6 benefits of D365 Project Operations for your professional services company

Professional services companies face a myriad of challenges, from managing complex projects and contracts to gaining complete visibility over resource availability and maximising billable hours. The right project management solution can help with this.

Take Dynamics 365 (D365) Project Operations, for example. Referred to by Microsoft as the ultimate end-to-end solution, capable of driving project success. Here are six benefits of Project Operations for a professional services company, like yours.

1. Better project management capabilities
2. Improved deal management experiences
3. Optimised resource utilisation
4. Simplified time tracking and expense management
5. Streamlined project financials
6. Improved overall visibility

1. Better project management capabilities

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By bringing together key features of Microsoft Projects and D365 Sales, Customer Service and Finance, D365 Project Operations offers you the exact functionalities needed to drive project success.

For example:

• Microsoft Project features, such as Gantt charts, customisable dashboards, scheduling tools, are embedded within D365 Project Operations. Now your project managers have just the tools they need to manage projects, no matter the size or complexity
• You can accurately estimate expenses and track planned-to-actual consumption in real-time
• Built-in analytics tools present you with real-time data into project progress and performance. This enables you to make timely, better informed decisions on-the-spot

2. Improved deal management experiences

When you deliver outstanding deal management experiences, you stand a better chance of winning deals. D365 Project Operations helps by:

• Offering customisable resource-based costing and pricing. You can model pricing based on geography and local market economics
• Enabling you to use adaptable billing models so you can create fixed-price, time and materials, or even retainer-style contracts to meet your customers’ requirements
• Providing standardised templates that you can use to swiftly create detailed estimates, schedules and monetary values for the quote(s)
• Offering a unified sales dashboard via the D365 Sales integration. With your customer data centralised in a single location, you can easily personalise customer engagements and interactions

3. Optimised resource utilisation

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Gain the ability to view resource availability across the board and you can optimise its utilisation. This is how D365 Project Operations enables you to do so:

• View project requirements and overall resource availability. Now it’s much easier to adjust workloads across your resources to ensure optimal execution
• Assign the right people and resources based on their skillset and availability to the right projects/tasks when you can view resource profiles. This allows you to improve overall productivity, quality of work and the chances of project success
• Thanks to intelligent skills-based assignments and visibility into resource availability, you can easily anticipate resourcing needs and take action

4. Simplified time tracking and expense management

Time and expense tracking can be laborious processes, especially within the professional services industry and its fast-paced nature. Forgetting to log in billable hours is only part of the problem! Luckily, D365 Project Operations offers the following functionalities:

• Ability to submit time and expenses while on-the-go. You can use either the handy mobile app or a browser, if you have a browser-enabled device
• User-friendly interface which allows you to ensure compliance with your business’s time and expense policies
• Configurable rules and automated workflows which not only ensure compliance with your policies but also guarantee accurate reporting

5. Streamlined project financials

Drive overall business efficiency and performance when you can access the right financial data at the right time. Thanks to these features, your financial reporting can be improved:

• Revenue recognition that’s compliant with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). This can help your teams adhere to accounting standards and practices
• User-friendly interface that can accelerate your customer invoicing process. For example, you can easily add or update details, group transactions, customise invoices, manage billing queues and more
• Using a combination of accounting rules, you can easily access project cost and revenue profiles for fixed price or time and materials
• Integrate with D365 Finance or use open APIs with a third-party ERP system to access accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger functionalities

6. Improved overall visibility

D365 Project Operations aims to bring all the vital areas of your project-based business into one location. This means you can:

• Remove business siloes, thanks to Microsoft Power BI. It’s the ideal tool to better visualise and easily share business intelligence with your team (or across departments)
• Make faster, more informed decisions, thanks to customisable dashboards that present key insights in digestible formats. Now it’s easier to plan for periods of increased demand or downtime, adjusting workloads so teams aren’t over or under capacity and so on

Gain the visibility and agility required to drive project success with Dynamics 365 Project Operations

To read about the features and functionalities of this intuitive solution and how it can benefit your business in more depth, check out our factsheet. It covers the challenges faced by the services economy and how D365 Project Operations can help.