Deal flow software for operations

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(upbeat music) - Hello everyone. Welcome to our session, on project deal management capabilities. I am Rupa Mantravadi and I'm a PM on the R&D team of Project Operations. In today's video, I'll be showing you how Project Operations can empower sales teams to manage their sales pipelines, build credible proposals, and once the deal is won, how Project Operations can help delivery teams stay close to contract, by automatically evaluating contractual terms, defaulting chargeability rules and prices, so that your delivery teams can stay focused on delivering quality work for your customers. As you know, Project Opportunity are built on top of Dynamics 365 Sales. So we automatically support the core sales features, like having a business process flow qualifying leads to create opportunities, and each project based Opportunity uniquely, from Sales Opportunity, can have the concept of Opportunity lines, that are either product based or project based. So here I have two project-based lines, and one product-based line on the Opportunity. And the value of the Opportunity is really a summation of those projects and products that you are trying to sell to the customer within this Opportunity. So if you look at opportunities, just like I was mentioning, because we are built on top of the feature rich and powerful Dynamics 365 Sales, we also support the notion of having multiple quotes per Opportunity. So if you navigate to the quotes tab, each Opportunity can have one or more quotes attached to it. And each quote is evaluated on various metrics that are more tailored for project-based quotes. So if I look at this quote, for line analysis for Adventure Works, you'll see that this quote is already won, and the quote is analyzed based on the expected margin, the adjusted gross margin, and whether the quote actually fits in with customer expectations, schedule or budget. So if you look at the quote itself, and these metrics along which each quote is analyzed, you'll see that the quote has been analyzed in terms of, where's the gross margin coming from. It's really coming from the total chargeable cost, and as compared to the total revenue, on the quote. And what you can see also is these charts built using the native charting capabilities in the database platform. And you can see the spread of revenue and cost over time, that is spread over the duration of the project. So, along with how this quote compares, by way of how profitable it is, there is also a second vector along which quotes are analyzed in terms of how they fit in with customer expectations of schedule, and customer expectations of budget. So now, going back to the profitability analysis, if you look at, where are these numbers coming from? How is the system able to give me these detailed metrics? That is based off of those line items on the quote. So, if you look at this line analysis work, and go down to that third level, and see the estimates, you can see that salespeople could either build this estimate directly on the surface of the quote, or salespeople could also collaborate with your project delivery team, which could be estimating on a project plan. So, if I look at the project that is mapped to the quote line. So let's see the detailed project plan. And the project plan also has an estimate of the type of people that are needed on each of these tasks. And each of these types of people, come with a specific cost, and a bill rate. And this uses the rich multi-dimensional capabilities, for pricing and costing resources that we have in Project Operations. So if you look at the structure of the price list, on a price list, you can have specify your labor prices. You can have markups for your labor, based on overtime or holiday time, or, you know, certain roles have a standard markup of 10% or 20%. And in addition to labor pricing, your prices could also have expenses priced based on categories. So you can charge a certain straight amount for airfare car rental, or you could have a bill rate concept, or a sales rate concept, that takes your cost that you have put in for airfare, and applies a 10% markup over it when you're billing it to your customers. So you have all of those paradigms possible. And in addition, you can also have products, priced as well. You can use products on your projects, and each of those products can come in with a certain rate. So if I make a choice as a sales person to bring estimates from my project plan into the quote, I will obviously have a more credible quote. And now if I go back to the project, that I was on, just now, across the time duration of my project. So for all these tasks, based on the dates, and the project plan, I can see a time phased estimate of how much I'm consuming along a week granularity or a month granularity. So on this note, I would like to shift gears to show you the contracting capabilities that we have. So let me open our contracts list page. So these are all the contracts that I'm responsible for, and show you a few examples of contract that illustrate the power of Project Operations contracting models. So the one that I have open right now, on my screen, is a contract that we have for City Power. City Power and Light is a British customer. So all invoicing, to that customer needs to happen in British Pounds. So if you look at this contract, you can see that the value of the contract, the currency used here is British Pounds. And if you go to the line items on this contract, the line items on the contract are both tied to the same project. And there is one line item that includes expenses. And one line item that includes time or work, that you plan to work on the project. But if you look at the project itself, for this City Power and Light, assembly line designs for City Power and Light. And if I open the estimates of this project, you can see that because this project is being executed out of the US, all of the costs of this project are reported in US Dollars, whereas sales is being reported in British Pounds. So that