Case Study: Nova Technology, Inc.

July 2005

Organizational Profile

Founded in 1985, Nova Technology is a woman-owned small business providing managed IT services and engineering solutions to customers in both the public and private sectors. Nova Technology’s business-oriented approach improves service delivery and systems reliability. The mission of Nova Technology is to deliver IT solutions by providing the highest quality service and support to our customers with an absolute commitment to client satisfaction.

Professional Services
Nova Technology is a leading provider of end-to-end IT Service Management (ITSM). Our experienced staff has been helping the government reconcile advancing technologies with evolving missions for over 20 years. We help CIOs improve service performance by providing proven processes, experienced people, and state-of-the-art tools to take organizations to a higher level of IT Management Process Maturity. We help ensure that they successfully meet goals for reliability and overall customer satisfaction by helping realize a vision of continuous insight into service level availability and performance .

Integrated Service Center (ISC)
Nova Technology’s ISC improves responsiveness to customer needs by providing a service focused approach to IT management. Our process driven approach ensures that communications between organizations are efficient and effective. Incidents are tracked to closure by a service desk professional who takes full responsibility for resolution. The secret to our success is the use of proven best practices defined by the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Unlike other processes and standards, ITIL is designed for IT Service Support, and provides an efficient and effective approach to improving service and meeting service level agreements (SLAs.)

Optimization Service Center (OSC)
Our OSC takes service a step beyond support, to optimization. We use the ITIL processes to control change so that your infrastructure is scalable to easily support the seamless integration of new services. Nova Technology is committed to ensuring that their staff maintains pace with technology as it advances. This means that our experienced engineers can work with business users gather requirements and recommend the best solutions available to get their jobs done. These solutions are then designed, built, and tested to customer requirements before deployment.

ISC— A process based integrated approach to providing IT Service Management for business services and their underlying components, including applications, infrastructure, and telecommunications.

• Increased reliability through better coordination and communication
• Improved responsiveness to customer needs
• Increased value and peace of mind

OSC— A process based integrated approach to delivering new and enhanced services that is focused on business requirements.

• Efficient organizational growth as technology advances
• Seamless and non-disruptive launch of new services
• Maximized value of technology investments

Challenges:

In 2002, John McBride, newly hired Chief Operating Officer, begin to modernize Nova Technology’s operations. Nova Technology identified improvement areas including included paper timesheets, management and client reports, and the billing cycle. Challenges with paper timesheets included the following:

• Collected at the end of the month, use of paper timesheets could not assure daily time reporting compliance;
• Entered, for a second time, into a master spreadsheet, the time and rates were rolled up for invoicing causing difficulty in accuracy and extra effort;
• To ensure on-time and on-budget projects, the project managers maintained separate ledgers (to have data before the end of the period) which required their extra effort as well as extra effort required to reconcile with the paper timesheet data;
• Subcontractors required six weeks to be registered on the system; and
• Doing the paperwork required 25% of the project administrator’s time.

Management and Client reports suffered from:

• Lack of real time information to manage projects for on-time and on-budget objectives; and
• Unprofessional-looking client reports were an impediment to winning new contracts.

In the billing area:

• Lacking professional reports to the clients put a bad light on the organization as a whole and was an impediment to winning new contracts;
• Billing occurred on the 20th to the 25th of the month delaying cash flow;
• Exact hours and minutes frequently did not match customer clocking systems; and
• Sixty to eighty hours required to do the billing.

Solution:

Nova Technology decided to find a system to automate the timesheets. The major requirements were ease of use and support of the DCAA guidelines. Nova Technology looked for standalone systems that could do billing reports. Well-known timesheet and expense tracking vendors required significant time to implement and on-going effort to maintain their systems. John McBride evaluated several vendors of electronic timesheet software. Pilot tests of several vendors enabled John to evaluate to the two key requirements: ease of use and support of DCAA guidelines. In addition, John was able to see the deeply functional capabilities of the Unanet web-based software including the forecasting capability and the integrated expense reporting. Nova Technology chose the ASP (Applications Services Provider) option for Unanet web-based Professional Services Automation software. This assured 24 X 7 accessibility and limited effort on the part of Nova Technology.

Implementation:

Working with the technical support, the Unanet software was up and running in a few days. After 30 days, the software was fully deployed.

Benefits:

Accuracy and timeliness of the billing has improved. The first month, Nova Technology issued the bills from Unanet on the 10th day. Today, Nova Technology regularly issues bills any time from the 2nd to the 5th day, an improvement of 80% to 90%. The amount of time and cost to do this has also improved by 90%. A Unanet function of Time In / Time Out enables Nova Technology to accurately match the clocking systems that customers used in some contracts. Subcontractors can use the system immediately as it is easy to include them.

Users can do self service in managing their time and expenses, eliminating the work of administrators and managers. When assigned to a project, users receive an email stating the name of the project, the dates, and the budgeted hours. Users can view a monthly schedule of their assignments. Users can quickly run a leave balance report.

Overall improvements include:

• Visibility into the work before the end of the period to ensure accuracy, on-time, and on-budget;
• Reduction in the billing process from 20 to 25 days to 1 to 2.5 days;
• Improvement in the accuracy of revenue recognition and billings to the correct accounts;
• Faster publishing of the invoices to provide better cash flow;
• Ease of managers and project managers to approve timesheets at their computer, anywhere and anytime;
• Ease of notifying people who are late;
• No need to keep files of paper copies nor subsidiary ledgers;
• Quick access to printing of supporting documentation for invoices; and
• Easier internal audits.