Unit4 PSA Demo Flashcards
Demo - Outlook Integration
Our solution sits on the Microsoft Power Platform so you might be wondering why we’re actually looking under your Outlook environment. We actually integrate directly into your Outlook so instead of working with multiple solutions, remember that slide I showed you earlier with the digital transformation and all those different applications that you’re working with, we’re giving you one application, one platform to work from. If you use Microsoft productivity tools within your organization, I’m sure you’re all familiar with Outlook. So what I want to show you here is that if you have a look at your emails, we receive multiple emails on a daily basis and this is what we refer to as unstructured data.
Combining your Outlook with Dynamics 365 and with PSA, you start taking your unstructured data and creating structured data out of that so if I click on a specific email, it can be integrated down the route of purchasing within your Dynamics environment so you’d get this little icon you’d launch in the D365 environment and this allows you to start tracking emails with unstructured data that you’re getting on a daily basis in either your opportunities or leads, which depends on whether you’re looking from a sales engagement or projects point of view. Within our environment, we can start tracking those emails towards your actual projects
I’ve created a project which I’m going to be showing you and I can track this email towards my specific project, which I’ve created within the solution. So now what happens is that I start taking my unstructured data and I start assigning it towards projects and here you can now see I have a specific project that I’m working on. I can see the company that it’s actually associated with and this is the entity that I’m actually working from, which gives me an overview of the actual contact details, who the person is and more.
So that’s just a quick overview of how Outlook integrates seamlessly into the Dynamics 365 environment but I’m not here to speak about the sales process in Dynamics 365 so I’m actually going to take you directly into our project management solution called Unit4 PSA.
PSA Dashboard
When you open up the Unit4 PSA solution, you’re presented with this type of a view. Before we go any further, I just want to have a brief overview of the actual landscape that you see in front of you.
On the left hand side, this is what we refer to as our navigation bar
These are all the various modules that are used to build projects as well as maintain and progress projects through their life cycle. Various type of projects, employees, utilization sheets, time and expense, approvals
The top bar is our command bar and there’s multiple aspects that we have access to here as well.
Before I go into that, I just want to show you a little bit from a dashboarding point of view. So I spoke about those business intelligence components. We have dashboards that are pre-built and defined for our sub-verticals. They were built over many years of experience in the professional services game so depending on what type of business you’re actually in, you might find some of our predefined dashboards relevant. So this is one specific dashboard that we’ve got called the PSA dashboard.
It shows all my active projects. I can have more of a pipeline type of view for my active projects
The great thing about this is that you can actually drill down into this information. If this is too small, you can expand the chart, which makes it easier for you to see and wherever you see this little hand, you can actually drill down into this information
You can see who the owners are that are working for this specific environment. You can decide what to look at. So let’s have a look at the pie chart and you can see that within this specific company, these are the various project managers that are working on various projects within this organization.
The great thing as well is it highlights exactly what the information is, who the individual is, and what’s also really nice about this is if I want to see a little bit more information around where this data actually comes from for this pie chart, I can just view the records
Active Projects
If you’ve noticed, what I’m showing you here is a single environment where everything is one or two clicks away and it makes information easily available to you.
So here, I have the chart with the type of view that I wanted to have a look at and it now shows you all the data on the right hand side. What’s great as well is I just click on the ones that this person is working on and it’ll just highlight and eliminate the rest and it’ll make the type of data that I need to see far more easier. So again, it’s taking that unstructured data that you have within your organization and making it far more structured.
The good thing about this is I can export this to Excel if I want to so that’s another advantage of having it integrated into your productivity tools. You can slice and dice it a little bit further if you want to do that. If you have predefined reports that you’ve built, you can do that as well or if you wanted to send this as an email link to an individual within your organization to review some content around these specific projects, feel free to do so
The great thing about all of this is if I want to get back to my original dashboard, I literally just click on home and it will show you all my base information that I was working from and if i want to go back to my original dashboard, I just click on that and it’ll go back on with all my information there.
Quick Create: Project
One thing here that I want to highlight to you is that we have this little cross referred to as Quick Create for a record. If I click on this, I’ve got multiple things that I can create. The great thing here is I have a project component and this is unique to Unit4 PSA. So if I click on this, I can quickly and easily create a project.
