From Information Week December 6th, 1999
… BD Healthcare Consulting & Services, a newly created division of worldwide health-care giant BD Corp. in Ashland, Mass., management also wanted software that can change with the company-and found it in Evolve Software Inc.’s Servicesphere suite.
The shop of 40 to 50 consultants from inside BD and a recently acquired consulting firm called Concepts in Healthcare will provide services specific to the health-care industry. Ranjit Nair, director of professional development, says his group picked Servicesphere based on the opportunity-management and resource-management modules. Opportunity management tracks a customer from initial contact through sales to follow-up service, assuring the information about a customer is complete and available to each worker in the cycle. Resource management tracks who is available to be assigned to an account and what skills that person (or team) has, but it also lets people list areas in which they would like to develop new skills and block out time when they can’t work.
Given the high turnover rate and cost to retrain new IT professionals, it’s important to hear what employees want from a job. Evolve lets managers see what skills or areas of employment workers want. “We’re hearing people say that job growth is nearly as important as the money they make,” says Ramon Chen, Evolve’s VP of marketing.
BD Healthcare Consulting & Services is looking at Evolve’s delivery module as well. That product helps measure the metrics of worker utilization and the efficiency of the billed rate to actual rate (which includes time that didn’t get billed), as well as other internal project-profitability analysis.
Nair says a department of 50 consultants doesn’t really need professional-services automation software-all the spade work is being done in anticipation of the division’s growth. His group will consult in the health-care vertical market on ERP, business processes, materials management, clinical management, and business transformation. “Health care is the last industry to go to Web-enabled technologies,” Nair says. “We could grow incredibly fast in the next two years, and we want to be ready.”
Parent company BD Corp. is in the process of deploying ERP software from SAP-which plans to offer a professional service automation product-but Nair went ahead with Servicesphere because it meets the specific needs of his division. ERP vendors are tracking the development of the professional-services automation market, and SAP will be among the first to pursue it with an offering in mid-2000, says Jennifer Connolly, solution architect for the service provider industry at SAP. Phillip Say, product strategy manager at PeopleSoft Inc., hinted that hosted Web-based professional-services automation applications from the vendor may be on the horizon.
Because of the ubiquity of ERP in large companies, all professional-services automation software vendors have, or are building, links to back-office applications, or provide open application programming interfaces to link ERP apps to their software. It may still be too early for the ERP vendors to target the business, since many customers don’t see a need yet for direct links to their payroll systems or human resources.
In some ways, professional-services automation is an enterprise of its own. “It’s ERP chapter 2: providing ERP functionality not by SIC code [standard industry code], but by worker profile,” Say says. In fact, SAP’s consulting services division is using professional-services automation software from Novient Inc. to manage its own staff and resources.
Novient, which recently received venture-capital funding from Hummer-Winblad and Noro-Mosely Partners, was founded in 1995. Its customer list includes Baan, HP Consulting, and Hyperion Solutions. President and founder Mark Kopcha says the company, which has solely Web-based applications, will also host professional-services automation applications for clients.
The next step for Novient is to create Internet communities that will let customers communicate with selected vendors. This could be done for any type of contract-employment marketplace. In IT, a company that has available workers can post their availability and skills. A company that needs IT workers can select several consulting firms to bid on a project or open the project to everyone on the site. Consultants can be scheduled, and workers can find out where they’re going or suggest projects they want to work on. It’s a vision of the future that anticipates a fully integrated IT consulting market.
But part of the vision requires buy-in from the workers. At HP Consulting in Palo Alto, Calif., U.S. resource manager Kerry Pinkerton says getting the consultants to input their schedules, work skills, and preferences has been problematic. Many see the initial input as too much trouble, even though updates, which are done via a Web connection, only take a few minutes each day. “We count on the consultants for the quality of the data,” he says. “The win for them is that we won’t have to call and E-mail them constantly for schedule updates.”
As with any emerging technology, there are sideline spectators in the professional-services automation software space-including the largest consulting firms. “They will let the midsize companies test these products,” says Dennis Wayson, a chief analyst at Dataquest. Even the early adopters are taking a piece-by-piece approach to the professional-services automation suites, with most choosing to run only one or a few of the personnel-management modules.
Later adopters may include brick-and-mortar businesses that haven’t yet felt the need to maximize service-call billing.
Meanwhile, software vendors that are watching this market closely may some day be competitors, but for now they’re looking to professional-services automation for their own internal needs. Consider Kronos Corp., which provides workforce planning, billing, and labor-analysis software, primarily for retail and industrial businesses with hourly workers. “We provide some of these specific features in our software,” says Mark Kizielicz, Kronos’ VP of marketing, about the professional-services automation market. “But we’re also looking for a PSA product for our own consultants.”