is the multi-currency situation, or a true multicurrency scenario, where all your costs are in one currency but your revenue, that is, the revenue that you're charging the customer, is in a different currency. And that is illustrated right here. And if I go look at the actuals on this project, to see how actuals are coming in, you can see that all the costs transactions, are coming in with the US Dollar currency, whereas all the revenue transactions or unbilled sales, are all coming in British Pounds. So when the customer receives an invoice, they're seeing the invoice in their currency, which is British Pounds, but all of your costs are all getting calculated in US Dollars. Now, how is the margins for projects like these calculated? So if I look at the contract performance, there you can see that all of the calculations are being performed in your currency. So the system is able to take that British Pounds revenue in British Pounds and convert it and show it to you, in a currency and a percentage that you can understand. So that is a little bit about multicurrency orders. Now, moving forward to a different kind of a contract here. This is a Blue Yonder Installation. And in this contract, we have two line items. And in these two line items, if you notice, point to two separate distinct projects. So basically the customer has two initiatives, which they want build as if they were two line items on a single initiative. And you're able to generate an invoice across the two. And when you look at contract performance, it is bringing together all the initiatives, and showing you a detailed performance, based on the amount of money spent on each of those different projects. So you have contract as an umbrella, to bring together many sub projects, and you can report that at the contract level. But each delivery team, that is working on each of these projects, they can keep to their projects. If you need to, just like we saw in the previous contract for City Power, you can just simply create one project, and have everybody work in that project. Or if you choose so desired, you could create two separate projects, keep the teams focused on their individual projects, but then bring them together as two lines on the same contract. So your customer is able to see one invoice. And then, a third type of contract here, is this one that we have for Adventure Works. Now, on this contract, there is an advanced concept here, a couple of advanced concepts here. There's one which says that we have a not to exceed cap on this contract. So this ensures, that whenever a financial transaction hits the project, it is validated, against that not to exceed limit. To ensure that your customer is never invoiced beyond that limit as specified here in this case, it is 250,000 US Dollars. So anytime a financial transaction, like a time entry, or an expense, or some kind of an expenditure happens on your project, that expenditure is first validated, to ensure can this be invoiced. First of all, is this an invoicable expense? And if it is, how does it violate any invoicing or contractual limits? Can it be invoiced? So all of that is already taken care off, and the system stamps the transaction as a failed, or a valid transaction. And all transactions that are failed cannot be put on an invoice. You have to either renegotiate your contract terms and reevaluate them, or you just have to mark them as non-chargeables so that they're never sent to the customer, which means that you are taking the cost, but not able to get the corresponding revenue. So, those are some of the advanced concepts that I'll be showing you. So there's the not to exceed limit, which gets validated, as I mentioned. And in addition to that, just like the other one with City Power, this contract also has two lines, one for time, and the other for expenses. And one thing unique here is I opened the contract line that is billing for labor, or time expense, time costs. If I look at the customers tab, for the line analysis work, we have two customers paying for it. So you can do that kind of a multi-customer contracts, where, you know, for a particular line item on a contract, or at the contract, entire contract level, you can decide that you're going to split the charges in a certain percentage. Here I've said evenly distributed, or 50-50. But you can do 25-75, or 60-40, or whatever be the split percentage. You can split the charges between two different customers. And, how that gets validated, when financial transactions are getting recorded, I'll just show you that in a bit. But this split percentages or multiple customers, can be decided at the line level. So for example, in this one, in this particular contract for Adventure Works, it is only your time or labor costs, that are being invoiced to two different customers. If you look at expenses, they're all going to one customer. So you can also do that. You can decide the number of customers, and the split percentage at the contract line level, as well as at the contract level. So, now that we know that there is a split for labor, where labor is being charged to two different customers, if you look at the actuals that we have against this particular contract line, you'll see that basically anytime there was a time transaction, that got split between Adventure Works Engineering and Adventure Works. So this was a time entry for five hours, but it got split as 50, 52.5 hours to Adventure Works Engineering, and another 2.5 to Adventure Works. So that is a little bit about how, you know, multi customer contracts takes into effect. And we also, so how not to exceed limit, will get validated against each of these contracts, and contract lines. And that not to exceed limit can also be set up at the line level or for a specific customer. In this case, you know, because the contract is getting paid by Adventure Works Engineering and Adventure Works, each of those two customers can have a slightly different contractual cap. So then, when the actual is recorded, it will get validated against that cap, to market as flagged as a valid actual, or an