So here, I’m going to call it Inmind partner showcase. I can associate it to a company quite quickly and remember when we referred to those predefined work breakdown structures that we have in our solution? They standardize and they templateize for those sub-verticals that we’re having a look at. For example, if this was an IT consultancy firm, I’d use Surestep - Rapid. I need to assign it to a specific entity as well.
If you have multiple entities within your organization and you run multiple projects across those entities, we can manage that. If you run a global organization, we can also manage multiple currencies as well
I need to assign everything to myself for this demo.
This is how easy it is to quickly create a project from our solution
Pinned Project
The project I’ve created earlier is already pinned to my pin board. I’m sure you’re all familiar with that type of concept that sits within the Microsoft environment. So I’m going to click on the specific project.
When you see this project opening up, it gives you a whole lot of data and this is really just the summary or a snapshot of the specific project. If it came from a specific opportunity, you’ll see where that opportunity was so you start understanding your pipeline and if you start leveraging Power BI, you can start drilling across that type of information as well. So here it shows me that my project type happens to be an ad hoc project and we are using the Surestep Rapid methodology that we’ve defined for the specific project, the project status is active, the owner information, the account tab. There’s a whole lot of additional information that you can add. You can see my name has been produced multiple times for this project and that’s because from a demo point of view, I need to take on multiple roles to show you the full process of the actual demo. So you can have a briefing, contract sent, signed so it gives us a great overview of the project for your project managers.
You can also see the specific team members that are involved in this specific project so i’ve just associated one specific team member within my organization to this project. If you have project teams, let’s say for example, you have a group of individuals within your organization that are experts in doing one type of project you can put them into a team and automatically allocate them to a specific project. If I’m wanting to find additional users, it’s quite a simple process to do. I’m going to add Zenib to this and it basically just looks through your organization and adds that individual to your project. You can see the hourly rates so we have predefined projects
We have defined project hour types
You would decide and implement the actual hourly rate so when you have a contract for a specific project, you would define the budget for those projects.
If it changes because of negotiations through the opportunity phase, this gives you the opportunity to actually change the hour rates for that as well.
You’ve got the financial overview to show you how much has been invoiced out, how big is the actual opportunity, what it needs to be invoiced.
If it’s integrated into your financial solution and we see that certain amounts of invoices have been paid.
You will see the paid information here as well.
So this gives the project managers a good overview of the actual financial health of the project which is obviously important
If I look at my the details component, this is where this shows the predefined blueprint or work breakdown structures, those templatized projects that we’ve actually built and predefined for you, so these are the various sub steps that we’ve defined and built on best practice for the specific type of project. We’ve defined the specific item types but if you wanted to, you can actually go in and change the specific line item type for that project if need be.
We have multiple, over seven different types of item types that you can build so from an hourly rate all the way through to recurring to product expense fixed
I’m just going to keep this at fixed fee for the time being and just take a step back and watch what you see here is that i’m not moving and between multiple screens it’s really just a backwards and forth on the actual project screen
So there’s the Actuals, there’s Invoices and there’s various components that have been associated to this project
Notes - That email, which I tracked earlier within my Office 365 environment with my Outlook that I tracked against the project, there you can see there’s that specific email so anyone that’s actually involved with this project actually gets to see the full visibility around the project and the interactions with the specific project as well
We also have an area called related and I want to show you something here.
So this is the specific budget, which you, as a user in the organization, would define the values and the hour quantities for the specific projects that you are running
We give you the framework of the individual steps
You fill out and provide the actual hour quantities and the hour rates as well
These are the templates that sits as a standard within your organization but you can change it
So let’s say for example during the opportunity phase, you realize that the scoping session is actually going to be much longer, it’s going to be double from a scoping aspect.
You know and when you save this, you can see that the value actually does change
It’s fully interactive and because it’s cloud-based, so if you’re looking at your projects, you know if a project manager changes something within a budget and you’re the owner of the organization and you run a report, know that you will have the most updated information available for you.
So now I’ve had a look at my specific projects, I’ve played around with my budget, I’m happy with the actual fees that need to be associated with this.
I now want to allocate my resources to the specific project. Once I do that, obviously it looks into my system. It looks at my utilization and the resources that are available. Are yorick and zane actually available for this?
