MetricStream Customer Success Story

Originally brought in as a personal tool to manage the professional services operations of sixty PSO developers and QA engineers, OpenAir began at MetricStream with resource management, project management, and time tracking.

“It was my belief that accurate management of our services team through OpenAir was the cornerstone for building a profitable deployment practice,” said Joe Longo, VP of Professional Services Operations. “If we could capture time accurately and invoice it out correctly, then OpenAir would pay for itself.”

Within three months OpenAir invoices were generated as ‘pro-forma’ invoices, authorizing MetricStream’s finance team to perform the actual billing. Thanks to the fact that OpenAir’s Invoices module is tightly integrated to the projects, resources and timesheets modules, this process turned out to be surprisingly simple and error-free.

Given the diverse geographic location of consultants, the prior communication problems were entirely pre-empted with OpenAir. This allowed for robust project costing analyses that had been previously absent.

“I began developing executive status reports that provided our first glimpse into project costing which was a real awakening for us. Actually seeing how much projects truly cost the company rather than just estimating the costs created a deeper understanding of our own business, and a hunger for more metrics from OpenAir.”

Now with more data in the system, MetricStream now tracks project cost, billing, receivables, and margins, and looks to incorporate revenue forecasting in the near future.

With finance and resource management teams in India and consultants around the world, precise invoicing and resource allocation was a challenge.

“OpenAir has provided us with a protocol with which to advise our finance team on how to invoice clients,” said Longo. “No longer does finance have to call our consultants to ask about hours. Their time is automatically entered into the system and processed by billing rules that stipulate how and when clients should be billed.”

Recently, MetricStream started tracking expenses in OpenAir, making the prior manual process obsolete. “MetricStream is very excited to bring OpenAir expenses online. We expect a noticeable bump-up in billings simply because we are certain that all billable expenses will actually be invoiced,” said Longo.

With OpenAir, a seamless integration between expense tracking and client invoicing provides an error-free process, so there’s no additional work to add the expenses to existing charges. “It’s like finding free money.”