Wikipedis - Albert Bridge / Three buses, Comber FinancialForce has announced how three large customers use its Services-as-a-Business platform to power their services business. The three customers concerned are part of the Thales Group, Avalara, the tax and compliance software vendor (also a FinancialForce partner), and Kinetic Vision, a design, engineering, and development company.

These customers are using a combination of the FinancialForce platform and Salesforce. With Salesforce, the FinancialForce solution, now includes a complete end-to-end solution for services businesses. Components include its Professional Services Cloud, ERP Cloud and Customer Success Cloud.

Scott Brown, President and CEO at FinancialForce
Scott Brown, President and CEO at FinancialForce

Scott Brown, President and CEO at FinancialForce, commented, “Thales, Avalara and Kinetic Vision are all great examples of companies who are growing their business and deepening their value to customers through a Services-as-a-Business platform that delivers next-level automation, intelligence and innovation. We are thrilled to provide these organizations with the tools they need to elevate the customer experience and expertly seize on new market opportunities.”

These are not new wins but existing customers who are now willing to tell a bit more of their experiences about using the FinancialForce platform.

Thales

The Thales Group is a huge French multinational technology company with around 81,000 employees working in 68 countries. The Thales Cloud Protection and Licensing (CPL) has standardized on FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA) worldwide. Previously, the division had three regional groups that operated independently. Helped by the FinancialForce professional services term, it standardised its processes on best practices and implemented FinancialForce PSA across the division.

The FinancialForce team helped to configure the solution to meet the standardised requirements and localisations. Despite acquisitions continuing throughout and after the project, Thales CPL now has continuity between opportunity and project lifecycles.

The implementation has been a success, and Thales quickly saw benefits in data accuracy, and the solution also helped manage revenue leakage. The solution identified anomalies in projects and between projects and support agreements. It also has a better understanding of non-billable hours. The project has already achieved 100% ROI, though no timescale for this was given. It also achieved 99-100% data accuracy every month, in addition to reducing revenue leakage.

David Laffineuse, Worldwide Manager Process, Tools and Integration, Thales CPL, commented, “FinancialForce PSA drives the highest levels of data quality across our professional services and higher levels of performance from our resources.”

Thales CPL is looking to integrate the PSA solution with Jira. In addition, other Thales teams are now investigating the product.

Avalara

Avalara already leveraged Salesforce to help its growth, attracting 30,000 customers across 95 countries. As the company grew, it added service and product lines through acquisitions and expansions. The professional services associated with these operated using different applications and tools, and while integrations to Salesforce existed, there was little consistency.

Avalara selected FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Revenue Management to bring consistency to its processes. Now deployed, the solutions have achieved greater than 100% ROI delivering real-time visibility across the different service lines for the leadership. In addition, the company has consistently reduced planned hires by 5% annually through the automation the solution has delivered.

That automation includes how projects are set up from the information entered by Sales reps with Salesforce. It has cut a process that used to take 4-5 days and many person-hours to a near-instantaneous project setup. Resource managers use skills-based routing to match tasks with resources, and it is easier to identify bottlenecks and future resource constraints.

To support its continued growth, Avalara knew it needed to standardize on a system that operates natively on the Salesforce environment, where all orders originate, and all projects must ultimately be captured. By implementing FinancialForce Professional Services Cloud and leveraging FinancialForce PSA and Revenue Management, Avalara gained the tools it needed to manage its complex professional services business.

Tyler Flora, Senior Director, Professional Services, Avalara, commented, “Simple tools cannot solve complex problems. The sophistication of FinancialForce allows for solving complex problems. The reward at the end of that can be very powerful.”

Kinetic Vision

Kinetic Vision is a technology consulting company based in Cincinnati, Ohio. It provides services and hardware to over 50 of the Fortune 500 companies across industries, including medical, transportation, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, electronics, and aviation. As a fast-growing company, it needed a solution that would meet its operational and financial requirements after outgrowing its small business solutions after 300% growth. It has now implemented FinancialForce Financial Management and FinancialForce PSA.

With a single platform to run the business, the leadership now has greater visibility, and teams leverage a single application to manage projects, invoicing and data management. There were immediate benefits, including a 33% faster financial period close, and it hopes to reduce the time taken by a further 80%. The cash flow has also improved by reducing the time to invoice by 90%. This has been accelerated by the ability to approve timecards faster using the cloud-based solution.

During COVID, the solution proved invaluable to the business to the extent that the company easily maintained its ISO 9001 accreditation. The ISO auditor praised the FinancialForce solution during the certification renewal process.

Jim Topich, Senior Vice President of Kinetic Vision, commented, “I love how customizable this platform is for our organization. Everyone from sales, human resources and our project managers to accounting and our executive team are benefiting from our real-time data. As a result, we are on track for continuing our double-digit growth.”

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

It has been some time since FinancialForce unveiled some customer stories. However, these three powerful stories indicate how the FinancialForce platform is making a significant difference to these companies. While approval for these stories to come out will be recent, they have been working with FinancialForce for some time. This makes the case studies more mature but gives little indication of recent successes.

What this does show is that the FinancialForce solution is modular to an extent. Medium-sized companies such as Kinetic Vision can leverage the complete FinancialForce technology stack to replace ageing disconnected systems. For larger enterprises, the PSA solution can dovetail neatly into Salesforce and larger back-end systems.

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