en flag +1 214 306 68 37

Data Analytics for Professional Services

A Full Overview

Since 2008 in IT solutions for professional services, ScienceSoft builds custom analytics software that allows companies gain real-time visibility into project management, personalize their offering, promptly adjust business decisions in line with market changes, and more.

Data Analytics for Professional Services: A Full Overview - ScienceSoft
Data Analytics for Professional Services: A Full Overview - ScienceSoft
Alex Bekker
Alex Bekker

Head of Data Analytics Department, ScienceSoft

Marina Chernik
Marina Chernik

Senior Business Analyst and BI Consultant, ScienceSoft

Data analytics for professional services is a way to consolidate disparate data on project, customer, marketing, and talent management and drive insights on project delivery improvement, effort and resource allocation, customer attraction and retention, costs optimization, and more.

  • Development time: 2—6 months for an MVP.
  • Costs: $30,000­—$800,000 depending on the solution's complexity. Use our online calculator to get a ballpark estimate for your case.
  • Core integrations: ERP, CRM.
  • ROI: up to 220%

Key Analytics Features for Professional Services Companies

Project management analytics

  • Monitoring operational KPIs, e.g., project margin variance, revenue write-off percentage, time capture completeness.
  • Real-time project health monitoring with instant alerts on deviations in budget, progress, and other indicators.
  • Benchmarking project performance against historical results and segmenting projects (e.g., by employee, department) to easily identify success and inefficiency drivers.
  • Predictive analytics to forecast project resource requirements, timelines, and possible constraints.
  • Suggestions on resource allocation optimization based on task type, employees' skills, current workload, performance, and more.
  • Pinpointing projects with high returns potential to efficiently prioritize resource allocation.
Read all
  • Multi-dimensional customer segmentation (e.g., by demographics and inquiry for B2C customers; by industry, company size for B2B customers).
  • Monitoring customer-related KPIs, e.g., net promoter score (NPS), customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rate.
  • Identifying customer preferences through the analysis of historical customer management data.
  • RFM analysis.
  • NLP-powered analysis of customer sentiment based on communication logs like surveys and call transcripts.
  • Forecasting customer demand for certain services.
  • Custom service quote options based on multi-factor analysis (e.g., historical project data, market trends, competitor activity, resource availability).
  • ML/AI-powered recommendations for personalized service delivery (e.g., investment portfolio rebalancing in line with tax legislation changes).
Read all

Employee analytics

  • Tracking the required employee-related KPIs, e.g., employee billable and productive utilization, human capital risk, revenue per billable employee.
  • Insights into the performance of teams and individual employees (including contingent workers), e.g., to identify high-performing employees, detect root causes of low performance and skill gaps.
  • Recruitment campaign analytics.
  • Performance vs. compensation benchmarking.
  • Employee engagement analytics based on the analysis of surveys, managed and unmanaged attrition percentage.
  • ML/AI-powered recommendations on the required employee-specific training.
Read all
  • Monitoring financial management metrics like revenue, operating cash flow, AP and AR turnover ratios, average billing rate.
  • Financial performance benchmarking against industry peers and internal markers.
  • Continuous market monitoring (e.g., macroeconomic indicators, regulatory and tax legislation changes, competitor activity) for timely risks identification.
  • ML- and rule-based identification of financial management bottlenecks and optimization opportunities (e.g., for budget variance control).
  • ML/AI-powered financial modeling and forecasting.
  • Detecting financial reporting anomalies.
  • Automated financial reporting to the required authorities.
Read all

Marketing analytics

  • Monitoring the required KPIs, e.g., late-stage pipeline value, bid-to-win ratio, pipeline to QTR forecast ratio, cost of sales to revenue percentage.
  • Analyzing customer interactions with the marketing content (e.g., website behavior, click-through rates).
  • Marketing campaign performance evaluation.
  • ML/AI-powered recommendations for marketing campaigns optimization (e.g., customer-specific communication channels or email timing).
  • Generative AI capabilities (powered by solutions like ChatGPT) for automated marketing content creation (e.g., emails, newsletters, social media posts).
Read all

Visualization & reporting

  • User-friendly, interactive dashboards that provide general and detailed data views.
  • Standard and custom easy-to-interpret visuals.
  • Scheduled and self-services reporting.
  • UI tailored to specific user roles (e.g., industry consultants, accountants, customer management specialists).
Read all

Want to Drive Value from Your Data? We'd be Glad to Help!

Whether you're only planning your data analytics solution or already have a clear vision of it, our consultants would be glad to learn about your needs and make data analytics work for your company. Just drop us a line.

Core Integrations for Analytics Solutions in Professional Services

Core Integrations for Analytics Solutions in Professional Services

ERP

  • To enable data-driven project delivery improvement.
  • To analyze financial management processes, get financial forecasts, and mitigate risks.
  • To support accurate financial reporting.
  • To optimize employees' productivity and increase talent retention.
  • To efficiently manage customer demand and resource supply.

CRM

NB: Depending on your needs, we can integrate your solution with a customer portal.

  • To personalize customer service and ensure accurate service quoting.
  • To understand customer sentiment toward the provided services.
  • To increase marketing campaign performance.

See How Professional Services Companies Benefit from Analytics Solutions Built by ScienceSoft

What makes ScienceSoft different

We achieve project success no matter what

ScienceSoft does not pass off mere project administration for project management, which, unfortunately, often happens on the market. We practice real project management, achieving project success for our clients no matter what.

See how we do that

4 "Hows" to Consider When Developing Analytics Software for Professional Services

Development of analytics software for professional services is aimed at delivering a solution that drives business value through tailored capabilities, a cost-optimized architecture, case-specific UX/UI design, and other factors. Below, you can explore major points of attention for developing a successful analytics solution for a professional services company.

