Norming

The Norming Professional Service Automation System is a powerful and flexible business management software designed with industry leading technology to automate and control the most vital activities and processes of a professional service organization. It provides a complete and integrated solution for streamlining the management of business partners, human resources, projects, timesheets, expense and docuements.

Highlights:

Ease of Use

• Fully web-based, available via web browser anytime and anywhere.
• User centric design, user friendly interface and easy to use functionality.
• Customizes user portal to include frequently-used screens and reports.
• The Employee Self Service (ESS) portal makes managing requests or changes easy and quick.
• Fully supports multi-entity, multi-currency, multi-language.
• Integrates with Sage ERP Accpac 6.0 and beyond.

True Customizability

• Provides easy-to-use onscreen tools to create and modify fields, screens, tabs, tables, and views.
• Provides a graphical user interface for designing approval workflows.
• Provides online translation functionality to modify the language set to incorporate company specific terminology.
• Allows user to modify all the standard reports, or attach custom reports to the system.

Business Partner Management

The Norming PSA system includes features to manage and track your business partner relationships, as well as sales opportunities, project contract, project billing, and transaction history inquiry.

Business Partner Management

• Maintains customers and suppliers within a single database.
• Provides synchronization with the Accpac AR customer and AP vendor database.
• Tracks all communication with business partners.
• Maintains associate company information for business partners.
• Provides a central repository for documents about business partners, allowing enterprise-wide access anytime.
• Employees can manage business partners based on their access right on the ESS portal.

Sales Opportunity Management

• Allows users to specify the likelihood of closing a sale opportunity at each stage of your sales cycle; by defining each stage, sales staff and management are provided with real-time rolling forecasts and pipleine analysis.
• Simplified workflow features provide automated sales processes to guide salespeople through proven selling methods.
• Sales opportunities can be converted to contracts. A drill down link is provided from contacts to sales opportunities.
• Employees can manage sales opportunities based on their access right on the ESS portal.

Contract Management

• Contract defines some basic information for projects, including contract status, manager, priority, project style, start and end date.
• Allows user to maintain one or more projects from within a contract.
• Provides a central repository for documents about contracts, allowing enterprise-wide access anytime.

Billing and Transaction Inquiry

• Creates billing batches automatically with the pre-defined project billing schedule.
• Converts billing batches to invoice batches to invoice customers against projects.
• Allows user to enter invoice manually against specific customers and projects.
• Integrates with Sage ERP AccPac AR to create AR invoices automatically from billing batches.
• Integrates with Sage ERP AccPac to create AP invoices automatically for subcontractor cost allocation transactions.
• Displays the summary account and detail transaction history of business partners.

Document Management, Reports & Dashboards

The Norming PSA system can store documents related to employees, business partners and projects in a single database, so they can be retrieved out of a central repository as needed by authorized employees.

Document Management

• Maintains document categories with specific subject, file numbering rule and approval workflow.
• Additional document properties can be created for documents to make searching easy.
• Unlimited level of directory can be created to store files.
• User and employee permission can be specified per file and directory.
• Document approval workflow can be set up to have documents reviewed by specified employees.
• Document approver can update documents with a new version while keeping the old version.
• Documents can be viewed and kept in a central repository or separately by module.
• Provides an easy and fast method of searching for documents in the system.

Reports

• Based on SAP’s Crystal Reports technology.
• Human resource reports include Employee Register, Employee List, Employee Analysis, Employee Job History, Payroll Calculation History, Job Opportunities, Benefit Planning Report, and Leave History.
• Business partner reports include Partner Profile, Sales Forecast, Contract Details, and Contract Status.
• Project reports include Project Status, Project Schedule, Project Estimate, Project Cost, and Project Profitability.
• Timesheet reports include Timesheet Details, Timesheet Summary, Time Comparison, Overtime Detail and Overtime History.
• Expense reports include Expense Forms, Employee Expense Account, Expense Details, and Expense Summary.
• Allows users to attach custom reports to the system for specific reporting requirements.

Dashboards

• Based on SAP’s Crystal Xcelsius technology.
• Human Resource dashboards include Headcount Change, Labor Cost Analysis, and Top 10 Employees.
• Business Partner dashboards include Customer Comparison by Industry, Customer Comparison by Size, Sales Forecast and Top 10 Customers.
• Project dashboards include Project Profit/Loss, Project Cost Analysis and Top 10 Projects.

Human Resource Management

The Norming PSA System provides a set of powerful human resource management features for professional service companies to automate employee management, recruitment, training, leave tracking, overtime tracking, benefit planning, and payroll calculation.

Employee Management

• The Employee database includes personal information, dependents, job description, job history, skill set, training history, education and work experience of each employee. The employee maintenance screens can be customized for a company’s specific needs.
• Provides job management functionality to review, transfer or terminate the employment relationship between the employee and employer. All activities such as changes of job responsibility, work calendar, payroll and benefits are kept in job history.
• Provides skill management functionality to document and maintain employees’ skill sets and certifications.

Recruitment

• Allows user to maintain job opportunities for recruitment purposes. A job opportunity defines the job responsibility, required skills, payroll and benefit information.
• Job opportunities can be released on the ESS portal or any website viea the eRecruiter module. External applications can submit an online job application via a web page, and existing employees can apply for jobs through the ESS portal.
• Administrators or managers can set up hiring workflows for each job opportunity to make sure every job application follows specified evaluation procedures.
• After job applications go through specified approval workflow, external applicants can be converted to an employee, or existing employees can be transferred to the target job.

