Scheduling at PKF with Beeye

Work organization and mission scheduling have always been at the heart of the operational efficiency of audit and accounting firms. As we all know, this is no easy task. Initially tested by the audit division of the Parisian firm PKF Arsilon, the Beeye solution was quickly extended to other activities, and eventually to all French offices. Luxembourg, Jersey, Ecuador have followed suit, and other PKF offices are now interested. Are their needs the same as yours? Why did they choose Beeye? What does its use change to the life of these offices? How do they appreciate the benefits of the solution? Take 5 minutes to find out.?

Scheduling: a contentious issue

Allocating the right resources to the right assignments at the right time is the goal of any scheduling process. Easier said than done?

In large and medium-sized firms, for audit, accounting and consulting assignments, scheduling is sometimes a subject of tension requiring arbitration. Everyone wants to have the most experienced employees to ensure the success of their missions and offer the best service to their clients, even if it means depriving other teams of them. Jean-Gabriel Boulic, Managing Partner, PKF Arsilon France

The hunt for talent can go as far as overbooking, this process by which a manager reserves an auditor all year long without necessarily having the missions to employ him or her... just to make sure that he or she has the resources he or she considers to be the most reliable. Even if it means moving away from an optimal allocation of resources...?

To achieve this objective, some firms have set up a scheduling department - one or more full-time staffers in the larger firms, or a partner who takes charge of scheduling in addition to his or her own assignments - in the smaller firms. With 2 ensuing problems:

• Do the people in this position have sufficient knowledge of the needs of the missions and the required skills? The expertise and experience of each person?
• The construction and, even worse, the follow-up and updating of schedules, most often developed on Excel, is quite time-consuming, and ultimately pretty limited: little collaboration, little visibility, no forecasting. All this with questionable ergonomics!

“A few years ago, we were using a simple scheduling tool developed in-house, but we were not really satisfied with the solution, says Jean-Gabriel Boulic, PKF Arsilon France. We couldn’t leave it at that.”?

What can we expect from a scheduling system today??

To be a quality player

The first objective of scheduling is the quality of the service provided. The main goal remains to allocate the best possible professional to the most appropriate assignment. “Scheduling must become a quality player,” summarizes Jean-Gabriel Boulic. Meeting deadlines is part of this commitment. You have to be able to be warned in time of any risk of blunder.

Quality is also about punctuality. It’s about getting everything done on time! It is crucial to set new rules for how teams work Didier Arias, partner in the Paris office?

Steering the firm

Particularly at a time when it is more difficult to recruit, scheduling must be far-sighted in order to deploy its human resources better, while remaining flexible enough to adapt to the firm’s structural requirements as well as to the tensions of the moment. In addition to management requirements, there are also reporting requirements: generating regular reports on assignments, workloads and the firm’s results.

Leading the team

The well-being of employees is vital. The right balance between their professional and private lives must be respected. “It’s a matter of business continuity for the firm,” says Sébastien Sauvageot, Partner in the Paris office. Scheduling should respond to generational aspirations, especially those of junior staff. Giving meaning to their actions, showing them the objectives they have achieved, giving them time for reflection or discovery are all imperative today. Finally, scheduling must be a real management tool, “which must, for example, enable staff to work with different partners and team leaders so as to broaden their experience and improve their employability, while smoothing out conflicts between colleagues” adds Jean-Gabriel Boulic

It is crucial to set new rules for how teams work Didier Arias, partner in the Paris office Rita Rakib, partner in the Luxembourg office

Protecting junior auditors

Turnover is picking up pace among junior auditors throughout the world. This is not good news for anyone, as the quality of our people is what makes our firms valuable.

We have to protect junior auditors. They can quickly find themselves torn between the direct demands of different managers. Especially if they are very good! And yet, faced with a superior, a young graduate will find it difficult to judge what he or she is entitled to refuse... without harming either the client or his or her career. The result is additional stress, and sometimes overwork, which is harmful to well-being. We wanted to improve this situation and needed an intelligent scheduling tool to do so. Rita Rakib

What does Beeye change in firms??

How is the scheduling faring today in PKF offices that have implemented Beeye?

Didier Arias sums up: “All the characteristics of the staff are integrated in Beeye: their expertise, experience, professional interests, known qualities, etc. But also their personal address, which we need when assigning a certain mission to a certain staffer in order to know whether it will take place 10 kilometers from his home... or 100.

The different types of missions were analyzed and subdivided into tasks, to which the recommended time to be spent was allocated and discussed. The AI integrated in Beeye then recommends the best possible choice for each mission.

In July we planned the next 12 months in Beeye, so as to foresee the overload or underload. Beeye gives us indicators of the match between hours needed and hours available.”

There is still a weekly organizational meeting, but it is much more efficient. Half an hour suffices most of the time to agree on the next two weeks. We project Beeye on the screen and, because the interface immediately highlights scheduling conflicts, we can focus on those contentious cases. Rita Rakib

What has already changed:

• Real visibility of operations: who is doing what, who is available, who is busy...,
• Better allocation of employees to missions,
• Employees enter their time put in more easily,
• Managers are more disciplined, ? The schedule has become a management tool.?

Today, each manager is in charge of his or her team’s schedule, on a tool that can be consulted by his or her employees. He or she has to hand in his or her elements before the scheduling meeting, which is much shorter than before. Beeye helps to discipline everyone. Jean Medernach Partner, PKF Audit & Conseil Luxembourg?

Benefits of the solution

For Sébastien Sauvageot, the benefits of using Beeye for work scheduling are threefold at the outset:

Visibility: In the age of telecommuting and home-office, management is changing. We advise and support our employees wherever they are; Beeye is a collaborative tool that changes the way we communicate as a team.

Steering: Beeye makes it possible to monitor the budgets and profitability of missions as they are carried out, in real time, with comparison vs. the previous year. The tool issues alerts and we can intervene in time, warn the customer, and possibly charge extra.

Management: We no longer waste time looking for scheduling conflicts, since they are directly indicated by Beeye. Based on this information, we can devote our scheduling meetings to plug these gaps. Furthermore, it saves a lot of time in the scheduling process!?

Before Beeye, scheduling could be complicated, and discussions lasted long. Today I estimate that I spend only two hours overall per week on. Rita Rakib

Beeye is a source of confidence for:

• The partners: the ability to hold the helm with maximum visibility;
• The staff: “the security of knowing what they have to do in the coming weeks” (Didier Arias).

Flexibility of the tool and its publisher?

The editor was able to adapt its tool to our specific needs, in co-creation with us. Beeye is a company of engineers, always listening to possible new developments. They also helped us to build our own repository, both for auditing and for public accounting. Jean-Gabriel Boulic

Co-creation is not possible with all publishers. For many, the reflex would be rather ‘take it or leave it!’ With Beeye, we were able to create a nomenclature adapted to the audit work. We appreciated the flexibility of the tool and received sound advice and support from a team that listens. The tool adapts to the different activities, but also to the different partners, who can easily customize the reporting to their specific uses and needs. Rita Rakib