1.

How to meet business goals

During the stage of business analysis, it is essential to conduct interviews with business executives, domain specialists, finance teams, and other stakeholders to elicit their needs and expectations, translate them into requirements for the solution, and prioritize them throughout the development process.

ScienceSoft often uses Agile approach in analytics solutions development. This helps us adjust the software according to early user feedback and avoid costly and time-consuming redevelopment (compared to introducing changes to the final software version).

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

2.

How to optimize development costs

There are many ways to optimize development costs without sacrificing the solution's functionality or quality. E.g., ML/AI-powered capabilities do not always require building custom ML models. For cases like sentiment analysis and customer service chatbots, open-source models can be used with little to zero customization.

ScienceSoft's cost optimization practices include the reuse of proven third-party components and microservices, QA automation, and implementation of CI/CD pipelines. All this allows us to achieve up to a 78% decrease in costs.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

3.

How to optimize the TCO

A tailored approach to solution architecture design can help achieve the optimal cost-to-performance ratio of the analytics software. E.g., it can be feasible to use cashing mechanisms for storing frequently accessed data (e.g., on real-time project management) or enable workload-dependent scaling of resources to optimize cloud costs.

Software TCO also largely depends on the pricing of technology vendors. Being technology agnostic, ScienceSoft can choose among multiple providers and go for the ones that offer an optimal combination of performance, scalability, and pricing in each particular case.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

4.

How to ensure smooth user adoption

It's essential to give users instruments that facilitate the execution of their role-specific tasks. E.g., capabilities for granular representation of financial data can help financial teams identify cost-saving opportunities and revenue trends, while static dashboards that provide a 360-degree view of operations can give C-levels a quick and clear understanding of the company's health and progress.

One of our UX/UI design practices includes auditing the software that the company has in use and implementing similar workflows in the new analytics solution.

ScienceSoft

ScienceSoft

Costs & ROI of Developing Analytics Software for Professional Services

Costs of professional services analytics software development can vary from $30,000 to $800,000+. The exact figure largely depends on the organization's size (e.g., companies with several service lines and geographical locations will require more data sources for integration) and the complexity of the analytics features (e.g., rule-based or ML/AI-powered analytics, big data analytics).

Analytics in professional services can bring an average ROI of 220% that is driven by capabilities for service personalization, high-value customer attraction, marketing campaign improvement, and informed resource planning. 

A basic solution

A solution of medium complexity

An advanced solution

Average organization size
?

The more employees, service lines, and geographical locations a company has, the more complex the solution will be in terms of the required features and the number of data sources to be integrated.

<200 employees

200-1000 employees

>1000 employees

Data complexity

Structured (e.g., relational databases, XML, Parquet files).

Structured and semi-structured (e.g., JSON, ORC files).

Structured, semi-structured, and unstructured (e.g., DOCX, JPG, MP3, MP4, HTML files).

Data processing frequency

Batch (e.g., every 24 hours)

Batch and real-time

Batch and real-time

Analytics scope

Basic reporting: core financial KPIs, resource utilization, billable hours, performance by employee/unit.

Specialized analytics for different departments, service lines, and customer segments. In-depth financial analytics (e.g., insights into cost allocation, planned vs. actual KPIs).

A 360-degree view of operations and assets across locally and internationally distributed enterprise systems (e.g., PMS, CRM). M&A analytics.

AI and machine learning

 

Simple, ready-made AI models (e.g., for customer sentiment analysis).

Custom or fine-tuned AI models (e.g., multi-factor what-if models, forecasting based on historical and real-time data).

Reporting and visualization

Via market-available tools like Power BI, Tableau, Looker.

Via market-available tools like Power BI, Tableau, Looker.

Via market-available tools like Power BI, Tableau, Looker, and custom data visualization modules.

Cost

$30,000—$150,000

$150,000—$300,000

$300,000—$800,000+

Get a Cost Estimate for Professional Services Analytics Development

Please answer a few questions about your business needs, and our experts will get back to you with a custom cost estimate.

1
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7
1.8
1.9
1.10
2
3
4

*How many employees are there in your organization?

*What describes your situation best?

*What services are you interested in?

*What type of analytics should your solution provide?

*What are the supposed data sources for your analytics solution? Check all that apply.

*What analytics capabilities are you interested in?

*What is the approximate number of users for your solution?

*How promptly should changes in source data be reflected in your solution?

?

If you have different latency requirements for different data types, feel free to check several boxes.

*What services are you interested in?

*What type of analytics does your solution provide?

*What are the current data sources for your analytics solution? Check all that apply.

*What analytics capabilities does your analytics solution enable?

Is your analytics solution custom or platform–based?

*What would you like to improve in your current analytics solution?

Would you like to add new capabilities to your analytics solution?

?

E.g., predictive modeling, new types of reports.

*Do you have any preferences for the environment?

*Do you have any tech stack preferences, incl. cloud platforms?

*Do you have any requirements for data visualization?

?

E.g., specialized self–service dashboards for different user roles, non–standard charts, accessible UI design.

*Are there any compliance requirements for your solution? Check all that apply.

Your contact data

Preferred way of communication:

We will not share your information with third parties or use it in marketing campaigns. Check our Privacy Policy for more details.

Thank you for your request!

We will analyze your case and get back to you within a business day to share a ballpark estimate.

In the meantime, would you like to learn more about ScienceSoft?

Our team is on it!

Data is Wealth and You Already Own It – Just Put It to Work!

Benefit from the experience and skills of our data analytics consultants, solution architects, software developers, and compliance experts and turn your data into value. With mature project management practices, ScienceSoft drives projects to their goals regardless of time, budget, and change request constraints.