invoicable one, or a invalid or failed actual. So that is a little bit about those, a couple of advanced concepts, which is basically multi customer contracts and contractual limits or caps. Now let's move on to a new concept. Again, this is new. In the April 2021 release. This is a contract. And if you look at the line items, again there is only one project that the contract or the delivery team is working on. But then in that project, there is a prototype phase, and there is a full implementation phase. So, if you go to that project, the prototype phase of that project is tied to a fixed price contract line, as we can see, whereas the full implementation of that project, is tied to a time and material contract line. So when do we see this kind of mapping where certain tasks are mapped to the contract line? So if I go, open up the prototype work contract line, I can see the tasks that are associated to this contract line. And I can see that, okay, there are four tasks that are associated to this contract line. And if I go to the full implementation work, I can see that contract line has a different set of tasks. But if you go to the project itself, the project has one team and one set of tasks. So these are tasks that are part of that project plan. And the project is managed as a single unitary project plan with both prototype phase and full implementation on the same project. And, but then each of these phases, is tied to a slightly different contract line, to ensure that the prototype phase, is built on a fixed price basis, while the installation of arms and telemedicine diagnostics, which are part of the full implementation phase, they are being billed out as a TNM billing method. And that you can see, a project manager can see that. Also on the project page, just like we saw in the contract. You can also look at it on the project page and see, okay which, these are all my tasks, but how are they linked? Are they linked to the prototype work? And are they chargeable or not? So that is the next thing. And again, as part of the April release, I also want to put the spotlight, one of the newer capabilities that we have in this area, is the concept of a retainer based contracts. That is a fifth one that I would like to show you, in this contract for Consolidated Fabrication Book. What we have is, we have only one line here. It's a pretty simple contract, it has a time and material, and maybe there's one product line. But, we have the concept of a retainer or a pre-payment. And now retainer is, as you are aware of, or as you may be familiar with, it is a contract type where irrespective of how your costs are coming, you would have a fixed invoice scheduled with your customer. As in, it's not a fixed price bid, it is still a variable consumption based contract when it comes to the overall value of what the customer is paying you. It is still variable. But, you are invoicing the customer a fixed portion, of, or a consistent numeric value every period. It could be monthly, weekly or it could be one time payment. But you are invoicing the customer or a fixed amount, every certain period. And based on how your costs are coming in, you would just do a reconciliation. And only invoice the customer if there is any additional work. Or you could say, okay I'll save that, because at the start of the month I'm going to invoice for the next retainer, and then I'm going to reconcile. So that is the concept of retainer. And there is also a slightly different but conceptually still the same, variant of retainer called advanced, customer prepayment or advanced. Both of which are fairly newer capabilities to our product. And you can see here that I have invoiced a retainer, for $4,000. And I have about $10 available on this retainer because I already used $3,990. So that is, and when you're setting up a retainers, you have the capability to set up a schedule of retainers along a certain invoice frequency. It could be say, monthly, bi-monthly, or weekly. You can set up an invoice frequency and then create your retainers based on that frequency, for a certain amount. So that is a little bit about the whole contractual setup, and all the ways, advanced ways in which you can set up a contract. And we also, to summarize, we also saw how you can use the project plan and the estimation behind the project plan, and the configurable price list to build a credible quote, which can then turn into a fairly advanced project services contract. So that is our quick walkthrough, of the deal management capabilities. We will now just review, call to actions. Here's a quick call to action, for those of you that are interested to know more about Project Operations, how it works, how to configure it, use it. We have a detailed help documentation sites. So please visit our help documentation at aka.ms/ProjOpsHelp. We also have a very rich, friendly community. Please join Dynamics Communities. You can see the links on the slide. And we are also very active on Yammer and LinkedIn, please do join us there for, you know, different kinds of people and different kinds of conversations, based on the people that are on each of these community sites. And if you have this burning, aching idea, that you want to give us for a new feature in Project Operations, we are always looking at our ideas sites. So please log in to ProjOpsIdeas@aka.ms, and please log an idea for us. And we're always looking there, and do upvote, do solicit your friends and relatives to upvote your ideas, because that's how we break the tie between ideas. And related sessions, we have a few sessions that are related to the content in this video. There's one session on new concepts and Project Operations. There's one deep dive into invoicing and revenue recognition. There's one on project planning and resource utilization, which is kind of taking off from where deal management leaves, in the general business process. And of course we also have an introduction and roadmap session. So those are a few sessions that could be of interest. And thanks a lot, for joining us on this video. (upbeat music)