Part 3: A Closer Look at PSA on the Salesforce AppExchange
Through a network of certified of partners, Salesforce offers a variety of PSA solutions that can be found on the Salesforce App Exchange. Additional licenses are typically required for full use of these solutions but free trials may also be available if you are not ready to make a decision just yet. When you find yourself evaluating which PSA solution is the best fit for you here are some questions you should ask?
- What project or service planning tools are available through the solution?
- Does the solution support creation of a project plan with corresponding deliverables and what does that look like?
- Does the solution also offer a way to track costs?
- The solution should feature visibility to both direct and indirect costs.
- How can we maximize resource allocation?
- Can I see which resources are overallocated for the week and quickly identify when additional resources are needed?
- What risk prevention triggers are in place to let me know if a project is in jeopardy of going over budget or missing a deadline?
- What flags are in place that would call this out?
- How well does the out of the box functionality work with my type of industry?
- What additional configurations or custom development is required for the system to work for my industry or related processes.
- How does the system automate invoicing?
- Does the solution provide an option for invoice generation and automatic billing?
Now that you know the right questions to ask when selecting a PSA solution let’s look at how a Salesforce-native PSA comes together in practice.
Arrow PSA
Arrow PSA is a Salesforce-native solution created by and for Project Managers, Executives, and Developers. Arrow provides a single solution to support your administrative and service-related processes. Out of the box, Arrow supports administrative processes by:
- Providing a platform for Executives, Managers, and Knowledge workers to collaborate and work towards project related goals while having visibility to key project related metrics.
- Empowering anyone working directly with clients by providing a single place to organize requirements and track deliverables to ensure deadlines are met.
- Offering a time entry solution that gives your team the ability to enter time and relate it to a specific project and related task.
- Providing Project Managers with a single system designed for planning projects, assigning resources, monitoring time, tracking deliverables, reporting, and viewing other projected related KPIs.
- Enabling Service Managers, a way to visualize resource utilization and better manage project portfolios to ensure customer satisfaction.
- Offering robust invoicing features that can be configured to support your billing processes.
Additional Arrow Features
- Built natively on Salesforce with the ability to configure and customize objects as you would with Sales or Service cloud but also the ability to customize utilizing Apex classes.
- Real-time visibility into all aspects of your project including, Performance, Utilization, Profitability and Schedule
- Ability to manually create project templates via lightning component or ability to automatically create projects using Apex methods and flows.
- Enterprise grade billing engine that supports a variety of contract types such as Fixed Fee, Time and Materials and Retainers or a combination of these types.
As you can see Salesforce does a great job in solving for service-related bottlenecks by offering a variety of PSA solutions that can meet your business needs. If your organization could benefit from the power of PSA and you would like to learn more about achieving service efficiency through PSA, please reach out to us here at SMBHD and we can show you how to make this possible.
– Jerry Kirby, Consultant and Project Lead
