Certinia’s Summer 2024 Release brings efficiency enhancements at scale to technology & services organizations
Raju Malhotra is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia. His focus is to shape the company’s product vision, drive the technology roadmap, and ensure exceptional user experiences across the vast customer base. Read his blog here on the Summer 2024 Release and what it will deliver to the market.
We’re excited to announce Certinia’s Summer 2024 Release, introducing enhanced features to help our customers achieve enterprise-level scalability, drive new efficiencies across their professional services and customer success organizations, and unlock tangible benefits with AI.
Managing resources and projects at massive scale
This release incorporates a number of features in our Professional Services (PS) Cloud solution to accelerate resource management at scale and boost productivity, including:
Resource shortlisting
In many enterprises, it is not just resource managers who decide staff assignments. Certinia’s shortlisting enables an inclusive workflow that automates and tracks selection and decision-making logic across other key stakeholders. This makes the assignment process more visible and scalable, and also creates opportunities to learn from selection patterns.
Mass Actions for Project Resource Requests
Enterprise resource managers deal in large-scale projects that require many assignments, and as a result, need to manage high volumes as efficiently as possible. The introduction of mass actions allows resource managers to assign multiple resources with one click as well as make consistent updates to several requests at once, improving resource manager productivity by reducing repetitive work.
Demand-side resource requests
With our new demand-side resource request feature, customers can not only find the right resources who can fit the required schedule, but also retain the schedule even when they un-assign resources. This facilitates the understanding of the patterns of work at-scale. Having role requests for the work, while knowing the shape of the work, also provides early visibility for staffing, more accurate forecasting, and granular information for capacity and demand planning.
Connecting estimation to delivery
Many organizations still use spreadsheets for estimation, which are disconnected from the services sales cycle. The latest release includes UX updates in Estimate Builder for services organizations that still use spreadsheets for estimation. Our new spreadsheet-like UX features copy handles, cell dragging, and similar functions to help customers transition to platform-managed estimation.
Connecting delivery to project financials
We’ve introduced new features to enhance how services financials are tracked to key challenges project managers have, such as limited visibility across multiple budgets to assess statuses and the risk of overbilling. With real-time notifications, project managers will be alerted as they near budget limits, allowing them to make timely decisions to either expand a customer’s purchase order or adjust project deliverables to stay within budget. In addition, billing caps will prevent billing beyond the agreed amount in the customer’s purchase order, avoiding any charges beyond the project scope.
These enhancements to services financials will not only provide immediate visibility, but also safeguard project profitability by protecting services organizations and their customers from unexpected costs.
Improving productivity and value tracking for customer success teams
This release significantly enhances our Customer Success (CS) Cloud capabilities, including optimizing team productivity, improving customer health monitoring, and ensuring seamless value tracking. With multiple enterprise-scale early adopters already operational, including Salesforce, CS Cloud is gaining significant market momentum.
The new editable Success Tracker allows Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to plan and review success by directly editing tasks, dates, resources, and statuses. Additionally, the Activity Tracker supports the centralized creation and editing of customer insights by anyone engaging with the customer. These enhancements, along with improved usability across creating playbooks, using Task Boards, and filtering, provide a more intuitive user experience.
Understanding customer health is crucial, especially as the CSM-to-account ratio increases. Our new Account Health Score, tailored to each customer segment, acts as a heat map, helping teams prioritize and act based on data signals. With capabilities for account segmentation and automated action triggers, CSMs can set up metrics that reflect each segment’s unique characteristics and proactively trigger interventions.
CS Cloud also now captures customer objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) from the sales cycle through adoption and beyond, ensuring no loss of information or duplication of effort. This seamless handover aligns customer success with initial sales promises.
Leveraging Einstein Copilot to unlock new business value for service organizations
Generative AI is quickly reshaping how services businesses manage operations, interact with their clients, and deliver value. We’ve unveiled new GenAI functionality leveraging Salesforce Einstein Copilot in the Summer 2024 release, offering the first PS Cloud Actions for early adopter customers. Copilot Actions for Services CPQ provides hyper-personalization for scoping estimates, using account and delivery data to offer a unified view of the client, their requirements, and goals to generate project scopes. This accelerates the process of creating estimates and SOWs, and enables innovative opportunities for delivery that drive revenue and successful outcomes for customers.
We envision a future where Generative AI is seamlessly integrated into every professional services business, allowing them to deliver faster, more innovative services that support stronger client outcomes. We will further execute that vision in future releases as we make more GenAI capabilities available across our solutions.
Transforming accounting team workflows with time-saving capabilities
We’re continuing to improve the way accounting teams operate with new accounting features that significantly enhance productivity and streamline efficiencies, including:
General Ledger: Perform Year End Closing
A year-end playbook and templates are designed to help reduce the time and effort required to close the financial year, boost the productivity of accounting teams, and save valuable time and resources.
General Ledger: Process period end adjustments
Enhancements to the platform will allow organizations to automate the currency revaluation process for foreign currency bank accounts. Adjustments can now be generated automatically, ensuring financial statements accurately reflect the current exchange rates at period end, reducing errors and the time required to close financial periods.
Accounts Receivable: Process cash receipts
New flexible cash matching features enhance the efficiency of accounts receivable operations, particularly in managing intercompany cash transactions. Flexible cash matching capabilities allow for seamless cash matching across different companies and intercompany accounts.
Tax Management: Generate tax reports
Organizations can now centralize the preparation of 1099 forms into a single, user-friendly interface. Certinia has simplified the generation of both 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC reports, updating them to comply with the latest regulations, including changes like the increased reporting dollar amount threshold.
Empowering the world’s best technology and services organizations
We’ve listened to our customers and incorporated a bevy of new features designed to make resource management, estimation, financial, and accounting workflows more efficient, precise, and collaborative. This release furthers our commitment to ensure technology and services organizations can keep moving forward with certainty.
For full release details and additional resources, check out the Summer 2024 Release Hub on the Certinia Community!