So it does a bit of thinking there as you can see but what I’m able to do now is I’m able to click immediately and look into my Gantt chart and this is a built-in Gantt chart into the solution so I don’t have to export anything. I don’t have to take data out and put it into a separate application altogether. This is all running off the the same data that sits within Unit4 PSA
So here I can see these are the various components. Those are the sub steps that I’ve got. I can go down into the individual sub steps. It’s quite easy to scale it up and show a far more condensed version if i’m moving various components again, within the Gantt chart, it just tracks that information over as well
Okay so what i’ve shown you now is
An overview of the solution
How easy it is to actually create a project
Some of the various tabs within the actual project
The summary of the tabs
But now I want to show you how easy it actually is to present your time and expense
Timesheet
When I open up my timesheet, I have multiple components here
The Green ones show that it hasn’t been approved yet
Blue has been approved okay
You have your combination. Your totals at the bottom. So you can see how much time you’ve actually used in the day
I can see that I still need to book some time against the amount of hours, which i’m due but what’s really great as well is there’s an automatic Outlook integration so if you just have a look here.
I’m going to go back to my Outlook. I’m going to go back to my calendar. You know there’s various sessions here, discovery session, project update - Inmind.
When I click on my Outlook retrieval, it goes ahead and it takes that data and it puts it into my timesheet. The great thing about this is we work with Outlook on such a daily basis and we plan our projects around there and we set up meetings but here, you can bring in the data and you can now assign this to specific projects. So for example, I’ve got this specific one. Purely by double clicking on it, I can take the specific project that i’m working on. I can take my hour type. I want analyst. If you’ve got a specific expense that you’ve agreed with the clients, you can introduce that and when you save, it basically updates that Outlook agenda meeting into Unit4 PSA.
Now, we don’t want to show, for example, that we’re having lunch on a daily basis because that’s got nothing to do with anyone else. So by just refreshing my screen, what happens is it just keeps my core data that i’ve imported and assigned to projects and it eliminates everything else and it gives me a clean environment to work from
It’s very easy to actually allocate time within the solution. You allocate it on a project. It’s a click and drag environment. For example, today, I’m going to do this. I’m going to click it down like that so it’s a full area component. What’s great as well is if you know that this is something that runs on a recurring basis, I can copy and paste that entry. So it’s a very easy way to manage your time. Now that we’ve allocated some time, what we need to do now is to approve the time
PM Approval
So if you think about it, we’ve created a project. We’ve assigned resources to the project. Those resources have done the work. They’ve now allocated their time and expenses towards specific projects and now we need to approve that time as a project manager at the end of the week. This is a very easy process to do and also sits directly within the solution.
Now we usually approve time at the end of the week so because it’s Tuesday today, I’m just going to move my calendar to the end. I’m going to do a bit of a refresh and what it does for me now it shows me all my specific projects that i’m related to as a project manager
So there’s a few that i’ve been working on here
Gives you an overview for that Inmind Sure Step one that i’d created for the specific demo
You can see that it comes up with the hours that I put into my time sheet and for that specific one, that is the description which I actually created within my Outlook agenda. It was that unstructured data and again creating it structured
Now the great thing about this is when I need to start approving time, when I start looking at these various components, I can see exactly where I am from a budget point of view and how much of the budget I’ve used within the various sub steps of my projects. So I’m going to approve these. I’m only using nine percent of my current project because it’s in the beginning of the actual project and I’m going to approve the hours. It takes all of that information away and it just leaves me now with the project, with the hours that I still need to Approve.
Invoicing
I’m just going to go back to my project that i’ve pinned because now what we’re wanting to do is we want to make the money. We want to send the invoice after we’ve done all the work and we send invoices out on a weekly basis
It’s about billing with precision. The sooner you get the invoices out, the quicker it is to actually get the money in
So I’m going to click here. I’m going to create an invoice and now what it does is we create invoices at the end of the week so i’m just going to do that process. It shows me my specific hours that I’ve just approved and has created an invoice for me. So I click ok and now what happens is it actually generates my invoice for me
Our solution, we generate the invoice from PSA because that happens from a transactional point of view from an operational aspect within the organization and then we integrate that invoice through to your financial solution
So if we just have a look here, I get some base data again and I can have a look at my preview, for example.
What is this invoice actually going to look like?
Is it the right information that’s being sent out?
Who are the right people that’s sending this?
Is this the right project?
