Case Study: Taking Advantage of Polaris’ Advanced Analytics to Get Complete Visibility into Your Business
Every day, businesses generate a ton of valuable data that can fuel business growth. Yet, many fail to turn this data into information to gain new insight and improve strategic decision-making.
Why? It’s mostly because the data is inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent. Erroneous data plagues 91 percent of organizations, making it unfit for any analysis. And even when the data is reliable, businesses have a hard time turning it into insights that will help them solve a problem.
This is where the accurate time data capture and advanced business analytics capabilities of Polaris come in. Our PSA platform provides businesses a single source of truth for all time data. And as you know, time data ties into every business metric related to project, costs, billing, productivity, and more. You can leverage accurate, real-time data to make proactive decisions and streamline processes.
Advanced business analytics powered by embedded dashboards; custom reports; connectors for Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Google BigQuery; and API for Business Services let you visualize your project, resource, billing, and payroll data to identify trends and issues that affect your business.
Our customers use the insights from Polaris to improve productivity, plan for staffing demands, improve operations, learn which clients or projects offer the highest potential profitability, and make complex decisions simple. In this blog, we’ll cover how three of our customers leveraged reports and analytics to improve their processes and grow.
McNeal Professional Service: Analyzing Project Costs to Drive Profitability
Georgia-based McNeal Professional Service (MPS) is a staffing and telecommunications consultancy. They provide telecommunications network designs and installations, phone tower antenna installations, and government staffing solutions. The company employs full-time staff and contractors who work on projects spanning across 28 states nationwide, and they needed to track their time across billable and non-billable client projects. As a services-oriented company, an intrinsic part of their growth came from understanding what projects people were working on and how these projects were tracked.
As the company was growing at a fast pace, it needed a comprehensive solution to track time across its workforce and gain insights to improve its core processes. With real-time data reports from Polaris, they get granular insights into project time, helping them reduce invoicing cycles and accurately detailing time spent on specific tasks. The reports give them clear visibility and up-to-date information for cost and profit analysis.
Here’s what Chana Jackson, senior staff accountant at MPS, had to say: “We’ve always looked at understanding the hours that people have worked to make data-driven business decisions and also support our overarching goals. Project managers can set up their own job numbers to track how people are working on a task, with clear start and end dates. As the client work progresses, project managers can pull a report whenever they need to, which also gives a lot of detail. The system allows us to include that level of granularity and flexibility.”
Read the full story here.
RK Dixon: Leveraging Data on Past Projects to Improve Pricing Decisions on Project Bids
RK Dixon is an office solutions integrator dedicated to providing a wide range of products and services to their customers. The company began 37 years ago with one man selling copier products. Today, they have over 200 employees. As the company began to grow, they needed a solution that would help them analyze trends and assess costs, time spent, and expenses incurred.
They were looking for a solution to help them make informed decisions with reporting tools that highlighted employee productivity, project costing, and monthly billing. But, their in-house time tracking system lacked many advanced features needed for accurate tracking and reporting. The system had no way to consolidate customer project information and work that was previously performed to effectively forecast customer requests in the future. The system did not track and report on time spent by employees on specific projects. Pulling real-time updates on project progress was tedious and required hours of administrative work.
Polaris solved all these shortcomings through advanced reporting. Its built-in checks and balances ensure employees enter their time accurately, which is critical to report on costs, time spent, and expenses for making precise project bids in the future. Jenny Hall, Service Coordinator at RK Dixon says, “By running a report on a past project, we can quickly assess the costs of future projects and provide accurate prices to our customers. The advanced reports also help us to estimate costs and resources on projects more accurately in less time.”
Over 175 built-in reports in Polaris provides RK Dixon with real-time information on project costs. The ability to consolidate and report on past project information minimized the risk of underbidding on future projects.
Read the full story here.
MM4: Improving Efficiencies with Better Visibility into Projects
MM4 provides procurement professionals with software that integrates eSourcing, spend analysis, benchmarking, contract management, market data, and other company information to improve their buying decisions. The company has a large global footprint, with employees located in Australia, China, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Poor visibility into project profitability against client initiatives and limited understanding of resource utilization led to workforce and operational inefficiencies. The PSA tool they were using before Polaris gave them little ability to leverage data to support company-wide profitability goals.
Adriana Zalloni, Business Performance Manager at MM4, said that the information housed in Polaris is a gold mine for improving efficiencies and profitability across the organization. Highly configurable reports in Polaris can extract information from any timeframe and category, helping project managers and senior executives to gain greater visibility into hours worked against projects, the tasks that are taking the longest to complete, budget versus actual spend to date, team bandwidth, and other measures of efficiency. MM4 used these insights to ensure enough time was being spent on high-impact activities such as strategy and planning.
As MM4 continues to collect more comprehensive data on how its employees are working on different projects, reports help to improve how the company scopes and forecasts client activities in the future, and support decisions in hiring and managing talent.
Read the full story here.
Fuel Your Strategic Decisions with Accurate and Real-Time Business Analytics
As you can see from our three customers, Polaris empowers businesses with accurate, up-to-date data that can be turned into actionable insights easily. Built-in data validations and alerts flag any data inconsistencies, eliminating potential skewed metrics. The flexibility of reporting and advanced analytics point to the right insights you need to make strategic decisions.
If you want to join the ranks of these success stories, reach out to learn how Polaris can help you make better decisions and enable key strategic initiatives.
