Professional services automation (PSA) provider Kimble Applications on Tuesday announced significant developments to its intelligent PSA software, enhancing its resourcing and project management abilities as businesses look for ways to utilize employees’ time as efficiently as possible.

Specifically, Kimble says its “Summer 20” product improvements give businesses “unprecedented versatility” when tackling project staffing challenges and retaining employees. The specific feature enhancements include:

Resourcing and Project Management Significance

Kimble’s Charles Gustine

“We’re sensitive to the fact that what our customers are offering – people’s time, deployed in service of meeting a client’s goal – is a perishable item,” said Charles Gustine, product marketing manager at Kimble. “You can’t get back the cost of a resource that spent a day without a project and its subsequent revenue. The math on that is pretty straightforward, but the equation gets more complicated the larger and more complex an organization gets. And so, resource planning in services can be a particularly tough nut to crack. … [The Kimble offering] makes clear what levers to pull to better balance supply and demand across the organization and maximize utilization. It also makes it easier to pull those levers, more streamlined, more efficient, saving a lot of time that can be spent on [even] more strategic activities.

“We wanted to double down on that in Summer 20,” Gustine added. “We took input from some of our largest clients and used it to build features that increase both the efficiency Kimble provides (cutting time it takes to find the best candidates for a job down to seconds) and increase that visibility into data that enables strategic evaluation (making it easy to compare proposed candidates and weigh the impact that deploying them would have on the margin before making a final decision).”

With this, businesses can make more informed decisions more quickly. So project kickoffs happen sooner and more smoothly, which improves profitability and customer satisfaction.

RMM/PSA Software and the Current Landscape

How does this fit into what’s going on right now considering the current landscape and what’s happening in the industry?

“Businesses are developing and enacting strategies that are going to keep resources off the bench,” said Gustine. “This means breaking out of conventional team and business unit mindsets and flexing resources into roles and assignments you might not typically seek them out for, but for which they might be well-suited. That also means, even more than usual, finding the right projects for resources rather than the right resources for projects.”

That makes Kimble’s focus on PSA software and resource planning for Summer 20 especially pertinent and prescient. According to Gustine, users get a complete, up-to-the-minute view of supply (resources) and demand (upcoming work). Kimble’s intelligent resource matching helps find the ideal fit for a project based on skills and availability. Summer 20 automates the ability to home in on candidates for an assignment. This means there is more time to focus on strategic resource planning. Resource managers can use the new bench optimization functionality to find available work for resources, and to forecast long-term. That way, they can be sure that everything aligns with the resources they have and the skills those resources have.

“Companies are trying to build predictability in unpredictable times,” said Gustine. “Kimble is helping them do that by enabling them to reforecast and re-budget based on in-the-moment information.”