Macadamian Cuts Invoicing Time by 60% with a Three-Prong Strategy Boosting Visibility and Adaptability

Macadamian designs and develops digital health and connected medical device software solutions to improve healthcare. It is a full-service software design and development consulting firm that provides a complete range of product strategy, user experience design and research, data, and software engineering services. Macadamian is a global company with over 1,000 customer projects ranging across complex industries such as MedTech, Pharmaceutical, Healthcare Provider, Telecommunications, Aviation Insurance, and Financial Services.

Macadamian’s Professional Services team contributes a major portion to the business’ total revenue, which comes from 2 main sources, new sales and active client projects.  These client projects are a combination of initial deployments, and ongoing consulting & design services.  Macadamian’s consistent delivery of successful client projects is due to a smooth transition of information & close partnership between Sales & PS Teams.

The PS team at Macadamian was using a combination of Google Spreadsheets, Microsoft Projects, SAP ByDesign, and Namely to manage their client projects, log their individual contributor’s timesheets, manage project approvals & invoicing, and time off requests. This combination of systems had limitations in the form of data reliability issues, inconsistent user adoption and incomplete visibility into crucial project financial data.

For the management of timesheets and time off requests, SAP ByDesign was an unreliable source of truth due to lost and incomplete records, which was negatively affecting the accuracy of resource availability / allocation, as well as other critical project data such as profitability, revenue, cost and overall status. These issues not only affected the way the PS Team conducted business, but it was also causing issues for the Human Resources team as they managed time off requests & vacation hours in Namely, which was not integrated to SAP ByDesign, and therefore required a manual reconciliation process to determine resource availability.

In terms of project invoicing, the existing process was complicated and time consuming, with manual steps in the sending & editing of invoices between the Project Control Officer (PCO) Team and the individual Project Managers.  Due to a lack of automation, this inefficient process was costing time for both teams, and was prone to human error.  This impacted other departments as well. Naturally, Macadamian’s Finance Department is heavily involved in the project invoicing, revenue recognition and forecasting processes.  So, any delays or inaccuracies in the financial management of projects affected them as well.

Lastly, the Project Managers were using Microsoft Projects to manage the delivery and day-day tasks associated with client projects.  This system was not being used to manage time sheets, nor was it integrated to Salesforce to monitor new project pipeline.  This siloed PM tool left visibility gaps for Macadamian at large, into critical business data such as project revenue, status, resourcing, and forecasting.  These gaps were filled by manually pulling reports and reconciling them with the other systems, but this was once again time consuming and prone to error.

Macadamian underwent a transformational initiative to achieve complete visibility into both revenue streams, they would accomplish this with a three-prong strategy.  First, they would consolidate systems wherever possible to manage timesheets, resource management and project management with a single PSA platform.  This would involve the evaluation & implementation of a new software and the retirement of legacy systems.  Second, they would simplify and automate previously complex and manual processes related to timesheets, project tasks, workflow approvals and resourcing controls.  Third, they would integrate their newly implemented PSA software with Salesforce, in order to properly report on both new sales entrees and client project forecasts, thereby capturing a real-time & complete picture of Macadamian’s revenue.

After conducting an extensive vendor evaluation, Macadamian selected AdaptiveWork as their PSA platform, specifically for its comprehensive out of the box project management functionality, easy & secure timesheet reporting, and high level of configurability for new workstreams if needed.

Macadamian’s foremost goal was to gain a full picture of their revenue, and they achieved this by combining Salesforce’s opportunity data with AdaptiveWork’s project financial data onto a mobile adaptive website which they called the “Revenue Outlook App”.  This site is used by the executive team daily to monitor 27 critical business reports such as revenue forecasts, actuals, project costs & margin, project funnel and more.  This list of reports continues to grow as more data points are brought forward.

“By tightly integrating our core sales & PSA platforms (Salesforce & AdaptiveWork), we have achieved greater visibility into business-critical data.  This heightened visibility has in turn improved our enterprise adaptability, our leadership can foresee risks sooner, and change plans or adjust resources accordingly.” Marie Chabot, Senior Project Manager

Meanwhile, individual contributors on the professional services team are using AdaptiveWork every day as well, to update timesheets and manage their projects.  PS leadership now enjoys a robust resource management system which can group PMs by multiple factors such as skill set, geography, and title. They also have a real-time view of resource availability based on current and forecasted workloads. PS leaders also have a portfolio level view which was previously unobtainable due to siloed systems and can use portfolio risk reports and can conduct “what if” analysis to make more informed business decisions.

The Finance team at Macadamian has also benefited from this business transformation.  By implementing a more secure platform to record billable time against projects and even specific tasks, and by simplifying/automating the timesheet and project invoicing process, Macadamian has reduced the invoicing cycle time by 60%, from 5 days to 2. The plethora and variety of reports provided by the Revenue Outlook App has also greatly improved the Finance departments capabilities.

Last but certainly not least, the Human Resources Department at Macadamian has also received a boon by using AdaptiveWork.  A workstream has been built within AdaptiveWork, allowing every employee to view their accrued vacation time, and place requests to use their vacation hours.  This is reconciled monthly by the HR team and has helped them better manage request approvals & tracking. A secondary benefit is that employees can also submit requests for work hours to be spent in betterment activities such as certifications, trainings, and conferences. “Learning” is a core corporate value at Macadamian, as such they require all employees to spend a specified amount of work hours each year on activities such as gaining certifications, attending conferences and training courses.  AdaptiveWork is being used to better manage those requests as well.

• Consolidated 4 systems into 1 source of truth for PSA
• Connected 5 teams more strongly (HR, Sales, PS, Finance, PCO)
• Reduced invoicing cycle by 60%, from 5 days – 2 days
• Build a comprehensive document library for all projects
• Built, managing & distributing 27 financial reports