The perfect Dynamics 365 solution for Professional Services

Every industry has its own unique set of challenges. In the professional services industry, some particularly acute challenges include revenue leakage, effective time and resource management, timely and accurate billing.

This is part 1 of a 2 part piece. You can read the second part, here.

When your assets are your people your profitability depends on precision in tracking their time and billing accurately, so you’ll probably be grateful for a solution that is built specifically to support organisations such as management consultancies, system integrators, accountants, architects, and engineers.

That’s why, at Hitachi Solutions, we have taken a tailored, industry-specific approach to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

We’ve now combined our years of industry experience and Dynamics 365 expertise, with critical user insight from our existing clients, and developed a new cloud-based ERP solution, for mid and large scale professional services firms.

The perfect Dynamics 365 solution for Professional Services ?

Essentials for Professional Services is an optimised, pre-configured Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Microsoft Dynamics AX) application, based on best-practice industry templates and shaped to meet real user needs.

Working closely with our professional services customers to understand their pain-points, Hitachi Solutions has extended the standard Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Microsoft Dynamics AX) product to deliver the most value to those managing large-scale, complex projects.

The enhancements that we’ve made make it much easier for these organisations to set up and manage projects effectively. By collecting and analysing all the data that any project manager needs, our solution puts the most critical information at your fingertips.

Simple Project Setup

First things first. To make project setup simpler, we’ve modified the standard Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Microsoft Dynamics AX) copy wizard so that projects are automatically setup based on pre-defined attributes, pulled from the project creation wizard.

Users can select a project by type and by the number of sub-projects that fall within it. Plus, you can specify which characteristics are inherited from past projects and can control which users are able to create master project templates.

Enhanced Project Manager and Practice Manager Workspaces

Complete visibility gives you complete control, so we’ve included project manager and practice manager workspaces to give users vital insight into performance, through user-friendly dashboards.

Our workspace dashboards allow you to see all the project-critical information through one single pane of glass.

They provide:

• Insight into project and practice profitability
• Project RAG status information
• Power BI analytics and KPIs
• Customer-aged debt analysis
• Missing timesheet analytics
• Project resourcing information
• Tracking of projects at risk
• Project cost and effort monitoring
• Task assignment tracking

Essentials for Professional Services makes use of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Microsoft Dynamics AX) to give project managers easy access to the information that is most important to them, so they can monitor and optimise profitability and performance.

Greater Dimension Control and Improved Defaulting

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Microsoft Dynamics AX) enables users to append dimensions to financial transactions for ease of reporting and analysis. But Hitachi Solutions has introduced a new form for controlling whether dimension fields must be mandatory or left blank for master record configuration.

In addition, for each type of transaction, the sequence of defaulting behaviour for dimensions can be pre-defined to enable accurate accounting and ease transaction posting.

These are just some of the functionality enhancements that Hitachi Solutions has made to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Microsoft Dynamics AX) to improve usability for professional services organisations. You can read more about the other improvements and extensions that we’ve made to Dynamics AX in part two.

To find out how Essentials for Professional Services can help you manage projects more efficiently contact a member of the Hitachi Solutions team.