Built a scalable PSA foundation designed to support 2–3× growth in their consulting team.
Salesforce and Certinia
Key Improvements
Reduced administrative overhead for consultants and leaders, targeting ≤8 hours/week of admin time and saving ~2 hours/week in reporting and resource management.
Established baseline services KPIs—including 55% billable utilization, 20% productive non-billable utilization, and 12.25% engagement margin—enabling ongoing performance improvement.
The Challenge
This Global Enterprise Software company’s growing professional services organization relied on internally developed tools that lacked the capabilities needed to support a rapidly scaling consulting business. As demand for services increased, the team needed greater visibility into projects, resources, and financial performance while reducing manual administrative work.
Without a standardized professional services automation (PSA) platform, managing consultant capacity, tracking project performance, and maintaining consistent financial reporting became increasingly difficult. These operational limitations contributed to 63% of engagements exceeding their planned timelines, making it challenging to scale services efficiently.
Pain Points
- Limited resource planning capabilities made it difficult to forecast staffing needs and support team growth
- Fragmented project tracking and reporting reduced visibility for leadership decision-making
- Manual time and expense processes created administrative overhead for consultants
- Inconsistent revenue recognition and financial reporting workflows across systems
- Limited integration between services tools and external platforms created operational silos
Requirements
- Support future growth with a modern PSA platform capable of standardizing services operations while integrating with its broader technology ecosystem
- Centralized project tracking and reporting to improve operational visibility
- Simplified time and expense management for consultants
- Improved revenue recognition and financial reporting processes
- Integration with external systems, including billing platforms such as Zuora
- Defined KPIs for utilization, engagement margin, and operational efficiency to measure improvement after implementation
The Solution
Diabsolut partnered to implement Certinia PS Cloud on the Salesforce Platform, creating a centralized hub for professional services operations.
Through collaborative workshops and stakeholder alignment across Professional Services, Finance, and IT, the teams defined governance, KPIs, and delivery priorities. The implementation followed an MVP approach, ensuring core services processes were operational at launch while enabling ongoing enhancements after go-live.
The new solution automated the end-to-end lifecycle from opportunity to project. Projects, milestones, budgets, and resource requests are automatically created from Salesforce opportunities based on their service product SKUs.
Certinia PSA Core Analytics and tailored workspaces now provide services leaders with real-time insights into utilization, revenue forecasts, and project margin, while milestone-level percent-complete is passed to Zuora via SnapLogic to support consistent revenue recognition.
Products Implemented and Integrated
The Results
With Certinia PS Cloud in place, they now has a modern services platform that improves visibility, efficiency, and scalability.
Key outcomes include:
- A scalable PSA foundation supporting 2–3× growth in the consulting organization
- Improved visibility into utilization, project margin, and services revenue forecasts
- Automated project setup and resource planning from Salesforce opportunities
- Streamlined time and expense management through standardized processes and approvals
- Strong adoption across teams supported by structured enablement and hypercare
- Perfect 5/5 CSAT score awarded to Diabsolut following go-live