The 10 Best Professional Services Automation Solution providers 2018 by Insights Success Media

November

Best Professional

Solution Providers 2018

Tech Trend People Analytics: A Magical Crystal Ball for HR Fraternity

Future-Bots Catching-up with the Robotics for Better Future

Mounir Hilal Chief Customer OfďŹ cer & Senior Vice President

PSA Innovation with the Tenrox platform

PSA: Fortifying Industries through Integrated Software Solution

s businesses continue to evolve, they look for an integrated solution or tool which can streamline their number of operations, optimize efficiency, and attain higher productivity and profitability. Professional Services Automation, frequently abbreviated to PSA, has made this possible. PSA is unified software designed to assist professionals with project management and resource management. The solution embraces time tracking, invoicing, resource planning, business intelligence, and collaboration tools used by many project teams. Besides, it aids professional service providers to manage their client engagements throughout the project cycle. PSA software solution delivers a consistent method for overall management process from planning, managing to measuring the performance of each project throughout its execution process. Ultimately, it allows its users to integrate industry metrics in order to get better understanding of operations. PSA software was originally developed for the professional service sectors which includes major industrial traits. The tool also helps organizations to gain control over their project, financial, timeline, and resource data. Organizations often choose to update their PSA tools to increase its productivity and to meet client needs. In order to shed light over organizations which are driving business processes with an improved set of functionalities, Insights Success has nominated, “The 10 Best Professional Services Automation Solution Providers 2018”, which are aggressively establishing industrial aspects with their proficient service automation solutions all over the world. On the cover, we have encompassed Upland Software, a leading cloud-based enterprise work management software provider that enables its users with its family of applications to manage their

projects, professional workforce, IT investments, automate document-intensive business processes and effectively engage with their customers, prospects, and community via web and mobile technologies. Further, this magazine also features SimplyBook.me, one of the most successful online appointments scheduling software provider in the market, which helps service based companies to work effectively with a solution that makes them stand out as professionals. ClientFlow an integrated platform that brings Shared Inbox Management and Project Management together which helps management to have an overview on their team activities and give essential information on one platform. Haulio a fast-growing startup in the Container Haulage industry backed by the world’s leading Ports and Terminals Group, PSA, solving a global Container Haulage infrastructural problem through new thinking and new technology. Kimble Applications, a cloud-based software-as-a-service company providing professional service automation (PSA) solution known as Kimble PSA for Force.com, a cloud computing platform from Salesforce.com. Cloud Coach, the leading company with unified automation solutions which enhance organizations overall process with specialized enterprise-class project management and productivity software. AbacusNext, one of the best in class Professional Services Automation solution provider that helps firms with stringent security and compliance needs to grow by providing Compliance-Ready technology solutions and CrossConcept, a leading company with unified PSA solution that contains set of feature focusing on best practice functionality that service organizations actually use. Apart from this, our in-house editors have also written masterly-crafted articles named “Cloud Computing – Revamping the Technology for the Next Generation” and “Key Trends that are Driving Transformation in SaaS”. So, let’s start flipping the pages of the magazine to acknowledge the firms that are simplifying the processes. Happy reading!

Bhushan Kadam

Upland Software: PSA Innovation with the Tenrox platform

CXO

Cover Story

Leadership Viewpoint

Virtuoso’s Vision

Maestros Insights

Blockchain: The Next Opportunity for Better, Safer, Smarter Cities

The Shift that Broke the Pendulum

AI: From Articial to Authentic

CONTENTS Articles 38

22 Future-Bots

Tech Trend

Catching-up with the Robotics for Better Future

People Analytics: A Magical Crystal Ball for HR Fraternity

ClientFlow

Cloud Coach

A Comprehensive Project Management Solutions Provider

Next Generation Project Automation

CrossConcept

Haulio

Kimble Applications

SimplyBook.me

TOP Step Consulting

Simplicity is the Future

Delivering Exemplary Haulage Solutions

Revolutionizing PSA Solutions in the Cloud

The Pioneers of Appointment Scheduling Services

Striding towards Professional Services Automation Excellence

42 46

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Executive Editor Assistant Editors Contributing Editors Visualiser Art & Design Director Associate Designer Co-designer

Pooja M. Bansal Anish Miller Bhushan Kadam Jenny Fernandes Kedar Kulkarni Ishan Mittal Hitesh Dhamani David King Amol Kamble Kushagra Gupta Asha Bange

Art & Picture Editors Paul Belin Jayant Khanna Senior Sales Manager Passi D. Business Development Manager Peter Collins Marketing Manager John Matthew Business Development Executives Steve, Joe, Alan, Jagdish Sales Executives David, Kevin, Mark, Pranay Technical Head Jacob Smile Technical Specialists Amar, Pratiksha Digital Marketing Manager Marry D’Souza Online Marketing Strategists Alina Sege, Shubham SME-SMO Executives Prashant Chevale, Uma Dhenge Research Analyst Patrick James Circulation Managers Robert, Tanaji Database Management Stella Andrew Technology Consultant David Stokes sales@insightssuccess.com

November, 2018 Corporate Ofces: Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

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Cover Story

Mounir Hilal Chief Customer OfďŹ cer & Senior Vice President

Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

Upland Software: PSA Innovation with the Tenrox platform

n recent years, businesses have evolved to operate faster, in a more dynamic and complex landscape. New approaches are being introduced that combine the best of project and financial management, social collaboration, automation, real-time business intelligence, and much more. When combined, these systems help knowledge workers to become more efficient and adept, transforming how organizations operate to become more nimble, and with greater ability to stand out against their competition. Upland Software is a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise work management software. Its family of applications enables users to manage their projects, professional workforce, and IT investments; automate document-intensive business processes; and effectively engage with their customers, prospects, and community via the web and mobile technologies. With more than 4,000 customers and over 450,000 users around the world, Upland Software solutions help customers run their operations smoothly, adapt to change quickly, and achieve better results every day. Upland understands that to compete in today’s business environment, people need to access, analyze, and act on information in real-time and collaborate with team members around the globe. Its products provide enterprise work management solutions that are purpose-built for the challenge at hand, not bloated suites or costly on-premise software. And because its products are cloud-based and architected for performance, scalability, and security, Upland keeps its people connected anytime, anywhere, and from any device.

on-time and accurate invoicing and accelerate revenue recognition. Tenrox is equally recognized as one of the most complete enterprise timesheet solutions on the market, giving its customers the utmost flexibility to implement complex timesheet compliance policies, configure timesheet routing workflows specific to their unique business needs and customize timesheet templates according to the different employee types and requirements. Tenrox delivers excellence to its customers and is trusted by international Services Organizations such as AKA Enterprises, Autodesk, FICO, and JDA Software. But, Tenrox is more than just PSA software. It is a platform that provides end-to-end functionality for Professional Services Organizations, that includes sales enablement, customer reference management, and knowledge management. In addition, it provides built-in analytics and integration capabilities. Imparting Leadership Mounir Hilal is the Chief Customer Officer and Senior Vice President at Upland Software. With over 20 years of experience in the Professional Services (PS) space, Mr. Hilal has worked closely with Upland enterprise clients to drive maturity around their practice and define their longterm strategy. As a PS practitioner himself, Mr. Hilal leads Upland’s global Professional Services group, delivering outstanding financial performance with great customer outcomes.

Professional Services Innovation Tenrox is Upland’s powerful yet intuitive Professional Services Automation (PSA) platform that helps organizations to better plan and manage projects and optimize the utilization of their team. It helps improve billable utilization, provides insights into resource capacity aimed at reducing bench time, keeps costs in check, ensures

“Delivering powerful results through enterprise work management solutions.”

Mr. Hilal is an active participant with industry analysts and leading organizations that define the PSA market, including PS Village, PMI, and TSIA. He is an active speaker, and has presented at PMI events, as well as internationally. At the recent event in London, UK “Innovation through Integration,” Mr. Hilal shared his vision on Digital Transformation. He is also a major contributor to the books “The Rise of the Project Workforce: Managing People and Projects in a Flat World” and “Professional Services Automation: Optimizing Project & Service Oriented Organizations” Both of which were at the forefront of establishing the PSA market, sharing a strategy and vision for professional services automation. Anticipating Trends in the Professional Services Industry With an increase in fixed bid projects, companies need to be attentive to how they run their projects, and maintain profitability:

implementation and continued return on investment. Upland meets this need through strong relationships within the Professional Services industry. Regular interactions with analysts and industry professionals features predominantly in their practice, and this is evidenced in their approach towards implementation, and support. Not only do they provide configuration and how-to training, they also share best practices and guidance throughout the engagement. At Upland, they foster a partnership model with their customers, offering numerous opportunities for customers to provide product feedback and contribute to the roadmap. Customers are provided regular updates on the roadmap, resulting in a positive customer experience. Tenrox - Innovation Through Integration As more companies move to implementing fixed bid projects, they face increasing pressure on margins. For them to remain competitive, they must look for creative ways to deliver results more effectively. That’s where Knowledge Management comes into play. In March 2018, Upland announced the integration of its KCS v6 verified knowledge solution into Tenrox, giving organizations the ability to embed their own services playbooks, project know-how and corporate compliance policies within their PSA environment. Team members can search, find and create “best practices” and “lessons learned” content, to ensure greater collaboration, elevate project quality, improve profit margins, and be compliant with corporate policies. Recognized by KM World Magazine as a Trend-Setting Product of 2018, Tenrox is the only PSA with embedded knowledge.