Benefit and Payroll

• Unlimited earning and deduction codes can be created for payroll calculations, such as base salary, hourly salary, bonus, allowances, benefits, overtime pay, absence deductions, loan repayments, and expense reimbursements.
• Payroll calculations can be configured with user-defined formulas, which may include benefit premiums, timesheets, cash advances and expense reimbursement records.
• Income tax tables can be set up per company specific requirements.
• Unlimited benefit plans can be created with unique coverage amounts, premium fromulas and eligibility criteria. Employees can submit enrollment applications for optional benefit plans on the ESS portal.
• Employee-contributed premiums can be passed to a deduction code in payroll.
• Creates Sage ERP AccPac GL transactions automatically for allocating payroll and benefit expenses.

Leave Tracking

• Unlimited leave codes can be created to track employee absence or vacation.
• Allows users to set up accruals or reset formulas to automatically update the available vacation days for an employee.
• Employees can submit leave requests and check leave history on the ESS portal.
• Approval of leave requests will update leave history of employees and pass the leave time to the employee timesheet.

Performance Evaluation

• Creates unlimited key performance indicators to define important criteria to measure employees’ performance.
• Utilizes a balanced scoredboard for each entity (company, division, dept.) employee and project to evaluate an organization’s performance.

Project Management

The Norming PSA system provides an effective solution for managing and controlling all aspects of a project such as project budgeting, project approval, task scheduling, issue tracking, deliverables management, project costing and revenue recognition.

Master Files

• Project resources can be categorized as labor, expense, material, subcontractor, equipment, and overhead.
• Project activities can be predefined with specific activity type.
• Work break structures (WBS) can be created for specific projects to get project activities well organized.
• Project templates can be set up to speed up project creation.

Project Budgeting and Approval

• Project budget can be set up to control the usage of project resources with timesheet and expense report.
• Project estimate details can vary based on the project style chosen. Estimates for basic projects are based on the resource category for project, estimates for standard projects are based on specific resources for project, and estimates for projefessional projects depends on the specific resources assigned to project activities.
• Project approval workflow can be set up to have projects approved by authorized employees.
• Displays employee assignment status when searching for employees for a project.

Project Scheduling and Tracking

• Project schedules and progress as well as the assignment of project resources can be presented in Gantt charts.
• Project managers can assign employees to a specific project and task for a specific period. Project assignements can be copied to a timesheet by employees.
• Employees can enter the communication details with customer for projects on the ESS portal.
• Employees can enter and track project issues on the ESS portal.
• Employees can submit project-related documents and recognize the project deliverables on the ESS portal.
• Employees can submit timesheet and expense report on the ESS portal.
• Project review workflow can be set up to have projects reviewed by specified employees.

Project Costing and Revenue Recognition

• The project review workflow can be set up to have projects reviewed by specific managers before project project closing.
• Allocates labor cost, employee expense, inventory cost, subcontractor cost and overhead against project and activities on a single screen.
• Defines the billing basis and billing schedule for projects to automatically create billing batches.
• Project revenue can be recognized against the billing details or percentage of completion.
• The project closing workflow can be set up to have projects closed by specified employees.

Timesheet & Expense Reimbursement

The Norming PSA system provides a web-based timesheet for employees to enter worked time on project activities anytime and anywhere. Online approvals of timesheets allow Managers to review and approve timesheets on a timely basis and also ensure accurate and efficient cost updates to projects and jobs.

Timesheet Entry

• Employees can enter regular working time, overtime, and leave time on timesheet with detailed comments.
• Timesheets can be entered in a Grid or List view.
• Defines timesheet periods for employees to enter timesheets within a specific pay or work period.
• Project activity assignments can be copied to timesheets to save time on data entry.

Timesheet Approval

• Supports timesheet approval workflows to allow timesheets to be reviewed by authorized employees.
• Timesheets can be modified or rejected by any approver. Rejected timesheets will be returned to the employee.
• Maintains entered time, approved time and billable time for each time record.

Time Tracking

• Calculates labor costs according to the specified costing method for each resource on a project.
• Provides multi-dimensional inquiry on employee time usage history.
• Passes the timesheet record to a payroll module to compute employee earnings or deductions.

Overtime Management

• Supports approval workflows to get overtime requests approvied in advance.
• Supports overtime rules to calculate overtime automatically.
• Banked overtime can be cashed or taken for vacation.

Expense Entry

• Expenses can be entered on a project, activity, and/or category for cost allocations.
• Expenses can be entered in a specific currency and/or quantity.
• Expenses estimates can be set up for projects to keep expenses under control.

Expense Approval

• Supports expense approval workflows to have employee expenses reviewed by authorized supervisors.
• Allows expense approvers to modify or reject employee expense reports.

Expense Reimbursement

• Employee cash advances can be applied to reduce reimbursable expenses.
• Employee expenses can be reimbursed through your payroll system.
• Employee cash advances can be repaid through your payroll system.

Expense Tracking

• Allocates approved employee expenses on specific projects and activities.
• Provides multi-dimensional inquiries on employee expense history.
• Integrates with your payroll system to calculate earnings for reimbursable expenses and deductions for advance repayments.