Zimit
CPQ and Forecasting For Professional Services

As a veteran of the professional services industry, James Cramer, co-CEO of Zimit, reflects on how he and his teams once struggled with forecasting. “We had CRM, PSA, and good project management systems, but we couldn’t forecast revenue and resource demand without a lot of spreadsheets. There was no easyway to do it.” James Cramer and Zimit co-founder, Ali Safadi,believed that theservices industry could be transformed by a solution that would make forecastingrevenue and resource demand simple, always updated, and free ofspreadsheets.

Cramer and Safadi recognized that that key to making forecasting simple was capturing the rich data the gets produced during the sale. Most of the industry does pricing and quoting in spreadsheets. This makes forecasting possible future revenue and resource demand, which is time phased based on the duration of services begin delivered, nearly impossible. Zimit responded with innovation and introduced the service industry’s first CPQ (configure-price-quote) solution. Where CPQ had traditionally focused on product-based companies, Zimit CPQ is purpose built for companies that also sell and deliver professional services. Zimit CPQ simplifies the pricing process and offers a range of capabilities including solution catalogs, project templates, and a rules based level-of-effort estimation. Companies can add resources, packaged service offerings, adjust timelines, add discounts, manage approvals,and even compare different pricing models on the fly, just to name a few. This functionality is delivered in a cloud based, mobile friendly application. By capturing the revenue and resource details in the quoteand combining it with the forecasts from current projects, forecasting becomes simple, always updated, and helps driving decision making in real-time.

Zimit delivers forecast analytics for revenue and margin for the whole company or a single opportunity and level in between. It also calculates total resource demand and availability down to the skill set level.

We provide professional services teamswith the ability to forecast revenue, margin, people and skills. All in real-time. No Spreadsheets

“Our customers forecast revenue and resource demand based on what they are currently delivering and what they currently selling. They can finally ditch the spreadsheets and focus on more valuable activities” says Cramer, co-CEO of Zimit.

A recent Zimit customer, a large international system integrator, was challenged by its executives to simplify and increase the accuracy of its forecasts. Prior to Zimit, its revenue and resource forecasts were separate, unrelated efforts. And, they were spreadsheet based. With Zimit, the company was able to consolidate revenue and resource forecasts, driving it from the same data, and completely eliminate spreadsheets. This cut the forecasting effort by an estimated 90 percent and improved the overall accuracy.

Cramer states that “great software doesn’t come from software companies. It’s comes from great customers. They help you innovate if you listen carefully.” Following that philosophy, Zimit will be soon introduce scenario-based forecasting (what-if), where users can instantly simulate different forecast scenarios by simply changing any assumption like revenue, margin, win/lose, average rate, and other assumptions.This will help executives instantly see the impact on their revenue and people forecast in any scenario, all with the click of a button. This could be a game changer for the professional industry.