SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwire - Mar 7, 2012) - FinancialForce.com, the cloud applications company, today announced the Spring '12 release of FinancialForce Professional Services Automation (PSA), a cloud-based solution for services organizations that leverages Force.com and native integration with Salesforce CRM. FinancialForce PSA Spring '12 extends FinancialForce.com's lead in using social and mobile technologies to improve collaboration among distributed professional services (PS) teams and reduces the virtual distance between services teams and their customers. FinancialForce PSA now provides new methods for budgeting and calculating utilization metrics, providing multiple ways to gauge PS team performance using this master metric.
"FinancialForce.com is headed in the right direction with their Professional Services Automation Product. Project management is an excellent example of a business process that is inherently social and derives direct value when project communities collaborate," said Michael Fauscette, IDC Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions Group. "FinancialForce.com is making it easy for virtual teams to collaborate from multiple locations."
Social Project Management
PS teams are social by nature, relying on teamwork and engagement across departments and geographies to execute on successful projects as efficiently as possible. But most project management applications are anti-social -- designed for internal consumption, holding subcontractors at arm's length, and worse, leaving customers outside the confines of the project management system. FinancialForce.com is committed to breaking down this barrier and enabling virtual teams and their customers to collaborate on projects as a community by leveraging the cloud and social technologies.
FinancialForce PSA Spring '12 combined with the power of the Force.com platform make social project management possible. FinancialForce PSA delivers an innovative and intuitive task management system that enables PS firms to securely extend project and task management capabilities to virtual teams and customers. With its simple user interface, FinancialForce.com has made project and task management easy to adopt and access for occasional users, such as customers and subcontractors. The project community can access and update task information from anywhere at any time via a community portal.
"This new capability blurs the line between service teams, subcontractors and customers working on a project," said Todd Bursey, General Manager of Professional Service Automation at FinancialForce.com. "Our goal was to make task management simple, transparent and available online to engage customers more closely in the project management process."
Advanced Utilization Metrics
Utilization is known as the "Master Metric" for PS organizations because it is used as a key indicator to determine billings, profitability, team goals and employee compensation. Despite its importance, most PSA applications provide backward looking and fixed utilization calculations, failing to provide managers the flexibility they need to plan, budget and make forward looking predictions of this important business driver. In PSA Spring '12, FinancialForce.com has added new utilization methods and the ability for managers to tailor utilization calculations and budgets to better predict future utilization attainment. Multiple utilization methods can be stored simultaneously, to provide multidimensional insight into services operations beyond "canned" utilization metrics. Managers are able to create different utilization calculations to measure specific management criteria for various purposes such as compensation, resource management, productivity and financial forecasting.
Timecard App for Android
FinancialForce Spring '12 includes a new mobile app, FinancialForce Timecards for Android. FinancialForce PSA leverages the form factor of Android based mobile devices to allow consultants to quickly enter their time cards and view assignments. Salesforce Chatter is embedded into the application, making it easy for project teams to post to a centralized project wall while on the road or on a client's premises. Chatters replace emails, voicemails and conference calls, becoming part of a project's audit trail. FinancialForce Timecards for Android will be available for download later this month on the Android Market and the Salesforce AppExchange Mobile.
In addition, FinancialForce PSA Spring '12 delivers significant new capabilities including FinancialForce Reporting, which is designed to simplify financial reporting and add deeper analytical capabilities while harnessing the power of crowd sourcing to develop reports; and FinancialForce ClickLink™, a tool which allows users to quickly create tight integration with other applications that leverage the Force.com platform -- without coding. These new features are also available to FinancialForce Accounting users as part of the Spring '12 release.
FinancialForce PSA Spring '12 also includes enhancements to its FinancialForce Services Resource Planning (SRP) application which combines the power of FinancialForce PSA, FinancialForce Accounting and Salesforce CRM. FinancialForce SRP enables PSOs to manage their opportunities, people, projects and financials in one integrated services management application.
FinancialForce PSA Spring '12 is available immediately to FinancialForce PSA users as part of their monthly subscription fee. To learn more, visit www.financialforce.com.
About FinancialForce.com
FinancialForce.com is the cloud applications company. We focus 100% on building online business applications for Force.com, the world's leading enterprise cloud computing platform from salesforce.com. Our applications include Accounting, Billing, Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Services Resource Planning (SRP). We serve fast-growing organizations and dynamic enterprises, helping them to align Finance, Sales and Service in a way that enables profitable growth. We are backed by two of the biggest and best players in the business, UNIT4 and salesforce.com. To learn more please visit www.FinancialForce.com, follow us on twitter @FinancialForce or visit our Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/FinancialForce
Contact Information:
Media Contacts:
Maria Bradley
Reidy Communications for FinancialForce.com
Email:
(415) 509-0498