NetSuite OpenAir Helps Professional Services Team Boost Cash Flow by Reducing Invoice Cycle Time by 80%

Results:

• NetSuite OpenAir has helped ICS reduce invoice cycle time by 80%, from 10 days to 2 days, and eliminate 3 days per month of in-house IT maintenance
• Cash flow, resource utilization, and project profitability have improved for the company's professional services team
• Web-based time and expense access and approval workflows, plus easy remote-device access, have reduced the time from incurring an expense to re-billing it to the client
• Project managers now spend more time focusing on and less time on administrative overhead
• NetSuite OpenAir helped reduce invoice inaccuracies to an average of 3 per month, down from dozens with the old system

Challenges:

• Growing software development and implementation business was hindered by lack of business insight and controls
• Cash flow suffered because manual project tracking, plus lack of time and expense integration, slowed billing cycles
• Inconsistent processes among company's project managers made it difficult to calculate and predict resource utilization or project profitability
• Lack of process automation, A/P and A/R integration, created extra expenses for ICS' IT department
• Remote access via dial-in was time-consuming and unreliable, hindering performance of traveling consultants

Solution:

• ICS selected NetSuite OpenAir largely because it would integrate with the company's existing JD Edwards applications
• Company had used different point solutions to track time, log expenses, manage projects, and integrate data into JD Edwards, slowing processes and preventing process consistency
• Implementation and training for NetSuite OpenAir took just three weeks