About Project Service Automation (PSA) && PSA Process Flow

 About PSA

• Project Service Automation (PSA) provides an end-to-end project management capabilities to teams who are execution projects.
• PSA is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Framework.
• Almost all kind of projects can be managed using PSA.
• You can access PSA from Unified Interface.
• With PSA solution installation, Resource Scheduling is also installed. PSA lets you define the projects, opportunities, quotations, orders and contracts whereas Resource Scheduling helps you define resource skills, resource roles and pricing.

Important Terms In PSA

• Customers

  A customer is an organization. This includes

  • Customer
  • Vendor
  • Partner
  • Affiliate or Other
• Contacts

  A Contact is an individual.

  • Associated with maximum one Account (through Contact form)
• Project Opportunities

  Opportunities are warm leads who are interested in you project services (similar to sales)

  There is a separate form for Project Opportunities.

• Project Quotes

  When a potential customer asks for more information about project such as product, pricing, etc., a quote is sent.

  You can create one or more quotes for a project opportunity.

• Project

  Under Project you can define scope, estimates, timelines and resources required to meet an objective.

  Alternatively, you can quickly create a project using Project Templates.

• Project Contract

  When you win a quote, you create a project contract to make it official.

  You can create one or more project contracts for a quote.

• Invoices

  An invoice is used to bill customer for the project.

  When you create a project contract, you set the frequency to generate invoices.

  You can modify the created invoice before confirming.

• Schedule Board

  Schedule Board shows all resources, their availability and allows you to book resources for a project.

  Multiple views are available like Hours, Days, Weeks and Months.

• Resources

  You can book resources against a project for scheduling and invoicing.

  Resources can include users, contacts, accounts or equipment.

• Time Entries

  Resources working on a project can enter their timesheet (time entries) explaining how much time they spent working on a project.

  Users enter duration in minutes, hours or days.

• Expenses

  Expenses against a project can be entered by resources so you can be invoicing your client.

  Frequency of entering expenses may vary based on project requirements.

PSA Process Flow 

Following is the process flow that you can follow in Project Service Automation:

Project Opportunity

• Here you register warm leads that are interested in your project services.
• Here you define product and project related information.
• For example if you are implementing Business Central, you would specify the licenses and implementation fees related information or maybe the expenses that you want to quote.

Project Quotes

• You can create quotation from the opportunity and send it to the customer.
• It will copy all the information, that you have captured in opportunity, and put it in the quotes.

Project Planning

• In project planning you go into details of planning, for example the number of activities involved, number of resources  and man days required, scheduling and project planning.

Project Contracts

• When you mark the project quote as “Won”, it automatically creates a project contract.
• It is also considered as statement of work , like what kind of things will you deliver to the customer and also define the invoice frequency for each of the component.

Allocate Resources

• Once your project contract is defined, you are going to allocate resources to the project.
• The resource allocation is done based on the requirements.
• The resources then start working on the project.

Time and Expense Booking

• When resources are working on a project they start booking their time against the project.
• The resources start entering their time daily/weekly and also start registering the expenses that are incurred in the process. These expenses are monitored by the project manager and once approved can be billed to the customer.

Project Monitoring

• Project monitoring is not a single step, but a continuous process.
• So the moment you do planning you start performing project monitoring as well.

Project Invoicing

• Once you have reached the project contract milestone, you create an invoice and send it to the customer for billing.

Project Analytics

• Finally you perform project analysis where you can make use of the graphs, charts to identify how you are doing in the project.
• Based on the information, you can make necessary adjustments.

PSA Process Flow (Episode 04) – Tech-Quantum