This is all fully templatized and this is something that we would be able to do for you quite easily and get you trained up on this
If i go back to my summary, you can see that there’s no invoice number created yet and that’s because the invoice hasn’t been approved
The minute I approve it, I’m just going to save it quickly just to make it go quicker. It generates an invoice number and once that happens, the transactional data of this invoice gets transferred to your financial solution. From here, it’s very easy. This can all be automated by the way. I’m just showing you the manual process of it. I can just press email and I can just create an email with the pdf and you can automate this process.
So what i’ve really showed you here today is
I’ve taken you through a process from my Outlook environment
Taking that unstructured data, putting it into a structured environment
Creating an opportunity
Creating a project
Allocating resources to the project
Allocating my time and expenses towards that specific project
Approving it and going back and actually sending the invoice at the end of the day
Everything that you’ve seen here today is stock standard within the solution.
This is what you get out the box and this is the standardized and templatized version that we’re having a look at
Demo - Outlook Integration: Our solution sits on the Microsoft Power Platform so you might be wondering why we’re actually looking under your Outlook environment.
We actually integrate directly into your Outlook so instead of working with multiple solutions, remember that slide I showed you earlier with the digital transformation and all those different applications that you’re working with, we’re giving you one application, one platform to work from. If you use Microsoft productivity tools within your organization, I’m sure you’re all familiar with Outlook. So what I want to show you here is that if you have a look at your emails, we receive multiple emails on a daily basis and this is what we refer to as unstructured data.
Demo - Outlook Integration: Combining your Outlook with Dynamics 365 and with PSA, you start taking your unstructured data and creating structured data out of that so if I click on a specific email, it can be integrated with actionable data in your Dynamics environment so you’d get this little icon you’d launch in the D365 environment and this allows you to start tracking emails with unstructured data that you’re getting on a daily basis in either your opportunities or leads, which depends on whether you’re looking from a sales engagement or projects point of view.
Within our environment, we can start tracking those emails towards your actual projects
Demo - Outlook Integration: I’ve created a project which I’m going to be showing you and I can track this email towards my specific project, which I’ve created within the solution.
So now what happens is that I start taking my unstructured data and I start assigning it towards projects and here you can now see I have a specific project that I’m working on. I can see the company that it’s actually associated with and this is the entity that I’m actually working from, which gives me an overview of the actual contact details, who the person is and more.
PSA Dashboard: When you open up the Unit4 PSA solution, you’re presented with this type of a view. Before we go any further, I just want to have a brief overview of the actual landscape that you see in front of you.
On the left hand side, this is what we refer to as our navigation bar
These are all the various modules that are used to build projects as well as maintain and progress projects through their life cycle. Various type of projects, employees, utilization sheets, time and expense, approvals
The top bar is our command bar and there’s multiple aspects that we have access to here as well.
PSA Dashboard: Before I go into that, I just want to show you a little bit from a dashboarding point of view. So I spoke about those business intelligence components. We have dashboards that are pre-built and defined for our sub-verticals. They were built over many years of experience in the professional services game so depending on what type of business you’re actually in, you might find some of our predefined dashboards relevant. So this is one specific dashboard that we’ve got called the PSA dashboard.
It shows all my active projects. I can have more of a pipeline type of view for my active projects
The great thing about this is that you can actually drill down into this information. If this is too small, you can expand the chart, which makes it easier for you to see and wherever you see this little hand, you can actually drill down more.
You can see who the owners are that are working for this specific environment. You can decide what to look at. So let’s have a look at the pie chart and you can see that within this specific company, these are the various project managers that are working on various projects within this organization.
The great thing as well is it highlights exactly what the information is, who the individual is, and what’s also really nice about this is if I want to see a little bit more information around where this data actually comes from for this pie chart, I can just view the records
Active Projects: So here, I have the chart with the type of view that I wanted to have a look at and it now shows you all the data on the right hand side.
What’s great as well is I just click on the ones that this person is working on and it’ll just highlight and eliminate the rest and it’ll make the type of data that I need to see far more easier. So again, it’s taking that unstructured data that you have within your organization and making it far more structured.
Active Projects: The good thing about this is I can export this to Excel if I want to so that’s another advantage of having it integrated into your productivity tools.
You can slice and dice it a little bit further if you want to do that. If you have predefined reports that you’ve built, you can do that as well or if you wanted to send this as an email link to an individual within your organization to review some content around these specific projects, feel free to do so
