About HSD
HSD is an Australian software development company boasting five branches and over 20 years of history. It is also a certified Microsoft partner running long-term projects with multi-million budgets.
Specializing in the Microsoft Dynamics and .NET ecosystem, HSD has an excellent track of cooperation with small, mid-sized, and large private and public organizations in sectors such as education, healthcare, and regulation (RegTech).
- Industry: Software Development
- Size: ~50 employees
- Use cases: Resource management
Overview
Taking pride in its ability to produce high-end, bespoke software, HSD was gaining glowing recognition amongs its customers. Still, while remaining committed to upholding these standards, the company struggled to exchange internal information, eliminate plan errors, and forecast profit margins.
Recognizing the need for improvement, HSD turned to BigTime Foresight to create a single source of truth for the entire business. With the solution, the company reduced the time spent in meetings, perfected the planning process, and predicted project profit margins with an unprecedented accuracy rate, matching the quality of its internal processes to the standards of its software.
Challenges
Offering complicated, bespoke, long-term projects with varying billing types, HSD needed constant monitoring and excellent planning processes to ensure its profitability. Unfortunately, these qualities were not provided by Excel spreadsheets, which acted as a source of information for the entire company.
Sarah Prouse, Service Delivery Director at HSD, witnessed the growing informational discrepancies firsthand during hours-long, cross-departmental meetings that were supposed to remedy the problem.
Without a single source of truth, managers couldn’t accurately allocate people, monitor projects, and forecast their final profitability, putting them in jeopardy and, in some cases, providing the customers with incorrect settlement documents.
High-level reporting was also of no help. It required constant manual updates, and even with all that work, it did not guarantee the accuracy of processed data. As a result, HSD experienced a halt in decision-making processes with no data to rely on.
To tackle those challenges, HSD needed to eliminate:
- Crippled decision-making processes. With only massive Excel spreadsheets at hand and a lack of automated reporting, HSD’s team did not have up-to-date information they could use to make data-driven decisions capable of improving the company’s performance.
- Key processes plagued by mistakes. Inaccuracies in project plans, allocations, and financial forecasts limited managers’ ability to act on information on any issue, putting key operations at risk of being delayed, unprofitable, or incorrectly settled.
- Inaccurate margin forecasts. Lacking information on the workload, its cost, and other expenses, HSD could not calculate or even estimate the profitability for both current and future operations, risking its financial liquidity in the process.
BigTime Solution
Committed to providing value to customers, HSD decided to use BigTime Foresight to combat its issues and perfect its internal processes.
With the multitude of tools available in BigTime solutions, HSD could immediately exchange all types of information, both financial and planning, for both projects and people, and generate reports. Consequently, its managers saved hours of time and regained the ability to make informed decisions, improving the operations nearly overnight by eliminating key errors that would previously go unnoticed.
The key operational processes also improved. Forecasting finances, planning allocations, and monitoring budgets and projects is now more accurate and quicker than ever before, helping the company scale and achieve its long-term goals.
To successfully achieve this result, HSD implemented:
- A single source of truth. BigTime Foresight provided HSD with a complete overview of people, projects, and finances, giving its managers the tools to monitor key operations and make informed decisions on the spot.
- Accurate capacity planning. HSD now has a bird’ s-eye view of their people allocation choices from the calendar level, allowing them to quickly see who is working on what, for how long, and what their capacity is.
- Advanced financial monitoring. Thanks to project progress reports, HSD can quickly forecast profit margins and translate the simulation into improved people planning and, consequently, higher profitability.
Results
Thanks to the implementation of BigTime Foresight, HSD can now enjoy new transparency in all of its processes. Consequently, all of its key operations drastically improved, saving the managers’ time and assisting them in making the best possible decisions based on the latest data.
Thanks to that change, gone are the days of unknown profitability, manual updates, and endless meetings. Instead, with BigTime Foresight, HSD can be sure of the correctness of its data and use it to make its future look even brighter.
Results:
- Time the managers spent editing and updating numerous Excel spreadsheets was reduced from 15 hours to just 30 seconds.
- With fewer hours needed to complete the essential processes, HSD was able to save $200 K dollars a year on management.
- HSD can quickly forecast whether the margin on projects will fall below the expected level (20%) and act on the information accordingly.
