A quick and simple setup at PwC for entrepreneur Paris

SMEs, customers with high expectations

Working with SMEs requires specific skills and knowledge where flexilbility, availability and reactivity are must have. Customers demands are always considered as urgent and, even if they do not require lots of time from your employees, the large amount of tasks that need to be done can make planning optimization really hard. 

« In the accounting industry, we deal with lots of tasks that need to be done in a day or two. For example, a tax verification or an administrative audit require immediate response to the customers. », Marie-Christine Dura-Cayron, Project manager at PwC for Entrepreneurs

SMEs managers have lots of expectations towards accountants, which are most of the time their first counsellors. They ask for regular communication, lots of reactivity and a more human relationship than big companies. To meet these requirements, hard will is not enough. You must handle your planning both effectively and flexibly. 

Planning issues

« The best planning has to consider lots of factors, the most important one being the deadlines. You have to make the customer happy while ensuring employees' well-being. If one of them is assigned on too many tasks, this will never work, even for the best! ».

The peak work periods that are recurrent in the accounting industry makes thing even harder. When you have to deal with delays and due dates, it's not unusual to see people working on 3 to 4 missions at the same time. A situation that cannot last.

PwC for entrepreneur's office in Paris was using several tools to plan, from internal custom applications to Excel spreadsheets. These tools being not performant enough, the need to a fully integrated application was bigger everyday to effectively plan and assign tasks, handle quicly all conflits that may arise, but also manage the different teams and track progress thanks to custom dashboards and reports. 

Beeye, a new way to plan tasks

After a year of using Beeye, PwC for Entrepreneurs have changed the way they plan 0n their tasks. As Marie-Christine Dura-Cayron said:

• Beeye is a simple and collaborative application that let you see the conflicts and the solutions you have to deal with it. The tool let you access the list of available employees that understand the customer needs or have already worked with him. "We're still the decision-maker, but we have a major help to plan correctly."
• We're more able to forecast instead of reacting to urgencies. Work is assigned with a better delay when possible, priorities are quickly identified, we can anticipate our needs to hire more collaborators or external counsellors.
• Workload is better managerd: reports let you analyse easily your production capacity and identify periods of overwork or availability.

« We don't need to ask people what are they working on anymore.  The planning give us the answer immediately».

• Everybody has its own responsabilities in regards of planning: partners and managers are no longer the only one to manage planned hours. Everyone can now modify its own tasks, such as delaying or cancelling an activity. With new management rules, planning is always up to date. 
• Let's not forget the time that is earned by being able to create recurring planning for one or more employees in a few clicks. 

Major benefits from Beeye:

• A simple tool that let you see what you have to do
• A collaborative application where everybody can manage its own planning
• A great user-experience with new ways to plan
• A tracking system to provide lots of analysis on reports and dashboards
• A better way to manage the firm by assessing the needs to hire, forecasting profits in regards of the future work. 
• A tool that is adapted for for accounting and audits
• Less time to plan, more to bill

A quick and simple setup

• April 2018 : First conversation
• June 2018 : With our quickstart program, a group of partners and managers onboard on the application to test it and evaluate custom developments they'll need.
• Summer 2018 : a connector was built to import every month data from SAP into Beeye to retrieve all data about missions and employees.
• Octobre 2018 : all the teams from PwC for entrepreneurs Paris are now in Beeye

« Beeye is always listening to what we needs. They are highly reactive and creative to adapt the product to our systems and issues. After the training, the application has been well-received by all employees. ».

Right now, other offices from PwC are testing Beeye to plan and manage their tasks on a daily basis.