BigTime Foresight is a resource management tool. It allows you to manage the processes of running a professional services company. Our advanced system can track time off and calculate utilization, helping you make management decisions that increase your company's profitability.
BigTime Foresight Functions
Who Is Foresight For?
What Can I Achieve With Foresight?
Predicting Project Costs And Revenues Based On Allocations
Checking The Financial Status Of Projects Based On Time Entries
Forecasting Project Profitability Trends, Including Margins
Comparing Scheduled Plans With Actual Data
Creating Financial Scenarios Using Demands For Roles
Reviewing And Scheduling Employee Workload
Managing Employee Assignments And Utilization
Resource Management
Talent Pool Management
Allocation And Budget Management
What Type Of Data Is Synced Between BigTime And Foresight?
How Can I Implement Foresight In My Company?
BigTime Foresight Functions
Resource management and measurement of the utilization rate are possible thanks to five system functions that are entirely customizable in Foresight:
- Project Demand
- Resource Management
- Monitoring Project Progress
- Talent Pool
- Predicting And Tracking Project Finance
Who Is Foresight For?
As the leader of a professional services firm, you are responsible for high-level management processes. You want to look at employee utilization holistically. You are tired of diving into individual tasks to find this data, and you feel you’re missing out on a perspective of all your company’s projects. Foresight allows you to look at projects and utilization from a bird's eye perspective. It goes far beyond essential task management, which doesn’t provide a complete view of what is happening in your company. For example, with Foresight, you could plan an employee’s utilization at 50% per month for a backend project rather than assigning them to a subtask between Monday and Wednesday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
As a leader, you manage your firm’s margins, budgets, and profitability. You want to gain a general perspective on project finances and perform tasks such as:
- tracking actuals (data resulting from logged working hours. You probably already do this in BT),
- predicting profitability of not only projects but also clients, groups of projects, and the entire company, and
- understanding trends/comparing forecasting plans.
With Foresight, you can plan for uncertain scenarios based on demand. It can show you how the finances of this project will be shaped, who you will need to be able to start this project, and whether certain staffers will be available to work on projects.
What Can I Achieve With Foresight?
Predicting Project Costs And Revenues Based On Allocations
Cost and revenue prediction is crucial for any company. Forecasting allows for accurate budgeting and resource allocation, ensuring that financial goals are met and resources are optimally utilized. With Foresight, you can configure staffers’ information, including bill and cost rates. The system will automatically calculate the project's profitability, saving you time.
Checking The Financial Status Of Projects Based On Time Entries
Other important aspects of running your business are monitoring the efficiency of workforce utilization, identifying potential bottlenecks, and making informed decisions to improve project timelines and profitability. Foresight lets you create assignments for staffers and track their time entries. Thanks to that information, you can view actual data based on reality.
Forecasting Project Profitability Trends, Including Margins
Your firm should proactively adapt strategies, control costs, and optimize pricing structures to maintain a healthy bottom line and sustainable growth. Foresight users can check project profitability trends and generate reports for extended periods.
Comparing Scheduled Plans With Actual Data
A critical aspect of a service-oriented company is providing insights into project performance, identifying deviations from initial plans, and facilitating timely adjustments to ensure successful project delivery and client satisfaction. With Foresight, you can craft plans freely and decide on your own, after which you can turn your plans into actuals.
Creating Financial Scenarios Using Demands For Roles
Aligning staffing needs with project requirements, controlling labor costs, optimizing resource allocation, and ensuring your project's overall financial health and success are essential. Try out Foresight’s demand feature, which allows you to craft potential project assignment scenarios. Since you don’t assign staffers now, your planning can be more precise.
Reviewing And Scheduling Employee Workload
A calendar in Foresight displays assigned projects and working hours compared to capacity, offering different perspectives on employee workload from daily to monthly view. Users can choose between people-oriented or project-oriented sorting. Furthermore, there is an option to filter views by parameters such as project and staffer information in the calendar, reports, and people tabs.
Managing Employee Assignments And Utilization
A high-level overview of team assignments, project work, and utilization. Reports provide utilization rates (planned and actual) for the entire company or based on applied filters (teams, positions, seniority, projects, clients, etc.). These reports also display availability over a specified time with similar filtering options.
Resource Management
Use real-time alerts about overallocation during assignment creation and/or editing. Find replacements in other projects based on availability and skills. You can create placeholder assignments for projects if you’re not ready to assign specific employees. The project planning module impacts the calendar and reports and allows you to make simulations and forecast finances.
Talent Pool Management
In Foresight, you can access a single view and filter employees based on skills and availability within a selected time frame. You can also configure contract length, capacity, and preferred public holidays based on the country you operate from. Finally, you can manage time-off approval workflows, which affect employee capacity and related reports.
Allocation And Budget Management
Assignments store information about employee allocation on specific projects, including the number of scheduled hours, chosen utilization, project phase, and more details. Employee information includes experience, skills with ratings, language proficiency, and position. You can use Foresight to synchronize time entries from external time-tracking apps and connect them with assignments in projects. You can also use the module to sync time off from external leave management apps, display them on the calendar, and reduce employee availability. Foresight allows you to automatically include cost/income hour rate information when creating assignments and updating planned project budgets and profitability for both the project and the individual.
What Type Of Data Is Synced Between BigTime And Foresight?
If you use Foresight, specific data will be synced from your BigTime account. We sync employee-related data such as names, last names, default roles, statuses, departments, emails, and assigned cost centers. We also integrate project data such as project names, client IDs, client names, start dates, end dates, statuses, billing models, and types. The system also syncs time entries, distinguishing between billable, non-billable, submitted, and unsubmitted.
Learn more about the data flow between BigTime and Foresight from this article.
How Can I Implement Foresight In My Company?
A resource management tool is only successful if the appropriate processes to ensure high data quality and efficient syncing are in place before the adoption deadline. This means that you must appoint the proper people who will be responsible for these processes. Ideally, these people will know what these processes are for and how they benefit your company.
To successfully implement Foresight in your business, you will need to gather people who can:
- assign and manage assignments of people to projects (soft and hard bookings),
- manage and update profiles,
- manage and update skills,
- add new projects,
- manage people's permissions,
- manage time off approvals,
- manage data fields (incl. skills tree),
- assign leads to projects, and
- access all the financial data in your company.
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Remember. During the implementation process, you will receive full support from implementation managers. |
What Kind Of Processes Are Crucial For Using Foresight?
Adopting Foresight can change how your company structures, analyzes, facilitates, and improves existing resource management processes. Therefore, to implement it effectively, please read the list of best practices below:
- Ensure you have access to all company data (utilization, projects, people assigned to projects, costs, expenses, salaries, incomes, bill rates, and project overheads).
- Managing the implementation of a tool requires driving changes in your company and coordinating the people responsible for them.
- Make sure your Product Champion has enough time to complete their tasks. They’ll need at least two hours a week to familiarize themself with Foresight. At least six weeks must be allocated, alongside two hours for workshops with a customer success or implementation consultant.
- You need to know how resource management currently works, all processes, and access to the database and tools that support their implementation.
- To implement the tool, you must clearly define your organization's goals. The customer success and sales teams will support you on this topic.