Many of our customers are using Fulcrum for different types of consulting projects, meaning they’re delivering on projects on behalf of someone else — as a subcontractor to a prime contractor, to a city or municipality, or to another government agency. I wanted to take a moment to review some of the many advantages of the Fulcrum platform for consulting engineers, business analysts, field services companies, or software developers, and give a little background on why so many choose Fulcrum as a basis for completing their projects.
Focus on the deliverables
In most of these scenarios, consultants find Fulcrum useful because their primary goal, and why a client has hired them, is to deliver results — reports, answers, designs, data — not to build software application. They love Fulcrum because it solves a difficult problem without requiring them to build their own tools from scratch. We all know that reinventing wheels (like building your own data collection tool) is a pretty efficient way to erode the profitability of your client projects. So Fulcrum provides an off-the-shelf solution to get to the results their clients are paying for.
Scalability
Because of our scalable, usage-based plans, Fulcrum is a great sustainable solution to complete consulting projects. As your workload changes, whether due to expansion or seasonal shifts, you can scale Fulcrum’s plan levels and usage to match project demands. For instance, project lifecycles often return, such as asset inventories, where you revisit archival projects like a “2016 inventory review.” With Fulcrum, you can design asset survey projects that make it cost-effective for clients to return for updates. Having the workflow already established in Fulcrum allows you to streamline subsequent iterations, making projects like the 2016 inventory even more profitable.
By developing tools and systems within Fulcrum, you reduce your operational costs over time, which in turn lowers costs for your clients. This efficiency enables you to deliver the results your clients need faster and more effectively than competitors. In a consulting marketplace driven by “lowest bidder” dynamics, this edge lets you save costs without sacrificing the quality of your outcomes.
Better interaction with clients
Fulcrum offers significant benefits for service projects, particularly in transparency, collaboration, and reporting with clients. Instead of using Fulcrum solely as a behind-the-scenes tool, you can collaborate directly with your customers.
Fulcrum’s suite of features supports effective management-level oversight of field services work. Whether handling tasks directly in the field or managing forms, data rollup, and reporting from the back office, the platform streamlines operations.
Let’s explore some features our consulting customers find essential for delivering exceptional results to clients.
Sharing
Our Data Shares functionality gives you a resource for providing your clients with easy-to-use download URLs for grabbing the latest data right from Fulcrum, without having to have a login, or the need to know anything about how to use Fulcrum. Email them a URL to a KML file and they can pop it open in Google Earth and see the data themselves.
Rapid response
The drag-and-drop app designer offers a ton of flexibility in designing the field data requirements. When the inevitable (and naturally, unbudgeted) change request comes down the pipe from the client, you can revise your forms on-the-fly and they’ll be automatically redistributed to field staff, with minimal overhead.
Management tools
Because Fulcrum has custom roles and user permissions to control who can do what, you can give your customer direct access to see work progress as it’s happening. You don’t need to limit it to monthly or quarterly status updates, they can come inside and see how things are going for themselves. Transparency is something clients love, when they can get it.
Show, don’t tell
Before you even win the work with the client, when you’re showcasing what you can do, you can show them how quickly it’s going to work, rather than telling them in a proposal document or a PowerPoint slide. You can build an app in 15 minutes, bring a tablet to the proposal presentation, and show them the workflow in action. It’ll speak much louder than that Excel chart about efficiency or the Visio diagram about your process.
It’s all about results
Being in the consulting business is all about efficiency. As a services consultant, you’re brought in to bring answers, not make software.