Professional Services

In professional service organizations, efficiency is a primary concern. Businesses are challenged with selling an intangible product that is ever-changing and difficult to quantify. Profitability requires that projects are estimated correctly, are completed on time, and meet customer requirements.

To succeed, professional service companies must adopt strategic and comprehensive financial, project, and resource management practices. Expanding the use of information technology (IT) is the best way to add greater value while supporting more cost-effective operations. Bottom line, an affordable computing infrastructure can help your company and your people share data, work together, and make effective decisions more easily.

ERT Group offers a set of strong solutions to help professional service organizations manage every aspect of their company, from customer relationships and projects to business process outsourcing and financials. These solutions can help you streamline operations while increasing value, improve interactions with customers, and make faster, smarter decisions.

Overview:

Professional services include accounting, auditing, and bookkeeping services; advertising services; executive search services; legal services; and management, consulting, architecture and engineering  services;  IT services; management consulting and public relations services.  This industry’s structure is fragmented and concentration varies considerably among the many subsectors. At one end of the scale, large multinational firms dominate the market; at the other, firms tend to be specialized small- to medium-sized companies and sole practitioners. Most professional firms are small, with a single office. Only about 5,000 firms have annual revenue over $10 million. The vast majority have a single office.

The United States is extremely competitive and has an edge in many professional services sectors. The biggest competition comes from Japanese and European companies. In the global economy in which these firms operate, the competition will become more intense as the European Community (EC) nations merge into a single market, and as the North American Free Trade Agreement, joining the United States, Canada, and Mexico, becomes a reality.

U. S., Japanese, and European companies are aggressively pursuing contracts in the EC in advertising, management, consulting, and public relations services. U.S. legal and executive search firms are making major efforts to become more involved in Europe. U.S. and European accounting, auditing, and bookkeeping firms will expand in an effort to provide services to the emerging private sector in Eastern Europe, as will management, consulting, and public relations firms.

In the Far East, demand for professional services is increasing in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, as well as in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) member countries: Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. The demand for all professional services will continue to increase as the economies of these countries expand, diversify, and mature.  Many professional services companies are entering less developed markets through mergers and acquisitions of local firms. Eastern markets are slightly less saturated than Western markets.

Industry Issues:

Presenting Added Value in the Face of Rising Costs – Gaining an understanding of your customer’s expectations, business model and how your company can add value is imperative to increase your odds of a successful proposal.  For some service sub-sectors, competition from outsourcers exerts additional pressure on margins. Customers expect price flexibility and demand more value for money and faster service.

Keeping Budgets Under Control – Keeping budgets under control is the most pressing technology challenge facing small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) today, according to research commissioned by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA).   Budget tend to expand beyond control as technology products and services are being used to increase worker productivity.

Resource/Talent Management and Differentiation – People are critical to the success of any professional services company.  Firms must respond to a shortage of highly-qualified talent with a range of well-communicated recruitment, retention, and compensation schemes. A mobile and decentralized workforce needs to be linked to firm processes and culture.  With competition at all levels (large, medium, and small), professional services companies are challenged to differentiate themselves from their peers.

Recruiting Qualified Knowledge Workers – The most talented employees worldwide are increasingly unwilling to tolerate the long waits and uncertainty entailed in immigrating to the United States. Instead, they are going to Europe, Canada, Australia and other countries where knowledge workers face fewer immigration difficulties. Competing for knowledge workers is getting a little tougher for U.S. firms; however, most of the cutting edge R&D and Innovation still happens in the U.S.

Meeting Unique Customer Requirements – In professional service organizations, efficiency is a primary concern. Businesses are challenged with selling an intangible product that is ever-changing and difficult to quantify. Profitability requires that projects are estimated correctly, are completed on time, and meet customer requirements.  To succeed, professional service companies must adopt strategic and comprehensive financial, project, and resource management practices. Expanding the use of information technology (IT) is the best way to add greater value while supporting more cost-effective operations. Bottom line, an affordable computing infrastructure can help your company and your people share data, work together, and make effective decisions more easily.

Increasing Close Ratios – Professional services firms have named this as the most significant overall sales challenge with 67% of the industry identifying this as their top issue.
Maintaining momentum when there is no “deal” on the table – In a recent survey, 68% professional service managers considered maintaining momentum a significant challenge.

ERT Group Solutions Benefits:

Keep the customer front and center

• Track all customer-facing activities across multiple communication channels
• Improve communications with the customer through document sharing and safe Web interactions
• Increase customer responsiveness by improving business processes such as automated routing, notifications, approvals, and escalations

Smoothly manage projects

• Gain visibility into all project information and key performance indicators to enable quick and accurate decision-making with integrated project accounting and project management
• Effectively allocate internal resources and increase billable hours
• Boost productivity by automating business processes such as billing and invoicing