The ongoing proliferation of SaaS-based solutions, means that PSA vendors need to provide more than just core functionality to stay relevant. Upland is uniquely positioned to lead this challenge because of its vast portfolio of cloudbased solutions. Upland actively seeks synergies between its products, to identify innovative opportunities that will better support their customers. This process led to the introduction of proposal automation, that allows customers to leverage templates and easily generate Statements of Work (SOWS), respond to Requests for Proposal (RFPs) and complete technical questionnaires. Customers can accelerate their sales process, to win more business and stay ahead of their competition. Likewise, the integration of Knowledge Management was derived from the need to more easily search internal and external documentation sources to support compliance, ensure project consistency and accelerate project delivery.

Desire for better business intelligence Embracing Industry Challenges Upland recognizes that business intelligence is a key function for companies today, and created a strategic oﬀering called Upland Analytics for all of its products. Built right into each of the products, Upland Analytics allows customers to visualize their data and make insightful decisions about their business. For Tenrox, Upland Analytics comes with pre-built reports and dashboards so customers can monitor trends and identify gaps, in real-time, about their resources, projects and ﬁnancial performance, without having to rely on BI specialists or third-party reporting tools. The shift from vendor to trusted advisor In today’s business landscape, customers are looking for more than just vendors. They are looking for solution providers who can provide subject matter expertise and industry best practices to ensure a successful

Customers want automation but face immature business processes:

“Managing and optimizing projects, professional workforces, and IT costs.”

“Beyond PSA – a complete platform that encompasses proposal automation, knowledge management and built-in analytics.” One of the key challenges is to help customers deﬁne their business processes while automating them at the same time. Upland’s role as a solutions provider is to help guide its customers and work together to design the best system for them. Going through this process can have tremendous beneﬁts to any organization as it helps provide the solution and business process that they need today, and future-proofs their implementation for growth. Single point solutions that don’t meet the full need of the customer: Another challenge faced by customers is being underserved by systems that give broad functionality in many areas without providing depth of capability. With Upland’s Tenrox solution, the focus is on designing a robust PSA platform, then leveraging the Upland Integration Platform powered by Dell Boomi for bridging to other systems and provide enterprise-level connectivity. Customers can easily share business-critical data into and out of 1000s of software applications, including such as CRM, HCM, payroll, ERP and more, for a holistic view of their professional services operations. A consumer mindset in a B2B environment: The proliferation of web-based services for consumer consumption, and even more recently, the adoption of mobile applications, has meant that business users have adopted a consumer-like mindset with regard to the tools that they use for work. They expect their B2B software to perform with a consumer-like ease of use. Upland has embraced this trend and has actively invested in UX/UI development to deliver software that is accessible and easy to use, and thus more readily adopted. Furthermore, because the same UX/UI philosophy is shared across all Upland products, customers who adopt Tenrox, as well as other Upland products, gain a consistent experience.

Putting Customers First Customers choose Upland for three reasons. First, its award-winning cloud-based products are purpose-built for business needs and make its customer’s best-of-breed strategies a reality. Second, Upland executes a 100% customer success commitment, featuring a high-touch customer success program. Third, Upland has the scale and resources needed to invest in its customer’s success. “At Upland, our portfolio reaches beyond Professional Services Automation. We have multiple software applications that facilitate numerous enterprise work management solutions. As we continue to evolve and grow through strategic acquisitions, we will continue to seek best-of-breed products that are complementary to our existing cloud-based applications.” asserts Mr. Hilal. Client Recommendations “Real-time business intelligence is core to our business. Integrating dashboards and reports directly into Tenrox provides us with an end-to-end PSA experience and is a vital feature that will beneﬁt any organization.” - Dina DeMaio Smith, Data and Systems Manager at Vantage Partners. “We have worked closely with the Tenrox team at Upland to make key updates to the Resource Management module. Upland listened to our inputs and added new features that make the Resource Management module more user-friendly and intuitive to all. This allows us to embark on a very important product consolidation to bring our business resource management into Tenrox PSA.” - Terry Buckle, Head of Portfolio and Program Management at OpenBet.

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CORPORATE OFFICE Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754,(302)-319-9947 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription : www.insightssuccess.com

Company Name

Management

Brief

Walter Perdigao Co-founder & VP of Services Tony Abou-Akl Co-founder & VP of Development & Support

CrossConcept is the leading company that develop and implement PSA software for leading Professional Services Automation software vendors.

Peter Lee CEO

Cloud Coach is the leading company with uniﬁed automation solutions which enhance organizations overall process with specialized enterprise-class project management.

ClientFlow clientﬂow.com

Abhinav Marla Product Manager

ClientFlow oﬀers Shared Inbox and Project Management software for client service teams and consolidates all conversations, projects and client information into one location.

Forecast forecast.app

Dennis Kayser Co-founder & CEO

Forecast is an AI powered resource & project management platform for companies that care about delivering projects on time, on scope, and on budget.

Harmony Business Systems Ltd harmonypsa.com

Steve Duckworth Co-founder & CEO

Harmony Business Systems Ltd is a company with the platform that models and manages whole business.

Haulio haulio.io

Sebastian Shen Co-founder & CPO

Haulio is a fast-growing startup backed with leading Ports and Terminals Group, PSA, and solving a global Container Haulage infrastructural problem through new thinking and new technology, and a one stop shop for all your EV needs.

Kimble Applications kimbleapps.com

Mark Robinson Chief Marketing Oﬃcer

Kimble Applications, a cloud-based SaaS company, provides a PSA solution known as Kimble PSA for Force.com, a cloud computing platform from Salesforce.com.

SimplyBook.me SimplyBook.me

Ingvar Gudmundsson Founder

SimplyBook.me is one of the most successful online appointments scheduling software in the market, signing up thousands of new users every single month.

TOP Step Consulting topstepconsulting.com

Ronn Breaux President & CEO Jodi Cicci Founder & Executive Advisor

TOP Step Consulting is on a mission to enable and empower Professional Services Organizations to become proﬁtable, scalable, and eﬃcient.

CrossConcept Inc. crossconceptinc.ca

Cloud Coach cloudcoach.com

Upland Software uplandsoftware.com

Mounir Hilal Chief Customer Oﬃcer Upland Software is a leading provider of cloud-based enterprise work management software. & Senior Vice President

Abhinav Marla Product Manager ClientFlow

ClientFlow

A Comprehensive Project Management Solutions Provider

good communication is the extension between confusion and clarity, and teamwork is the core of incredible success. This phrase is valid in so many ways, especially when taking a part and working on collaborative projects. By considering all this, it’s the major objective to ensure the customer’s satisfaction and the best methodology when an individual is in the business world. In an interview with Insights Success, Abhinav Marla, Product Manager of ClientFlow shares his experience and gives resourceful insights. In addition to this he has also shed light over ClientFlow, its products and motto of the organization along with the future goals in revolutionizing the industry. Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Abhinav and Insights Success: Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness and its vision. ClientFlow is an integrated platform that brings Shared Inbox Management and Project Management together. With ClientFlow, You can manage your Personal Email accounts as well as Shared Email Accounts with your Team on one platform where you can assign work and

collaborate-in-content. ClientFlow helps managers have an overview of their team’s activity and give essential information when necessary through comments. Following is the feature list: • Single Platform to manage Personal and Shared Email accounts. • In-built Client and Project Management • Task Management and Time Tracking. • Message Templates and Mail Tracking • Assign conversations to Teammates and Follow conversations to receive updates. • Internal Comments • Snooze, Schedule Conversations • Automated Approval Reminders • Client/ Project Overview • Project Templates • Integrations through Zapier See all features here What makes ClientFlow unique is the fully functional Task and Time Management Module that is tightly integrated with the Inbox Module which ensures that all your work is on one Platform. On top of it, there is a layer of Client and

|November 2018|

Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

horizontally, we ventured into shared inbox management and eventually task management and time tracking. Even in the initial stages of the product, we saw a lot of usage on a daily basis.

‘‘

Integrated Email and Project Management of collaborative teams.

Project Management which helps teams have all their work organized based on Clients and Project. ClientFlow envisions transforming email based collaboration in client service teams. What are the cutting-edge automation solutions/services oﬀered by ClientFlow? ClientFlow provides the following automation solutions: Easy Approval Tracking: You can send Custom Branded Approval Requests to Clients via Email. Clients will be shown the due date and have clear options to Approve or Reject. As you send approval requests to multiple clients, it becomes hard to monitor and track them. ClientFlow provides a Dashboard where you can have an overview of the approvals based on status. You can send Approval Reminders or Set an Approval Reminder to be sent based on a rule. This helps Teams save hours of time per week on back and forth communication with clients related to Approval requests. Message templates: ClientFlow provides Pre built Message Templates ranging from status updates to invoice reminders based on best practices. Users can also create custom templates for their organization. Using Message templates saves time on composing emails especially when there is a lot of recurring communication in the organization. Project Templates: Teams can create Custom project Templates based on their workﬂow and save time on creating recurring tasks.

We have learnt that products with high adoption need to be UX-driven. Hence, we spent a lot of time on enhancing the User Experience. What are the challenges faced while providing automation solutions and how is ClientFlow serving to tackle them? We have learnt that there is a cost associated with switching from one solution to another in the automation space. Users tend to adopt a new solution only if a solution boosts the efficiency drastically (10x) compared to their existing solution. We always keep that in mind while designing the product. What according to you could be the potential future of services automation and how does ClientFlow envision sustaining its competency? We believe that users of service automation software will move towards integrated solutions that are customizable to their workflow. About the Leader Abhinav has acquired his Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Electronics and Communications Engineering. After his degree, Abhinav worked with ReportGarden, an agency management solution on creating a suite of tools such as Reporting, Budgeting, Invoicing, Proposals, etc. that help Service businesses automate their workflow. He worked with a small cross functional team through which he learnt a lesson of how to take ownership of work and earned experience in various fields including Marketing (SEO, PPC, Email & Content), UX Design and Sales (Prospecting, Deal making & Success). Abhinav is passionate about building and scaling products that have a positive impact on people’s lives. He looks forward to contribute to companies that encourage high ownership of work across departments that would help him to develop his analytical mindset, problem-solving and communication skills.

Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of the company. We started oﬀ as an approval management solution that would help agency-client communication. Having decided that there was a lot of scope to expand the business |November 2018|

n an interview with Insights Success, Peter Lee, the CEO of Cloud Coach, shares insights on the rapid success of his company, which specializes in enterprise-class project, Professional Service Automation (PSA), and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software built for businesses that wish to make strategic investments in their success. Also, he broadly discusses the company’s core competencies and its establishment in the market.

What according to you could be the potential future of services automation and how does Cloud Coach envision sustaining its competency? The current generation of Professional Services Automation (PSA) tools relies heavily on the reporting capability targeted at management, which often leaves the end-users dissatisﬁed with their user experience, as they navigate slow and cumbersome screens with a lot of wasted time.

Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Peter and Insights Success:

Cloud Coach, have noticed this disconnect, seeks to ﬁll the gap with our next-generation management and reporting PSA tool, which delivers a fantastic experience for end users saving them considerable time each day, while still giving the management all the great reporting they need, such as project proﬁtability, utilization, and revenue recognition metrics.

What are the cutting-edge automation solutions/services offered by Cloud Coach? Our solution is built with best practice processes that businesses of any type can adapt and follow. Each process has built-in automation that can be called when specific business criteria are met, such as automatically creating a project based on the right template when a sales opportunity closes, keeping everyone in the business on the same page. Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learned that have shaped the journey of the company. From the design of the very first line of code, we always knew we wanted to build a scalable solution that could handle many thousands of concurrent users on any specific day, and that influences every decision that we make around the product. The one thing that has surprised us along the way, is the way people use the product outside of its intended use case and having to accommodate those thoughts in the design process. What are the challenges faced while providing automation solutions and how is Cloud Coach serving to tackle them? In a professional services business, where the salary (and overhead) cost of employees is one of the biggest expenses, being able to drive efficiency across a team’s daily activities has a huge impact on a company’s bottom line. What we aim to do is design our product so that it takes a user (no matter what their role is) the minimum amount of time to get their job done, saving them time and their company money.

Testimonials from Cloud Coach Clients “I don’t need to do manual spreadsheets to report to the parent company any longer, saving a lot of hours of my team’s time.” - Timothy Roberts, VP Customer Success, Incognito About the Leader Peter Lee is the CEO at Cloud Coach with 15 years of vast experience in refining business initiatives, defining end to end business processes, developing IT strategies, and managing the implementation of large scale systems. Peter holds specialized skills in development of cloud computing solutions with a focus on Project Management, Billing & CRM. Peter also mention that, “As the person that sets our products’ vision, I’m fairly unique in being able to call on a background of being both a business manager outside of the technology industry coupled with consulting experience inside the technology industry. This gives me the ability to visualize how different types of users will want to best interact with a tool and design accordingly.” About the Company Cloud Coach specializes in enterprise-class and builds next generation Professional Service Automation (PSA) and |November 2018|

Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

Project Management tools leveraging the infrastructure of the SaaS industry leader Salesforce.com. Its vision is to create user-friendly tools that add valuable time back into a person’s day, compared to using other PSA tools. Cloud Coach provides enterprise productivity software that makes organizations team to simplify its everyday tasks, increase its productivity and allowing businesses to grow by giving them the time to concentrate on the core aspects of the business. The firm also guides its clients through a complete journey of finding a solution that would be beneficial to tackle business problems with the positive and profitable outcome to their business. Cloud Coach makes sure to become a good fit for business and being used to the best of its ability. Too often business productivity software is installed, but never utilized properly. Its premium consulting and support system will make sure that Cloud Coach is working for its clients and helping their business to become successful. |November 2018|

Catching-up with the

ROBO ROBOTICS for

Better

FUTURE R

obots have always been pictured as a man-made advanced technological creativity, which do and will favor the human species for future. As robotics is vibrantly globalized, soon it will be mainstreamed in various fields and sectors. Currently, there are numerous enterprises worldwide which are implementing robotics into industrial, healthcare and commercial use. Whereas, robotics have experienced a lot of up’s and down’s during this tenure, but with the time, it held a stronghold in the digital world. Whenever the discussion arises about the applications of robotics, the industrial sector has bespoken benefits’. Robots have become more affordable, smart and productive over the years. The sectors like agriculture, construction, warehousing and logistics, and customer services. By investing more in robots, an enterprise

|November 2018|

Future-Bots

will be solving certain problems more accurately and efficiently. Meanwhile, utilizing robots will help enterprises to push their limits in order to fill up the productivity voids. With each slippage of time, the technology is upgrading so does the robotics. The advancements in robotics field will be a boon to the enterprises in order to increase growth and productivity rate. There are certain parameters that should be considered while implementing robotics in the enterprise, such as Following up Parameters before Reaching the Depth of Robotics Modifying; as per the user’s need Generally, robots used to require advanced training in order to operate comfortably. It’s not an issue for the big enterprises as they acquire the skilled people to deal with, where the small enterprises are not so gifted with

|November 2018|

loads of assets initially. But, with the new advances in robotics technologies, it has become easier for small ventures to invest in robots for increasing the productivity generating more revenue. Just by giving wireless commands from an IOT, demonstrating tasks to the robots gets easier. Nowadays, there are numerous varieties of robots to carry out multitasks, thus as per the user’s need, one can invest in robots for the industrial purpose. Easily Compatible Unlike the big manufacturing robots in huge industries, there are various collaborative robots which are specially designed to work alongside and to assist human workers in a variety of tasks. Earlier it was sort of stressful for an enterprise to allot speciﬁc man-power for certain task, but by implementing co-bots such issues are resolved. As the size and shape of co-bots are getting more

compact, it may benefit the enterprises in various terms. Easy to Develop Earlier robots were not able to program easily due to the incompatibility between the user interface and hardware. But, now Robotic Operating System (ROS) is dominating the industry by providing solutions for varied robots in order to perform the task without lagging. It’s an opensource framework which helps developers to redirect the programming in different ways. This open-source framework is dominating the growth towards the constructive direction. Amplifying the Range of Applied Robotics The 21st century—is the era of implementing new ideology and technologies in various sectors. While technological disruption has collectively affected every possible

sector, robotics is still unaﬀected. From past few years, the technology, as well as its implementation, has increased substantially. Have a look on such few areas for possible applications. Obliging Enterprises through Robotics Cobot’s: Assisting Humans Unlike big manufacturing robots, collaborative robots are designed to work with employees in enterprises and corporates. The design is smart enough to assist humans and also, compact enough to handle. Generally, the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are slightly boon by implementing co-bots in day to day life, as they are easily adaptable, easy to process and most importantly it’s aﬀordable. According to some experts, there’s a possibility of enormous growth in the business, if Co-bots are implemented widely. The main motive of industrial robots is to the prioritized safety of employees and workers, yet the chances of accidents are always at high risk. Whereas, co-bots works as a service robot; they come in various shape and sizes easing the workability and reducing the liability of employees. In order to get sanctioned as service robots, any co-bot has to pass certain testing parameters by robot manufacturing companies, factors such as easily compatible with other devices and programs, safe in use, easy to command, and processing at a faster rate. Currently, co-bots are used for processes like machine tending, packaging, and material handling. In spite of industries, co-bots are used in various sectors such as in farming, hospitals, healthcare and facilities, and labs. It does come under robot-as-a-service format.

with personal robotics cloud which will help robots to take and give information directly. Depending on the robot, it can process various functions such as lifting, leveraging, handle vision, object recognition and other, thus certain robots acquire such skills and will provide information to the cloud. Then, this information helps other robots to get enlightened. In simple words to say, robots will teach other robots for the better good of the enterprises. On the other hand, as robots are getting more and more evolved, ﬁltering of essential information from rest will get much easier. This will comfort both big and small enterprises to manage big data more precisely. With the emergence of advancement in robotics, they are on the verge to touch skies already. If considering the above possible factors, this evergreen era of robotics is less likely to get saturated due to technological disruption. As the technologies are growing faster, the enterprises must to catch-up with them accordingly. It’s high time to implement new technologies especially of the robotics as its utilization is not only subjected to warehouses but also, towards the inhouse enterprise work. Hopefully, there’s a possibility of robot-oriented industries in the future.

Cloud Robotics Imagine an enterprise with robots that are totally independent to the user commands, in other words, no external programming may require in order to process robots for the various tasks. In accordance to that, a User Interface to be exact might not be needed in the future, as machine learning is already on its verge to get explored. Currently, in order to carry out certain tasks robots are been told to what to do using the interface whereas, cloud robotics directly twitch compatible code from the clouds which are required for the tasks. To work alongside with humans, robots must be deep learning the subjects simultaneously able to point out problems and provide solutions right away. Meanwhile, it will be a boon for the enterprises if the employees will get to interact with robots as a personiﬁed object rather than a machine. Soon, there

|November 2018|

CrossConcept: Simplicity is the Future

ack in 2010, two partners named Walter and Tony who had been developing and implementing PSA software for leading software vendors joined hands and founded CrossConcept. Within the founders and subsequent employees, CrossConcept have hundreds of years of combined experience helping service organizations to automate their processes. Since its inception, the company’s clients have ranged in size from a handful of people to more than thirty thousand. Later in 2017, CrossConcept launched its very own PSA solution called CrossConcept Continuum PSA using its years of real-world industry experience. CrossConcept’s PSA solution contains a carefully curated feature set focusing on best practice functionality that service organizations actually use. Its user interface is laser focused on minimizing clicks and on being intuitive. Frontline employees find it a helpful planning tool catered to their personal needs, rather than a necessary evil enforced by management. This focus on effective simplicity colors not only the CrossConcept Continuum product but all aspects of doing business with the company. CrossConcept’s roots are based as a service company and while it has transitioned to be a software developer, it will always consider itself a service company first that provides a fantastic PSA tool. Partnering with customers to help make them successful will always be CrossConcept’s core value. In 2018, CrossConcept’s amazing work was recognized by both the TopChoiceAwards and ThreeBestRated for the organization’s innovative mindset and outstanding service. CrossConcept took home the award for “Best IT Service” from both awarding companies. The organization’s vision as a business is to become the number one PSA vendor worldwide by leveraging its innovative, intuitive and cutting-edge solution along with its award-winning services.

Going Beyond Traditional PSA Solutions CrossConcepts Continuum provides service organizations with an all-in-one, modern professional services SaaS solution that is easy to implement, simple to use and can be customized in order to scale with a customer’s needs today and in the future. CrossConcept Continuum goes beyond traditional PSA solutions available today mainly by incorporating cutting-edge UI technology, which makes the solution more user-friendly, resulting in fewer clicks within the solution and time spent logging data. CrossConcept claims an innovation in their time-scheduling module which offers the end-user functionality that has never been seen before in PSA. Additionally, CrossConcept Continuum has been built from the ground up to easily integrate with accounting systems and seamlessly synchronize projects and accounting within one unified system. Their innovative PSA solution allows organizations to maximize profitability by seamlessly connecting projects and financial accounting, enabling users to manage all stages of their project from conception to completion and deliver on their promises. CrossConcept Continuum is a simple, yet powerful PSA solution built with the end-user in mind. Fast, flexible, powerful and user friendly! The Immensely Experienced Leaders With more than 25 years of experience in the IT sector, Walter Perdigao, the Co-founder and VP of Services heads up the services side of the organization. He’s passionate about information technology and is a proud gadget geek- & owns just about every type of personal technology that one can think of. He’s equally passionate about getting the right tools in the hands of businesses of all sizes to help them succeed. Tony Abou-Akl is the other Co-founder and the VP of Development and Support. He commenced his career

|November 2018|

Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

CrossConcept Continuum is the world’s most innovative, intuitive and ﬂexible PSA solution available on the market today. Tony Abou- Akl Co-founder & VP of Development & Support

Walter Perdigao

Co-founder & VP of Services

mmediately after graduating and since then has thrived in the Computer Science field. As a key developer for one of Canada’s premier PSA solutions, Tony’s entrepreneurial spirit inspired him. He wanted more - he wanted a company that was first class, prided itself on support of both customers and employees alike. In 2010 CrossConcept Inc, was founded and quickly exceeded their goals as a premier third-party service provider. As years went by, Tony once again believed they could do better. Along with his partner he spent years listening to customers which resulted in the development of their very own world class PSA solution; and voila! CrossConcept Continuum was born. Tackling Challenges with a Comprehensive Solution CrossConcept believes businesses are often forced to implement a PSA solution that is too complex for their needs or even worse - give up features they need by rolling out a low-end solution due to cost restrictions. CrossConcept Continuum fits perfectly in the middle, providing rich functionality for SME businesses at a competitive price point with the ability to scale as your business grows. Simplicity is the key game changer in PSA and CrossConcept Continuum offers just that. Lastly, the CrossConcept team have decades of combined experience working on small, medium and large PSA

|November 2018|

implementations since the late 90’s. The founders and team’s real-world experience is what drove and shaped the creation of CrossConcept Continuum. A Satisﬁed Clientele “CrossConcept Continuum PSA makes it easier for me to do my job as CEO. I don’t think of it as just a PSA system, but rather as a business solution that enables me to manage my entire business on a daily basis. We’ve seen a monthly calculated saving of 18.5% on time usually spent using legacy systems, spreadsheets, and outdated methods”- Brian Pavlidis, President, Net2Net IT Solutions. “CrossConcept’s PSA resources provided Hitachi Data Systems with business consultation to help us quickly achieve our objectives. Their deep knowledge of PSA and open and collaborative approach were vital to helping our professional services organization develop complex logic and supporting reports to increase productivity and run our business more eﬃciently.” - Michiko Nielsen, Operations Manager Global Solution Services, Hitachi Data Systems

Delivering Exemplary Haulage Solutions

s a revolutionary collaborative B2B platform for the Container Haulage industry, Haulio aims to be the simplest & most reliable way for businesses to take care of their transportation and haulage needs on land. The Haulio Community portal aims to maximize haulage resources through industry-level sharing to improve job productivity and asset utilization; at the same time, value-add to end customers with improved real-time visibility and reporting. Game Changing Technology

Sebastian Shen Co-founder & CPO

Haulio’s platform works by intelligently matching targeted jobs to haulage companies “hauliers” and their prime movers, using advanced algorithms and IoT technology that optimizes jobs’ specifications to locations, prime movers’ sizes and availability. With its technology, Haulio hopes to rewrite the rules of container haulage to ensure that every stakeholder stands to gain – the hauliers, drivers, forwarders, cargo owners and port operators. A Profound Leader Sebastian Shen is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Haulio. He is responsible for the users’ happiness and the product roadmap, ensuring that Haulio delivers tremendous value for hauliers towards Haulio’s end vision. Sebastian, along with his team ensures that every ounce of their efforts spent

|November 2018|

Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

on building the product is made to bring the entire ecosystem closer to industry 4.0. This starts with ensuring that digitalization of information is achieved with every single haulier on the platform, allowing the company to truly deploy its suite of intelligent systems across the industry. Prior to Haulio, Sebastian was a Business and Tech consultant at 2359 Media, one of the leading technology studios in Singapore and the South-East Asian region – helping his clients marry the latest in mobile and web technologies to their real business challenges. His notable projects involved chatbots with the Singapore Airlines, contactless technologies with the Singapore Tourism Board and delivery management solutions with ST Logistics. Sebastian graduated from the National University of Singapore. Currently, he is pursuing a master’s Degree in Supply Chain Management at the National University of Singapore, which he has put on hold due to his full-time involvement with Haulio. The ON-Demand Concept Haulio was first launched in May 2017 as a gateway to PSA’s Inter-Terminal Haulage through an “on-demand” concept via its platform. It was a tripartite agreement between PSA, Haulio and the Haulier companies executing the jobs. Initially, it had to go around knocking doors to convince the hauliers that these “on-demand” jobs can now offer a new flexibility for their drivers to generate revenue even during lull periods, night shifts and weekends/public holidays. This gradual mindset shift helps the companies realize that “something is better than nothing”. They have since successfully hauled over 70,000 TEUs till date. Shifting the Mindset

“To be Southeast Asia’s Leading Digital Haulage Platform – Powered by Technology, Empowered by People.”

is seeing increasing receptiveness as it continuously proves itself with its technology and actions. Industry-wide Facilitator Haulage is a significant, yet often overlooked segment in the automated and connected world of industry 4.0. With the advancements of energy lines, the requirements and demands of just-in-time delivery of containers will only rise. At the same time, the new digital era also means the increasing need for machine-to-machine, systems-tosystems communication to ensure that digital and physical flow of goods are well collaborated. These are demands that traditional service providers will face tremendous difficulty keeping pace with. Haulio comes in as an industry-wide facilitator, to usher every haulier into this future of clock-worked automated future through its collaborative platform.

Apart from the technological challenges in its platform, the biggest obstacle for Haulio and its business is that it takes a lot of eﬀort to convince industry stakeholders of its mission. Thus, conversion cycles can take a long time, and the implementation of technology to traditional business workﬂows take a long time too.

Emblem of Satisfaction

Changing the mind-set of business owners to trust and accept the concept of a sharing economy in the haulage space is another challenge for Haulio. The supply chain ecosystem is made up of various stakeholders and departments that have diﬀering KPIs. It thus takes time for the industry to align and adapt, before it can fully move towards a digital platform for the booking and execution of their daily Container Haulage requirements. Indeed, Haulio

“Haulio is a fantastic alternative revenue on days that we have insuﬃcient jobs and they are able to ﬁll up our load seamlessly through their simple and interactive platform.” – UBTS Pte Ltd

|November 2018|

“With Haulio today, we are able to attempt to (achieve eﬃciency) by getting jobs from the platform whenever we have a dip in volume to manage for the day.” – LSHK Trading & Transport Co.

“In Haulio, we can optimize our operations better by responding to the jobs posted at our lull periods.” – Union Transport Co Pte Ltd

Blockchain: The Next Opportunity for Better, Safer, Smarter Cities About the Author: Gianni Minetti Passionate and eclectic technology expert, Gianni Minetti is the President and CEO, Paradox Engineering SA has about 25 years of business experience in information and telecommunication systems, with peculiar interests in Internet of Things, smart technologies, blockchain and cryptography. In 2005 he founded Paradox Engineering as the vehicle for bringing his unique technology vision to the market through pioneer IoT platforms for Smart Cities and Smart Factories. He is currently President and CEO of the Company, which has been part of MinebeaMitsumi Group since July 2015. Gianni is also chair of the Southern Alps Chapter of the Crypto Valley Association, active investor and advisor to several blockchain venture projects. He is based in Ticino, Switzerland.

oday, about 55% of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population lives in urban areas, but this share is expected to increase to 68% by 2050. Combined with the overall growth of global population, this could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050, with close to 90% of this increase taking place in Asia and Africa, as reported by the United Nationsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects. Since the world continues to urbanize, a wiser and far-sighted management of urban resources is more and more needed, especially in low-income and lower-middleincome countries where the pace of urbanization is projected to be the fastest. Smart technologies and smart

|November 2018|

Leadership Viewpoint

urban platforms can support City managers in tackling the increasing demand for energy, infrastructures, aﬀordable housing, well-connected mobility systems, healthcare and education, as well as quality of life and jobs.

consumption, optimize costs and simplify processes for City operators and managers. Even more, it provides actionable information to feed strategic decisions about services eﬃciency and improvements, and take evidence-based actions where and when needed.

To understand how smart technologies work, we should picture Cities as distributed communication systems, where urban objects – think of streetlights, meters, parking lots, waste bins, Wi-Fi hotspots, video surveillance cameras, etc. – are not dumb, isolated devices, but smart nodes of a citywide network. With the Internet of Things (IoT), all these objects are injected with intelligence and acquire the capability to receive and transmit data and execute commands, thus enabling remote monitoring and dynamic, adaptive control functions.

Let’s apply what we’ve just described to a basic service such as street lighting. By connecting street lamps to a wireless IoT network, it becomes possible to turn them on/off and adjust brightness according to daily solar times and ambient light levels, defining variable patterns for working and festive days, residential and industrial districts. Sensors can be integrated to bring lights up when human or vehicle presence is detected, and on demand actions can be triggered in real time for single or grouped lamps – for instance when a car accident or an emergency requires intense lighting in a specific area.

Acquiring and correlating data from urban assets is a signiﬁcant step forward to improve quality of public services and citizen satisfaction, reduce energy

It is proven that implementing LED lighting and an IoT remote management and control platform can cut energy consumption and greenhouse emissions up to 70%.

|November 2018|

Moreover, connected lamps can monitor key operating parameters and automatically report failures, generating extra savings on maintenance costs. Considering LED technologies last about 50% longer than traditional light sources, the US Federal Department of Energy estimated that if the entire country converted to LED lighting over the next 20 years, it would save a total of USD 120 billion. Even more interesting developments are possible with blockchain technology, which can make Smart Cities far more secure, transparent, eﬃcient and resilient. As an original combination of mature technological concepts, including peer-to-peer networks, distributed consensus algorithms, validity rules, ledger technologies and cryptography, blockchain can be successfully applied in any domain where stakeholders’ relations are based on

trust and may be entirely disintermediated. This is particularly true in Cities, as they rely on accurate, secure, authentic and trustworthy information exchanges to deliver services to people and businesses. About energy distribution, for instance, blockchain-based metering solutions can accelerate the adoption of real-time diﬀerential pricing models and encourage users to participate to power generation by connecting their renewable energy microgrids to the main grid. In water networks, blockchain technologies enable smart contracts and validated rules to automate water supply in the most possible eﬃcient manner, minimizing leakages and tampering. Blockchain technology can be combined with IoT solutions to provide better waste collection services: it allows to accurately track

waste input and optimize waste truck routes upon parameters like bin status, filling levels, etc. This increases service quality and efficiency, and generates further savings on fuel expenses and overall maintenance costs. Garbage-related data could also support the introduction of customized fees for household and commercial users, thus rewarding recycling and correct waste separation. Coming to public government and administration, blockchain can be used to automate and digitalize civil registries, as well as property, real estate and business registries, generating notable cost savings and increasing quality of service. Considering citizen participation, blockchain-based voting platforms can improve present, analogue electoral systems by achieving secure, anonymous and unique voting in a decentralized manner. Same platforms can be used to poll citizens on specific urban initiatives, making sure contributions from civil society are recognized in Smart City planning and development. Blockchain technology is still in its early days, but most experts agree it has a potential for disruption. And some pioneer experiences – from Dubai to Tokyo, from New York to Tallinn – demonstrate that benefits for Smart Cities can really be worthwhile.

|November 2018|

Kimble Kimb le Applications Revolutionizing PSA Solutions in the Cloud

rofessional Services Automation (PSA) is a software solution for professional services which uses technology to improve business performance. Kimble, which is native to the Salesforce platform, is linked with CRM. This supports better matching of resources with demand, better project delivery, and more accurate forecasting. It is designed to enable a more forward-looking approach to running a services business. It also integrates smoothly with other apps such as various accounting packages. Kimble Applications, a cloud-based software-as-a-service company, provides a professional services automation (PSA) solution known as Kimble PSA for Force.com, a cloud computing platform from Salesforce.com. Kimble was founded in 2010 in London, UK, by Sean Hoban, Mark Robinson, and David Scott, each with entrepreneurship backgrounds in IT consulting and enterprise software companies. Since then, it has become an international business with oﬃces in London and in North America - Boston, Park City, Chicago, and Atlanta. The ﬁrm dedicatedly provides ongoing PSA support to services businesses all over the world. Kimble PSA is designed to drive business consistency and growth, with a unique combination of resourcing intelligence, delivery management, and business foresight. The organization also integrates its functionality with other complementary apps.

Mark Robinson Chief Marketing Oﬃcer KimbleApplications

Kimble digitizes best practice for service organizations, allowing eﬃcient access to talent networks and optimizing value creation. The ﬁrm helps professional services businesses by improving business performance, increasing visibility, and providing enhanced company collaboration. |November 2018|

Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

Kimble is dedicated to the production of unique management solutions delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Leading-edge with Automation Solutions Powered by real-time data, Kimble’s augmented intelligence and analytics deliver the information required to improve how a business is run and the forward-looking insight that helps plan for the future. In supporting a diverse set of requirements from both services and product companies, Kimble deploys experience and innovation from a broad range of industries to support the most functionally rich solution in Professional Services Automation. The app offers category-leading capabilities and ease of use in revenue forecasting and recognition, resource planning, project management, budget and margin control, mobile time and expenses, period management, and billing. These are the unified services offered by Kimble: • Implementation Services: Kimble is architected to be configured through settings and data rather than relying on the use of a coding language. Its implementation team will support its customers through the adoption of Kimble, using a series of business-led activities from which the configuration and deployment are driven. • Training Services: Kimble’s training team provides team training for the project during on-boarding that ensures that organizations’ staff develop a strong understanding of the capabilities of Kimble rapidly. • Professional Services: Kimble is a highly scalable and configurable application which can evolve with its customers changing business. Its aim is to empower its customer to manage these activities by themselves, with the availability of its additional support. • Support Services: Kimble’s dedicated product support combines the expertise of highly trained professionals with an extensive knowledge base. Sovereignty with Expertise

‘‘

Taking Professional Automation solutions to the next level.

Consultancy Company, Fulcrum Solutions, in 1997 with no external investment, and in just under 3 years it had reached 200 staﬀ with oﬃces in Edinburgh, Manchester, London, and New York. Stepping Ahead through Challenges The Kimble team is proud of creating a PSA which delivers real value for its customers – Kimble PSA scores highest for customer satisfaction and speed-to-value among the leading PSA solutions on crowd review site G2 Crowd.

“I am proud that for a good group of us, this is the 4th company we have worked in together, and at Kimble, we have an amazing team of people that operate without ego, and genuinely work together for the greater good,” Robinson said. Adopting PSA generally involves working in new ways to take advantage of the potential the technology creates to make better decisions more quickly. Managing change often presents a challenge. Kimble is expanding its customer success organization and works in partnership with customers, continuing to embed Augmented Intelligence and to take advantage of all the capabilities of the Salesforce platform to deliver proven customer beneﬁt.

Mark Robinson is the Chief Marketing Oﬃcer at Kimble Communications. He has over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry and as a serial entrepreneur. Mark started his career in management consulting before working for Oracle Corporation. Since co-founding Kimble, he has been focused on helping service organizations to improve business performance, regularly contributing to events such as TSW and Dreamforce. Mark started his ﬁrst IT

|November 2018|

TShift that

broke the pendulum

Murray Oles President CHALEX Corp

About the Author Murray Oles is the President of CHALEX Corp. The company is specialized in Workow Management for Marketing Communications Projects through the use of SmartFlo and integrated third party tools.

orporations are shifting their marketing services in-house and re-deﬁning relationships with their suppliers. This is a strategic shift brought about by a conﬂuence of technical, social and political change on a global scale. At the core of this movement is the corporation’s need to control global brand messaging quickly in an increasingly regulated world. Is this a temporary shift or is there more to it, and how far might it go?

|November 2018|

Virtuoso’s Vision

The rise of mobile computing combined with an explosion in SaaS software development has led to more intuitive purpose-built applications with built in learning tools. The net eﬀect is that corporations can do much more with less. Hence, the rapidly accelerating move to take internal control of the corporate global supply chain. More speciﬁcally, control of process, digital assets, resources, and the brand message. Evidence of the shift can be seen in global corporations like P&G who in recent years consolidated their packaging prepress supply chain from hundreds of companies to only three. The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) committee for in-house agencies includes members from hundreds of the Fortune 1000. A Google search reveals many recent articles detailing the rise of in-house ad agencies.

that can be analyzed as a service in real-time. The ability to analyze any combination of process and behavioral data yields valuable predictive insights. Standards such as BPMN notation and the XPDL file format have allowed developers to simplify the user experience for defining, managing, and sharing process maps across BPM platforms. A virtual task can automatically serve up the tools the user will need. SaaS tools have one thing in common. They can be called through a RESTful API without the need for a software developer. The workflow can be configured to invoke access to tools based on the nature of the task. For healthcare workflows a digital radiology file format (DICOM Web) enables secure cross-platform viewing and collaboration over a patient’s scanned images and medical history.

The drivers of this shift are affordable and effective new technology and the need for speed to market. The value of a middleman controlling portions of the marcom workflow has diminished. This does not mean that everything is being produced in-house, just internally controlled and managed by in-house staff who are defining new best practices for their agile enterprise. Many companies go back and forth between insourcing and outsourcing, but this time it is different. Companies are focused on process, and it is not just marketing, legal and business analytics, recruiting, employee services and even providing in-house healthcare.

Business agile companies adjust to market conditions faster by adopting a culture of managed change. It is no longer acceptable to be so disconnected from your projects that you can’t even access your own brand packaging and promotion ﬁles. The same is true for legal, regulatory and compliance work. The agile company controls all of these processes. Their DAM enabled BPM system interacts with a SaaS reporting service like EZBI that concatenates and reports on data across distributed systems. Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma programs are used to conﬁgure these systems to monitor compliance to regulated processes.

With change comes opportunity. Demand for business process management tools is growing rapidly. Many new companies are developing SaaS products to further enable the agile business. Online workﬂow modeling and business process management tools are becoming main stream. File sharing and digital asset management services are widely accepted. Integrating these services to meet the requirements of a project has never been easier now that RESTful APIs have become widely available. Artiﬁcial intelligence applied to big data analytics will provide the agile business with insights previously inconceivable. Best of all, the enterprise can securely access most SaaS services without making any upfront investments or long term commitments.

These changes are far more profound than may appear on the surface. The gig economy is fueling a virtual cottage industry that circles the globe. Project managers are increasingly in demand. This is not just an IT thing, every business runs on projects. The certiﬁed project management professional PMP is a new college certiﬁcation. Rachel Burger in a Capterra article explained The 5 Biggest Project Management Trends Shaping 2018. In brief, “business agile” is the new way of doing business. A visit to the Fiverr.com web site will show how one SaaS service is bringing buyers and sellers of creative services together. This in-house trend is not just another swing of the pendulum.

At the core of the agile business is an integrated business process management platform. This is the tool that enables distributed process control. In-house is only practical when the technology enables the staﬀ to do an order of magnitude more with less. BPM systems capture huge amounts of data

|November 2018|

“

he secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world” - Steve Jobs

The said quote itself explains the power of recruiting ‘right’ candidate. A right candidate has the potential to transform an organization fortune to a new level. A right candidate brings quality and effectiveness that builds a brand and develops a unique customer experience, while a ‘wrong’ candidate can lead to a lot of extra stress and issues that can hinder the development of a business. But at the core, hiring right talent is important, and this is where HR personnel struggle the most. With the advent of an emerging technique known as “People Analytics”, hiring right candidate will get easy than ever before. Necessity of People Analytics Competition for onboarding top talent is getting fierce, especially in industries, like IT, financial service firms, healthcare sector, and manufacturing, that are going to witness a massive transformation. Ever growing numbers of job seekers, shaken economy and neck-to-neck ruthless competition are making HR’s job even more challenging to find right talent for the right job. One technique that is seen as a solution for the said problem is “People Analytics”. It is an emerging field that is pulling everyone’s attention due to its potential to assist HR people in recruiting the right talent.

|November 2018|

Tech Trend

Understanding People Analytics People analytics or HR analytics is the application of statistics, mathematics, and modeling which collects and process worker-related data to see and predict patterns. This technique assist organizations to predict whether a particular person fit for a given job or not. Due to its ability to boost hiring and retaining the right talent, some people have gone so far that they have even started calling it as a “crystal ball for HR”. How ‘People Analytics’ can help HR fraternity • Identifying the features or variables in jobs and employees that matter/counts most • Matching those important job variables with a pool of applicants or recruits • Predicting the likelihood of a worker to stay on the job for a long time or to “churn” • And recommending salaries and other compensation to bolster longevity Importance of Peoples Analytics There are lots of important questions that arise into the mind of management peoples like: How can we find more top performers? What do our most successful leaders do to excel at their work, and how can we replicate that across the organization? Which people are most likely to stay for long? Which employees are likely to leave? With the right analytical tool in hand, one can get the right and accurate answers to these vital questions which plays a pivotal role in shaping company’s fortune and can assist an organization to maintain a robust workforce. Popular HR Analytics Tools Power BI Power BI link multiple sources like SQL database with people’s data, live twitter feed, machine learning API’s and more. All these different data sources are then combined with an aggregation process to create one large database.

|November 2018|

The consolidated data then can be used to create pivot table to let end user get a quick insight in the key areas of the workforce. And, all these meaningful insights then the end user can see in a user-friendly manner with Power BI’s dash boarding capacity. SPSS Dealing with analytics requires some sort of technical capability to make the most of it. But what if the end user is not a technical person but still want the same results which can be derived from the above tool. Answer to this said concern is ‘SPSS’ tool. Without having extensive statistical knowledge, an end user can do an exploratory correlation analysis or a quick regression analysis. This makes SPSS one of the most commonly used HR analytics tools in social sciences. Rstudio It is a people analytical tool which is best suited to process huge data sets. It provides valuable insights that can help an organization to maintain robust workforce. It’s potential to let end user visualize and statistically analyze candidate data with the help of user friendly interface is the prime reason behind its popularity. Interesting Research Finding Many recent studies even proved the effectiveness and productivity of People Analytics techniques. Recently, Deloitte’s Bersin found that organizations that use people analytics techniques at a sophisticated level reported 82 percent higher three-year average profits than corporations without properly-deployed people analytics methods. Over the world more number of schools, colleges, and universities are opening up than ever before. There is an increased awareness for education as well. More people want to get access to quality education to raise their living standards. All these are resulting into increased number of job seekers. With business competition going intense with each passing year, recruiting right talent has become the need of hour for HR personnel. The potential benefit of People Analytics will then definitely assist HR fraternity in recruiting and maintaining a robust workforce if applied meticulously.

|November 2018|

The Pioneers of Appointment Scheduling Services

Ingvar Gudmundsson Founder

n an interview with Insights Success, Ingvar Gudmundsson, Founder of SimplyBook.me, shares his experience and gives resourceful insights. In addition to this he has also emphasized on SimplyBook.me, its products, and motto of the organization along with the future goals in revolutionizing the industry. Below are the highlights of the interview conducted between Ingvar and Insights Success: Give a brief overview of the company, its uniqueness, and its vision. SimplyBook.me was launched as a product in 2011 after having been operated under the name DoReserve.com for couple of years. Fortunately, we realized soon enough that the old name and signup process was hindering the growth of the company. After the name change technical bloggers started mentioning SimplyBook.me. Google started ranking it higher, and visitor number increased rapidly along with signups. Today, SimplyBook.me signs up over 5,000 new companies from around the world every month and fortune 500 companies have adopted our enterprise booking solution. Our goal now is to increase our reach further by entering individual markets and countries with local based teams. This will be done directly by ourselves and in joint ventures with local partners. What are the cutting-edge automation solutions/services oďŹ&#x20AC;ered by SimplyBook.me? SimplyBook.me already oďŹ&#x20AC;ers users to accept bookings through chat bots and even through the use of voice bots, where the whole booking takes place through conversation. We believe that this is the future; people will talk to their devices and ask to book an appointment, which will then be done automatically through voice bots.

|November 2018|

Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

Give a detailed description of your influence over the SimplyBook.me and the automation (professional services) industry? Currently, I am holding the position as VP of sales where I mainly focus on sales of SimplyBook.me solution to enterprises which use the system for various kinds of appointment bookings within their firms and towards their clients. SimplyBook.me’s customers can be split into two groups, enterprise clients and smaller services businesses. The enterprise clients can be worldwide service companies, IT companies, banks etc. and the smaller service businesses range from beauty salons, medical professionals, fitness centers, schools and basically all other service industries where appointment booking is needed. Describe the experiences, achievements or lessons learnt that have shaped the journey of the company. Notando, an Iceland firm which is the owner of SimplyBook.me, was established in 2001 to create online financial accounting software. The company was doing fine until the financial crash hit Iceland hard and around 50% of the clients of the old accounting solution got wiped out and the company had to act fast. SimplyBook.me was created soon after the collapse of the financial industry of Iceland. A large portion of the staff was let go and the rest concentrated on this new appointment scheduling solution. This was in 2008 and for many years it was growing very slowly until the strategic decisions of changing the name (from DoReserve.com to SimplyBook.me) and simplification of the registration process were taken. For many years me and Mike, the CTO, took care of all customer support, which was good because then we could act quick on issues and good requests but as we were very few our efforts were spread thin. Fortunately we hung in there and after the name change it only took about 2 years to come into profit which allowed us to start to hire support people. Our support people have proven to be of incredibly high importance as they are the first line of contact with clients. Building our high quality support team and providing our clients with LiveChat was without a doubt one of the best decisions we have taken. What are the challenges faced while providing automation solutions and how is SimplyBook.me serving to tackle them? Automation is very important in many aspects of the SimplyBook.me solution. The solution allows providers to accept appointments and fills their diaries automatically; it then reminds both the clients and providers of upcoming appointments automatically. If a client has not showed up for a service over an abnormally long period the system can remind him to book again automatically. As was already mention the system can even answer the phone for the user |November 2018|

“SimplyBook.me helps service based companies to work effectively with a solution that makes them stand out as professionals.” and accept bookings there directly and fill the calendar automatically. All of these things save time for everyone, increase the service level, and best of all’ it increases the revenues of the system users as they get more bookings from old clients, they get more clients because they are available to accept bookings 24/7 and this in turns means more revenues and profits. What according to you could be the potential future of services automation and how does SimplyBook.me envision sustaining its competency? SimplyBook.me will continue to work hard on enabling our users to be more competitive and use automation to its fullest. It will increase and it will continue to take over many jobs all over the world. I am though confident that the industry we serve will stay resilient for many years to come as it needs the human factor. A good example of this is that there is no massage chair that replaces a human massage; there is no robot able to cut the hair of people with the details that clients expect. However we will need to continue to invent so that our users can get the most out of automation technology. We saw earlier this year when the Google voice assistance bot that was making calls to real people, and people could not distinct the difference and thought they were speaking with a human. I presume that within months the Google voice assistance will be calling-out for people to make appointments for them. Our system is already ready to accept such calls and decide with the Google voice bot what booking time will suit the client. We will continue to develop hard to make our users ready for all such new developments. Testimonials from SimplyBook.me Clients “We were set up and live on our website with the booking tool in less than 10 minutes from purchasing” “SimplyBook.me made it super easy for our patients to book appointments and it is even easier for us to manage our bookings in an efficient manner.”

About the Author Mr. Jay Klein drives Voyager Lab’s technology strategy and core intellectual property. He brings more than 25 years of experience in data analytics, networking and telecommunications to the Company. Before joining Voyager Labs, he served as CTO at Allot Communications where he steered Allot’s data inspection and analytics core technology offerings, and as VP Strategic Business Development at DSPG, where he was responsible for strategic technology acquisitions. He also co-founded and held the CTO position at Ensemble Communications while founding and creating WiMAX and IEEE 802.16. He also served as the CTO and VP of R&D at CTP Systems, acquired rst by DSP Communications and later by Intel. Jay Klein holds a BSc in Electronics & Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University as well as numerous patents in various technology elds.

AI: Artificial From

ith so much attention focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI), it’s worth remembering that one size does not fit all. There are specific business-related pain points in mind when a company decides to deploy AI technology, so making the right choices can be a tricky task. For example, several months ago, an AI related breakthrough was announced – a robot learned and demonstrated the ability to perform a perfect backflip. While it is well acknowledged that the invested research and development for this mission was huge and the commercial potential for some applications is enormous, it is somewhat unclear how this specific innovation or the core models and algorithms of it, can serve other industries and verticals. Herein lies the problem.

to Authentic

Gauging AI success in one field in many cases can be meaningless for another. To make things worse, even when trying to go deeper into the technology and attempting to evaluate, for example, which Machine Learning algorithms are utilized by the product, or what are the number of layers in the Deep Neural Network models mentioned by specific vendors, in the end it will be possibly pointless as it does not directly reflect the solution deployment ‘success’ implications. Nevertheless, it seems that the market ignores this reality and continues to evaluate AI-based products by buzzword checklists using familiar and related AI terminology (e.g.,

|November 2018|

Maestros Insights Supervised, Unsupervised, Deep Learning etc.). While checklists are an effective tool for comparative analysis it still requires the ‘right’ items to be included. Unfortunately, what typically is absent are the items which are important to the customer, from a problem-solution perspective. Introducing Authentic AI Given all of this, there is a need to change the narrative around AI technology and solutions to something meaningful and authentic that reflects the real-life challenges and opportunities that businesses are facing. This is the time to introduce Authentic AI. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines ‘Authentic’ as both ‘worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact’ and ‘conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features’. This is not about ‘Fake’ to be contrasted with ‘Real’. It’s about the essential features of AI which need to be acknowledged, and hence, redefine the ‘checklist’. Often, these essential ‘authentic’ features are hidden and only surface when a CIO/CDO is faced with a new problem to be solved. This is seen especially when the AI aspects of a proposed product or solution are fully explored by asking questions such as: - Is the AI technology utilized by the product aimed specifically for my problem, optimally (e.g., performance, cost, etc.)? - Is it capable of addressing the complete problem or only a part of it? - Can it be assimilated into the existing ecosystem without imposing new demands? - Can it address the compelling environmental conditions of the problem space?

These issues can be grouped into three diﬀerent ‘classes’ ‘Original’, ‘Holistic’ and ‘Pragmatic’: Original – How innovative is the solution? This can be quantiﬁed by assessing the following: - the invention of new algorithms or even new models and - the use of complex orchestration techniques or - through the capability to handle complex data formats and structures.

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While there is no need to re-invent the wheel repetitively for any problem, there are distinctive characteristics which require optimizing. Holistic – How complete is the proposed AI technology? It takes into account the capability of handling the end-to-end aspects of the solution, the competence of harmonizing the operation of the various AI components of the solution and the ability to adapt to ever changing conditions of the AI application. Pragmatic – Can the technology solve real world problems in their actual and natural space in a commercially viable way? This means that for example the data sources can be processed in their most native format (both unstructured or structured) as well as provide insights or results matching the pragmatic needs of the specific market expectations. In addition, the ability to be quickly deployed and rapid to act are assessed. All of these elements should be used to systematically assess and evaluate AI-based products and solutions to assess their authenticity and therefore effectiveness in specific use cases. For example, many home-loan mortgage evaluation and recommendation systems utilize a somewhat isolated machine learning based applicant classification method, one of many other processes included within the solution. The AI in this solution cannot be considered Authentic AI to a high degree as it ‘scores’ low on the ‘Original’ and ‘Holistic’ classes as it isn’t innovative ‘enough’ (from an AI sense). In addition, the AI component itself does not cover on its own the end-to-end aspects of the solution (hence affecting the overall performance and precision). It could be considered to be ‘Pragmatic’ to some level if it can handle the required data sources of financial institutions or the customer applications natively, and if the solution ‘output’ are the explicit results required as a specific recommendation (e.g., loan conditions). However, the deployment timeline (time-to-market) and commercial aspects need to be evaluated as well. This is just one example of many others, covering all kinds of variations. Perfect backflips may grant you a gold medal if you are a gymnast but if you are a master chess player don’t expect a winning move.

TOP Step Consu ing: Striding towards Professional Services Automation Excellence

stablishing and expanding a business is as much about streamlining operations as it is about growing revenue. Large corporations rely on professional services automation (PSA) to maximize the impact of their investments in people and in systems. OpenAir has proven to be one of the most powerful platforms at their disposal. 11 years ago, a newly-founded company became the ﬁrst dedicated partner supporting the OpenAir community. Today, it remains the world’s only dedicated OpenAir consulting ﬁrm. That company is TOP Step Consulting.

The duo provided consulting services to OpenAir customers based on a shared knowledge of, and familiarity with, its intricacies. Their passion for the problems that OpenAir could solve for professional services organizations and dedication to their clients garnered an immensely positive response, which meant that they had to expand very rapidly. Ronn and Jodi have made their own way, eschewing the traditional C-suite mentality and the tendencies to distance themselves from the hands-on work. They have always been intimately involved with every aspect of running the ﬁrm. Having started with sales, customer support, and recruitment, Ronn now focuses his considerable talents and experience on administration, operations, and customer relations. He performs these roles in addition to his inherent responsibilities as CEO. Jodi’s attention has shifted to customer interactions and to ensuring that Ronn has the information and support he

Ronn Breaux

Jodi Cicci

President & CEO

Founder & Executive Advisor

“

We follow a simple and straightforward approach to ensure we deliver a superior solution.

“

A Solid Foundation The ﬁrm’s ﬁrst employee, Ronn Breaux is today its President and CEO. Ronn and TOP Step’s Founder and Executive Advisor, Jodi Cicci, started the company when OpenAir was a stand-alone tool in 2007.

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Best Professional

Solution providers 2018

needs to be successful in his role as President and CEO. Just as their roles and responsibilities have evolved over the past decade, the company’s portfolio of services has too. Initially, they concentrated on resolving issues that customers had with existing OpenAir implementations. Today, they have a complete lifecycle of services including on-going support and Release Management. The People Factor TOP Step has deliberately adopted a hiring policy that is unique within their industry. Firstly, the company does not hire fresh graduates and industry novices to work with their customers. Instead, a conscious decision has been made to hire only highly-experienced professionals with proven track records of superior performance within professional service industry. This approach does increase human resource costs, but Ronn views the additional cost as an investment in quality, and in the company. He believes that the policy has been instrumental to the success it enjoys today. “Our people are our most important asset, and all of our hires have come from other companies where they have performed the roles that our customers perform today,” explains Ronn. “We can tell our customers, “I’ve done your job. I understand the problems you are experiencing and we can help you with best practices that we have implemented and used ourselves.” That is an incredibly powerful asset to have,” he says. Another key diﬀerence is that the TOP Step team does not work from a single oﬃce but remotely from locations across the United States. This independence from the traditional bounds of a single workplace |November 2018|

contributes to increased productivity, which translates into better comprehensive results for their clients. “We emphasize frequent communication through meetings and online tools, so there is a strong sense of cohesion within the team, regardless of where an individual may be physically working.” Ronn acknowledges that their organizational structure does not oﬀer employees many promotion opportunities. However, he is heartened by the fact that their turnover rate is extremely low, something that he attributes to the meaningful work that they perform and the rewarding outcomes they provide their customers. Making a Mark There is no doubt that TOP Step is committed to helping OpenAir gain and grow its market share. The company is an advocator for the platform providing education and assistance through tips and ebooks oﬀered on their website and through free webinars. Held twice a month, these events usually last approximately 30 minutes with an average attendance of 50 people. These initiatives have established and reinforced the company’s reputation for excellence and as a thought leader in the segment. Along the way, it has also developed a close working relationship with Oracle and has extended its collaborations with Oracle NetSuite partners. Touching on the lessons that he has learned, Ronn says that the most important one is to listen to every customer and consciously recognize that each client is unique.

“We constantly try to remind ourselves that every customer does things their own way, that they have unique requirements, and that we have to make sure that we listen and deal with them in that manner.” Surging Ahead While the past 11 years have been remarkable for the lack of competition, Ronn sees indications that the status quo might change, “PSA is in vogue at the moment. Several companies are testing the waters in new areas.” In line with Ronn’s assessment that PSAs will see increased interest in the near future, he is positioning the firm to be at the center of these discussions. However, he does not see much cause for concern, adding, “We feel like we have a 10 year plus head start.” TOP Step expects to continue its dominant position in the coming years and is considering including license sales to its range of offerings for the first time in 2019. One thing that will not change is their loyalty to Oracle NetSuite and OpenAir. “We understand that there is a lot of competition in the market for different PSA tools, but we have chosen OpenAir as the path forward. The outcomes we have seen and the success of the over 350 customers we have worked with over the past decade reinforce our belief that this is the right decision.” This resolute commitment, strong philosophy, and an extremely clientcentric work ethic make TOP Step Consulting the ideal choice for any company looking for a reliable PSA partner.

“People have a tendency to assume that a new problem can or should be resolved through a solution used in the past. If you go into a situation with preconceived ideas of how the client should run their business, you can get yourself into trouble.”

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