The injection of statistical insights combined with the evolutionary realization that information can be a valuable asset has and will continue to have serious echoes in the business world. For decades, being smart has equaled success, and analytics has played an integral role in generating competitive advantages. The importance of analytics for professionals is the importance of making good decisions.
Born out of a burning passion for analytics and professional services, Bric stands out among the crowd with its software maximizing your team’s time and talents through analytics. Based in Omaha, NE, Bric spreads its tentacles to users in 75 different countries and aims to provide analytics to 10,000 companies in 2018. Incepted in 2014, Bric started as an internal project by three professional service firms: a design agency, a software development shop, and a data science consultancy, eventually panning out as its own startup.
Unmatched Product Features
Primarily used by teams of designers, writers and developers, its product combines project planning, time tracking, and task management to automatically analyze your employee utilization and financial performance. Upon implementation of Bric, data is collected that provides you with analytics on employee utilization, capacity, scheduling conflicts, and financials. This way, Bric helps in accurately planning your team’s calendar, thereby enabling you to confidently get back to do the work you love.
Additionally, Bric automatically finds patterns in your team’s timesheets, which are then used to recommend more accurate project plans. Bric provides the following unrivaled features for a monthly subscription per managed employee.
- Project Planning – Bric alerts you to schedule conflicts, calculates charges, and recommends more accurate project plans.
- Project Management – Irrespective of what happens, Bric provides you with tools to identify changes and respond accordingly.
- Task Management – Know what is finished, in progress and what needs to be done. With time and tasks side-by-side, you are enabled to deliver tasks on time and on budget.
- Time Tracking – Bric allows your team to track time, and compare your planned and tracked time side-by-side.
- Reports – Bric is your company’s information hub—alerting you to potential issues and opportunities.
A Leader who Facilitates Change
Grant Stanley is the visionary who led Bric from the front ever since he took hold of the CEOs chair. Prior to Bric, Grant spent 8 years as the CEO of Contemporary Analysis, which specialized in providing predictive analytics to Fortune 500 companies and political campaigns.
His educational resume includes a degree in Economics from the University of Nebraska, where he received the Horizon Student Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He has even studied Mandarin at the National Pingtung University of Education in Taiwan. Formerly selected as one of the top 40 under 40 businessmen in the Midwest, Grant has been a regular contributor to the Midland’s Business Journal, Silicon Prairie News, and the UNO Alumni Magazine. He has also been featured in the Omaha World Herald, Inc. Magazine, and Entrepreneur Magazine, among various others.
Standing Out from the Crowd
“Too many BI systems provide metrics that are used to punish employees. Once this happens, employees resist or worse stop filling out timesheets and updating project plans,” explains Stanley. Bric has given workforce analytics a new purpose — improving management. This new purpose combined with an easy-to-use product has made people excited to track time and update project plans.
Bric is true software as a service company. It releases new code each week, based on its users’ feedback. Continuous improvement allows the company to capture more of its user’s workflow, and provide them with new analytics to look at their business.
Preparing for the Future PSA Trends
“The first trend will be professional services firms’ pressure to minimize non-billable employees. Consultancies will look to PSA’s to automate account management and administration. This trend will be welcomed by clients that have grown accustomed to digitized support as consumers.
Secondly, the most profitable professional service firms allow partners and managers to specialize on either business development, service delivery, or recruiting/training. However, this requires technology. Traditionally, each partner has been involved in each part of leading the firm, because there was a lack of analytics and reporting,” asserts Stanley.
Future of Continued Innovation
Bric’s advantage is its familiarity with data science and its optimal focus on product design. The company strives to design products that its vast customer base loves. Today, most of its focus centers-around improving its user experience. Bric wants your employees to love tracking time and planning projects. In addition to all these, the company is constantly developing and testing new ways for managers and partners to analyze their businesses.
