Keen fans of alliteration, customer-centric ERP, Professional Services Automation (PSA) company FinancialForce has celebrated summer 2023 with freshly cut cucumber sandwiches, icy pitchers of lemonade and a new platform release.
In a cloud-centric world where Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) reigns supreme for an increasing number of organizations’ enterprise software stack deployments, the company encapsulates its go-to-market offerings into a package that it likes to call Services-as-a-Business (SaaB).
SaaB-y SaaS?
Is this just marketingspeak product branding off the rails, or is SaaB-y SaaS now a thing?
FinancialForce positions its Services-as-a-Business platform as a technology proposition to power all aspects of services operations – from sales, to delivery, to customer success management, to financial management and planning – all built on Salesforce.com.
The platform claims to be able to provide a 360-degree view of every customer, by which of course we mean operationally i.e. not geospatially with some sort of observation and monitoring drone-based video camera system.
The 360-degree view in this sense is a combination of intelligence spanning from marketing and sales to product/service delivery and onward to customer success and ongoing project and services support… all of which aspects are designed to drive (and you can check off the usual suspects here on the Bingo-card of product-spin favourites) customer experience, accelerated growth, improved profitability, customer satisfaction and consistent renewals.
Profound domain expertise
The new release introduces FinancialForce’s approach that brings together key capabilities for running any services business efficiently and effectively. These capabilities include automation, intelligence and innovation, backed by profound domain expertise, best practices and a proven record of success.
“Organizations continue to be buffeted by market disruptions, from spiralling inflation to new Covid-19 variants and unanticipated supply chain issues,” said Scott Brown, president and chief executive officer of FinancialForce. “Our new Services-as-a-Business approach delivers the automation, intelligence, and innovation that services organizations need to become more agile so they can expertly turn disruption into opportunity.”
The Summer ‘22 release is said to represent a ‘significant debut’ for FinancialForce’s Services-as-a-Business vision, providing substantial capability updates to extend enterprise agility.
It delivers greater flexibility in skills-matching, by empowering resource managers to distinguish skills related to open roles as either ‘essential’ or ‘desirable’, delivering a more sophisticated assignment process. It also enhances the market-leading auto-assign capability to consider weighted preferences in resource assignment rules.
Alongside these enhancements, this release also unveils insights into the financial impact of resource assignment decisions, enabling greater profitability while maintaining world class customer experience.
Combined, these enhancements are said to give resource managers greater insight into and impact on, the performance of their organization, elevating their organizational contribution to overcoming the global challenging macroeconomic environment that we all work in today.
Utilization dashboard delights
“To help services businesses deliver with intelligence, the Summer ‘22 release includes significant enhancements to the out-of-the-box analytic capabilities of Professional Services (PS) Cloud. Organizations will have complimentary access to a utilization dashboard that monitors utilization performance and staffing efficiency; a revenue forecasting dashboard to help make strategic, business-enhancing, forward-looking, decisions; and a project burn-up dashboard to visualize work completed in order to support more cost-efficient project delivery,” noted the company, in a press statement.
Dashboards are powered by CRM Analytics by Salesforce.
Additionally, FinancialForce has extended the capabilities of Services CPQ, a fully connected services estimating solution. New role configurability features—including role templates, role grouping, and skill requirements—have been introduced to service estimates, allowing for a seamless journey from opportunity to estimate and project delivery.
