image receipt directly to your ERP system and reduce administrative burden.

CRM & Sales

Whether you’re in the B2B or B2C business, having a good CRM module within your services ERP is important in keeping your customers happy, finding and selling to new customers or effectively upselling and cross selling your range of products and services.

You should consider this when building your ERP requirements. Key features for an integrated CRM including prospect and lead management, marketing campaigns and tracking, quotations and sales orders.

The key for most professional services companies, is that these features are integrated with the wider services ERP system. For example, your sales orders should easily flow through to delivery and create projects and associated GAANT charts, as well as set up customer contracts, billing and collections. Integrating with your finance module can enable you to automate account blocking and give your sales and finance team 360 visibility of your customer relationships

Cloud

It’s not essential for services companies to leverage ERP software in the Cloud, but many professional services companies opt for Cloud ERP over On-Premise.

Cloud ERP systems have in the past been somewhat limited in terms of the amount of customization they can handle and have been optimized for process and product light industries such as professional services.

This means that there are many great Cloud-based ERP solutions for the services industry which offer out of the box processes and tools optimized for consultancies, managed services providers and other professional services companies.

Services ERP Software

There are many services ERP systems which include the modules and features mentioned above, but for our top recommendations, download our Top 10 ERP for Professional Services Report below: