Big Bang Gains Crucial Insights for Long-Term Success
THE BIG BANG SUCCESS STORY
Equipping Consultancies for the Future
Big Bang is a boutique consulting firm that helps businesses optimize and streamline their processes by implementing cloud solutions. Its highly skilled team of experts works hand-in-hand with organizations to achieve exceptional business improvements for every department so that companies can focus on what they do best— rather than on repetitive manual processes and activities that don’t add any value.
Big Bang’s team of consultants is dedicated to helping businesses achieve their goals with smart, effective, scalable, and cutting-edge cloud solutions that are delivered on time and within scope. Acting as trusted advisors, Big Bang contributes diverse experiences and in-depth expertise to the success of organizations around the world.
“Mavenlink gave us a vision that matches our overall system architecture and satisfies both our financial and our professional services departments. This new system of record helps us improve our project lifecycle by focusing on the important areas of resource management, project management, collaboration, project accounting, and business intelligence.”
— Nicolas Urena, Director of Business Innovation and Solutions, Big Bang
THE CHALLENGE
Accelerating Success
Big Bang relied on several different legacy systems for the past years, including Smartsheet and Trello for project management needs. However, as the company grew, the need for a more effective and far-reaching professional services automation (PSA) solution arose. The real challenge for Big Bang was to improve time allocation of varied skill sets with the ability to allocate resources in detail or for tasks in progress, combined with having the visibility in the forecast to better prepare for future task demands on its workforce.
“We didn’t have visibility into availability,” shared Nicolas Urena, Director of Business Innovation and Solutions at Big Bang. “As a result, we were managing projects with a flat rate for each resource on a single project and how we billed for professional services. It was difficult to determine gross margin and forecast availability and revenue for each project.”
Big Bang’s legacy systems were not entirely aligned with the company’s requirements to achieve business goals, with crucial hurdles that needed to be addressed including:
- Creating Clear and Accurate Resource Allocation. Big Bang needed to have more visibility on resource assignments and skill set management to increase the accuracy of internal operations, including managing capacity and projects. Achieving proper resource allocation to optimize Big Bang’s utilized time of team members and effectively apply each resource’s unique skills for a wide variety of tasks.
- Empowering Project Managers. The solution needed to help project managers improve business impact by overseeing resources, gaining visibility on customers, managing tasks and timelines, and planning capacity to easily track time. A successful implementation would support Big Bang’s goal of financially-driven project management for long-term growth through insights that were not previously collected with their legacy systems.
“Master Planning and Mavenlink’s M-Bridge integration with Netsuite has helped us ensure that all project-related financials are synced correctly and managed well.”
THE SWITCH TO MAVENLINK
Preparing for the Future with Better Insights
Big Bang needed to upgrade from legacy systems to a modern integrated system that could support their needs as a services business.
Mavenlink is a better fit for Big Bang’s processes and ongoing business demands than other solutions available in the market because of its integration capabilities. Big Bang selected Mavenlink as a key strategic move for the company. “The out-of-the-box features satisfied our resource allocation needs and provided us with the ability to have various reporting features,” said Urena.
Big Bang needed their solution to provide them with:
- Forecasting Visibility. The Big Bang team lacked the ability to predict and prepare for project needs and resource availability, a necessity for long-term project success.
- Detailed Resource Allocation. Understanding resource skills and availability on an individual level was a crucial component for Big Bang to improve utilization rates and more effective resource planning for specific tasks.
- Margin Insights. Big Bang needed better visibility on project profitability, including before and during execution, to make crucial adjustments that will positively affect margins.
- Project Risk Awareness. The ability to flag potential project risks, view completion rates at a task level, and view the time left for projects allows Big Bang to easily meet client expectations.
Mavenlink’s professional services automation strengths help the Big Bang team focus on collecting data concerning finances, projects, and people, which is critical to their business model.
“Mavenlink was easy to learn, easy to understand, easy to use, and we expect that our customers will be interested in this solution as well.”
“There has been onsite and ongoing training from Mavenlink,” said Urena. “There is also strong Zendesk support, so our team members can generally troubleshoot for themselves. We even had two Mavenlink migrators working with us over Christmas and New Year’s, which provided great help in getting our solution set up.”
“MavenOps helped us understand and implement key critical concepts regarding capacity, resource targets, availability, and target capacity tied to time off. The migration team was consistently available and helped us adopt Mavenlink in a short period of time.”
THE RESULTS
Equipping Big Bang for the Future
Easy-to-Use Project Communication
Mavenlink’s Gantt chart functionality provided the Big Bang team with the ability to quickly drag and drop tasks through an easy-to-use interface. Its live updating capabilities helped the team improve communication with customers for better coordination and improved satisfaction regarding project progress.
Detailed and Accurate Resource Planning
Through the use of Mavenlink’s Master Planning for resource allocation, it became significantly easier for Big Bang to effectively manage its workforce according to skill sets and keep everyone involved up to date with projects for an enhanced task coordination. The accuracy and visualization provided by Master Planning has supported Big Bang’s continued refinement of resource management.
Clarity in Capacity
Big Bang needed to have a greater understanding of workforce capacity for better utilization of its talented team members. Mavenlink provided clarity regarding team members’ time off and true visibility into individual availability and capabilities. As a result, Big Bang has greatly improved its ability to view the true capacity of resources, including tracking time off and part-time employee work.
Accurate Project Billing
Through Mavenlink, Big Bang was able to see individual resource utilization for each project and their respective rates. This resulted in stronger visibility on margins across the company along with the possibility of gathering detailed billing for each project that accurately defined charges according to the specific resources used.
*All quotes by Nicolas Urena, Director of Business Innovation and Solutions, Big Bang
