The 5 benefits of implementing a resource management tool in your IT services company
Agathe Placet
Content manager
September 24, 2023
4 min
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By rereading the 2022 version of”ESN & ICT 2022 Wide Angle”, the annual study published as every year by KPMG France and Numeum, a figure caught our attention: 12%.
It's about the record growth in 2021, Digital Services Companies (ESN) and Engineering and Technology Consulting (ICT) firms. During the last five years, the sector has never experienced such an acceleration in its activity.
But it is also this growth that is the source of a number of changes in the market, starting with The arrival of a growing number of competing businesses.
If you are an employee or manager of an IT services company or a consulting firm, this particularly complicates your commercial missions but also recruitment missions in leaving you with even less time than before to conclude your customer projects or to convince the best players on the market to join, or even more simply, to stay within your company.
And Time is the first tangible benefit What you would get out of setting up a tool for Ressource Management but it is far from being the only one.
So discover the 5 benefits of implementing a resource management tool in your IT services company or in your consulting firm.
As you probably already understood, what separates a successful IT from a stagnant structure, beyond the quality of the team and their ability to perform well, is the ability to manage more or less well the most important resource within a structure like yours, namely time.
And it is precisely because this resource is one of the most crucial, that when choosing between develop your own staffing tool and use software from Ressource Management To create specifically, it is often more appropriate to choose the latter, the objective being to derive all the benefits of using such a solution as soon as possible.
You are therefore already in the process of saving time before you even start using your staffing software. It goes even further once you get into the actual functionalities of the tool.
Since your resource management must be a management of ALL the resources of your company, the staffing software must therefore: centralize and gather ALL your data (number of FTEs (full-time equivalent) available, billable and non-billable FTEs,...).
Napta for example, our staffing tool, offers functionalities for centralizing needs which not only allow all stakeholders in the company to have access to the same information, but also to no longer have to search for the right information.
No more need to cross, on multiple Excel sheets, the needs coming from the various business units or projects in order to have a global visibility of the company.
By bringing together all your data and needs in one place, the software for Ressource Management becomes a daily ally in your search for productivity, serenity and time.
Wish to measure the Excluded Leave Activity Rate (TACE) of your consultants, i.e. their level of production for your ESN, without yourself being in a position to be productive in managing staffing seems, from our point of view, contradictory.
The TACE therefore, also called, Staffing rate, returns to you the percentage of your consultant's presence time actually used on client missions. It is, in this sense, one of the main indicators for measuring ROI of a service activity.
And there is probably no better way to collect, on the one hand, the holidays and other absences of your employees and, on the other hand, the time spent on customer projects and then return this information as part of your reports only by using a resource management tool.
Perhaps we should have started there, since we are talking about resource management. Your resource management software is, as the name suggests, intended to help you better manage your resources.
We are talking, of course, first and foremost about the time of your consultants but also about the technological tools available to them, the budget allocated to the realization of each of your client missions, etc.
And behind the generic term “Management” is actually hidden the imperative to make resources profitable for your ESN. Therefore, going hand in hand with the measurement and monitoring of your TACE, your staffing solution will allow you, or at least should allow you, to decide for example on which mission to position a consultant who has this current skill or which future skill...
... and all this taking into account the deadlines communicated to your client, the missions already signed and planned or those that are in the commercial pipe.
If we often say that “what can be measured improves”, we should probably add “thanks to better foresight.”
Take the case of intercontract periods for your consultants. A frustrating period par excellence within NSEs, both for the company itself, unable to make a paid employee profitable during this period of time and for the consultant herself. Being unemployed and not feeling useful to your business can lead to a loss of confidence and motivation, which does not bode well for future missions.
This is the situation that your tool solves Ressource Management by allowing you to learn from past projects (what were the periods of activity that proved to be particularly busy? What types of missions systematically required more human strength? ...) but also by anticipating future missions.
But these benefits can only be realized if you Have an internal reference person, specifically in charge of staffing. Depending on the size of your IT, it can be a full-time job or only take up part of your day.
For example, this is the case with Capgemini Invent where each Business Unit has its operations manager who also acts as a staffing reference for a group of around 200 consultants.
This benefit is perfectly in line with the one mentioned just before concerning the intercontract. Anticipating market trends as well as the type of future missions 2 or 3 months in advance allows you to offer your consultants training options.
So everyone can find their way around. Your employee develops professionally when your firm saves itself new costs in finding and hiring consultants.
At Napta for example, we have, from the very first steps of our Staffing tool, but the development of team skills at the center of the software. Thus, each collaborator declares and self-assesses skills and indicates his training wishes. This data generates you a dynamic mapping of skills and aspirations but also monitoring the evolution of skills.
The strong pressure on the market, both from a commercial point of view and in terms of recruitment, reduces the reaction time you need to take to make the right decisions.
The challenges are numerous: ensuring the profitability of your consulting business, reducing your costs, retaining your best consultants... And for that, implementing a resource management tool has simply become, as the market matured, a necessity.
Do you want to go deeper into the subject? We have lots of resources at your disposal to help you go further.
In addition to this subject, find our template”The perfect load plan for a successful deployment”.
Also discover our guides, templates and checklists in the Resources tab.
See you soon at Napta!
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