Shift Technologies improves administrative efficiency by 96% in key areas

Automating their business with Upland PSA enabled Shift Technologies to increase their efficiency by facilitating invoicing, revenue recognition, tracking and collection processes.

                    Industry: IS&T Consulting
                    Region: Middle East
                    Website: shift-technologies.com

Challenge

The arrival of a new CEO, with a mandate to streamline performance, started the search for a PSA solution.

The main consideration for Shift Technologies was a high level of flexibility. They needed a solution that could take into account the fact that they bill fixed prices for projects, but measure profitability according to time spent. They needed to match their group financial system’s structure and interface smoothly with their ERP, but meet their own requirements for administrative efficiency and project and performance analysis. They needed to manage differences between countries, (such as currencies), and even unknowns, (such as currency fluctuations or taxes), but be guided by sufficient structure to avoid being overwhelmed by all the possibilities.

Additionally, with a workforce constantly on the road, they needed a solution accessible from anywhere, to ensure the picture they had of their performance at any given time would be up to date.

To obtain as much flexibility as possible, their previous solution had been a hybrid of functions from multiple solutions. It did not enable them to appropriately and accurately measure time spent by consultants against projects and, therefore, manage projects costeffectively against budget. While it integrated with their ERP and conformed to group financial requirements, it did not give them a centralized view of project data and resource utilization, which meant they could not assess performance and plan for staff availability. And it did not manage multiple countries at once, making for a complex accounting process.

“PSA is a valuable asset for us. We use it on a daily basis; we’d be lost without it.”
—Yousef Al Barkawie, CEO, Shift Technologies

The PSA by Upland Solution

Since 2014, Shift Technologies have been using PSA for a streamlined solution that has had a marked improvement on their efficiency.

PSA Project Management gives the company’s executives a centralized view from bid to bill, to efficiently plan and track every stage of the delivery lifecycle, taking into account differing holidays in the countries they do business in and resource availability. PSA Time and Expense Automation updates the information in real time with data from Shift Technologies consultants via mobile app or cloud platform, smoothly managing multiple currencies and taxes, and allowing capture and approval according to Shift Technologies’ specific parameters.

PSA Resource Management enables resource optimization according to customer needs and locations, and planning for upcoming projects. It feeds into PSA Project Billing and Financials for automatic invoicing, as well as tracking of their fixed price income against the total cost of the project.

Upland Analytics for PSA pulls data from all the modules, giving company management overall visibility over resource utilization and internal efficiency KPIs, as well as enabling customized reports and export files to their ERP for shareholder reporting compliance.

Benefits

PSA helps Shift Technologies generate insights they were never able to obtain before. In real time. Previously, the CEO had to wait a month for his performance analysis reports, now he can get them on demand during a cycle, or the day after the end of a cycle — an essential improvement for him.

“I can’t run my business otherwise. If the most recent figures you have are 30 days old, you’re running last month’s business not today’s,” he specifies.

And there are more improvements: in efficiency and employee satisfaction. Timesheets and expense claims now take five minutes instead of two hours, and processing has gone from eight persondays to two person-hours per month. This means reimbursement of expenses has dropped from 30 days to two days, and can even be immediate, and the error rate has gone from 7% to zero, thanks to embedded checks and balances in the reporting and approval processes. “People have thanked me for making their lives easier,” says the CEO.

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