Professional services companies provide and bill a variety of services through efforts of time and work and include consulting, web design, engineering, temporary placement firms, accounting and legal services, cleaning services …

Here are typical analytic questions professional service companies shall constantly answer to survive and prosper:

• What is the actual hourly price of each professional figure?

• Which professionals generate better margin?

• Which projects were good which were and bad? Which reps sold them?

• Do any sales rep systematically produce poor economic results?

• What are your sales and profit trend? How did them evolve by unit and branch?

• At which kind of client shall you look for new opportunities?

• How much is your presales effort? How much was the cost of fixed-price project overrun?

Here is a free, practical analytic solution that will allow you to answer all such questions and much more, under different scenario and perspectives in just a few seconds!

Small companies (1-3 professionals) can feed the application through a simple spreadsheet, larger companies can export the same data to a tab-delimited text file. PISA will take care of importing such files into a multi-dimensional data warehouse and consolidate their content to compute strategic measures.

Input shall contain one row (or record) for each billed item. As you can see most field are optional (Req. column is blank) , but leaving them blank would reduce analytic capabilities. If, for example you want to be able to know how much small clients are less profitable than large ones, you shall provide client size field.

We will call each individual row an Activity. You will usually obtain core activity data from time sheets. It is important to enter activity record even if no billing takes place (see Billing field).

Trying the application

To run this application, simply click here  (you shall have Java 6 active on your browser). It will take 60-90 seconds just first time you execute it.

The application comes with a predefined small set of sample data to let you explore how it works (we will see later how to reset and load your own data).

In this post I will show a simple case: we are going to analyze sales and margin by client industry this year.

PISA is a self service BI application and do not require any technical skill to be used. All you have to do is to assemble your inquiry through drag and drop of concepts and terms typical of your business.

To start a new inquiry, choose File > New or click New button (Or Ctrl-N), Structure tab will open:

Business measures are indicated by brown gauges. Whenever you select one of them (click on it), its meaning and interpretation is shown on Interpretation tab (on bottom).

So, let's start telling PISA defining what we need. Drag into Columns, one after the other, three business measures: Billed, Cost and Margin:

Our Inquiry shall now look like this:

Observe that PISA acts as a mentor showing in red labels what shall still be completed to perform retrieval, Rows in our case.

Let's take a better look at how information structure is organized.

Dimensions are different perspectives to look at our business we can combine. So we have Professional dimension (who worked?), Client dimension (who pays the bill?), Project Dimension (in which project was the effort made?) and two time dimensions. Service date (usually from timesheet) is the date effort was made and Invoice Date is the date effort was billed.

Inside each dimension hierarchies reflect business structure. We can explore time dimensions, for example, by week or by months, thus we dispose of two different hierarchies. Each hierarchy has multiple levels, for example years are decomposed in quarters, that are decomposed in months, that are decomposed in days. Quarters, months and days are three levels of the hierarchy. Each level is by its way composed of members, for example January 1, 2009 is member of day level.

Please spend some second exploring structure tree.

Now, back to our need, on rows we would like to see different type of client industry, so we open client dimension and industry hierarchy (we have decided to organize clients by industry and size) and then drop Industry level into rows:

Now, all we have to do, is to press Retrieve button (running man) or choose Inquiry > Retrieve or Ctrl-R:

Let's try some charts. Select Billed column (right click on Billed header then choose Select), and then request a pie chart (click on pie chart icon on top). Here is how our sales are distributed:

Now let's compare different margins. Deselect Billed and select Margin column then request a bar chart:

In our example, selling to pharma industry performs quite better.

Now let's go back to data tab and perform a drill-down to expand a member into its constituents (children). Right-click on Banking and choose Drill-down. There is only one client under Banking category: Blue Sea Bank (our data sample is quite small). In an actual case you would observe cost and margins of all your clients in banking Industry.

And now a Drill-through to determine where that 10,400 come from. Drill through expands an aggregated cell into its associated "transactions". Right click on cell containing 10,400 and request a drill-through: you get something like this:

PISA let you build complex inquiries from simple building blocks. You can save your inquiries and repeat them whenever needed. You can also make your inquiries available as one-click-inquiry on left pane of application like the ones provided in this sample.

I will explore such features in next posts as well as different visualization features. Stay tuned!

Pisa also offers many actions through pop-up menus to navigate explore and export data (Excel for example), different chart types can also be customized holding the Control key when selecting chart.

Loading your data

Choose About > Pisa and check your data directory (that depends on your specific computer). In that directory you will find a subdirectory called proservice with the following files:

To use your data,first of all you shall get rid of example data. Choose Administration > Recreate Database to re-generate the database.

Then, whenever new data is available, choose Administration > Load > Run Activity Loader and supply an Excel or CSV file (unless you modified configuration to load from your database).

Enjoy Professional Service analytics!