Digitalisation push through Corona: Effects on time recording and project controlling

"Corona is digitising the German economy." This was the title of the Ifo Institute's publication at the beginning of August. Results of a survey among German HR managers. In the majority of German companies (55 per cent), the Corona pandemic has driven the digital transformation. For example, 31 per cent of the companies introduced computer programmes for collaboration within the company. Another 36 per cent intensified the use of already existing digital tools.

Diverse digitalisation topics

There is a wide variety of topics in the area of digitalisation. In addition to the efforts of many companies mentioned in the ifo survey to provide their employees with a location- and time-independent workplace - keyword digital workplace - many companies are currently also concerned with creating a "pandemic plan for IT" in order to be better prepared for crises in the future. For many sectors that are particularly suffering from the Corona crisis, such as stationary trade, travel agencies and tour operators or trade fair and congress organisers, the digitalisation of their business models is often the only remaining possibility to save their business.

Special boom for digitisation consultants

As a result of the current digitisation pressure in many companies, many consulting firms - despite or perhaps because of Corona - are assuming a special boom, especially if their service portfolio deals with digitisation topics or they have specialised in sectors such as those mentioned above, where the pressure to digitise is particularly high.

But the consulting firms also face the challenge of dealing with the Corona-related changes in their daily work. Home office, meetings via video conference or joint access to documents and records with colleagues and consulting clients must be mastered both technically and organisationally in order to be able to profit from the expected boom.

Challenge: Time recording and project controlling must also be digitalised

Furthermore, consulting firms are faced with the task of finally digitising time recording and project controlling. In concrete terms, this means:

• • An end to Excel-based time recording
  • Mobile access/cloud operation of the time recording system

  • Continuous process from quotation to invoice for seamless project controlling

As a cloud-based software solution for time recording and project controlling, ZEP offers a powerful and flexible platform for digitising these two business processes.

Time Recording and Project Controlling with ZEP: Practical Example Infocient Consulting GmbH

One company that made its time recording and project controlling crisis-proof well before Corona is the Infocient Consulting GmbH from Mannheim. Infocient Managing Director Jochen Waltz explains: "ZEP makes our work much easier. The solution is web-based and can be used by all our employees regardless of location and time. The use in the cloud computing model also has the advantage that we don't have to worry about the operation of the application and don't have to maintain our own IT resources. A big plus with ZEP is that we don't have to record project times on a project- or client-specific basis, but can intuitively track the course of the day. The billing module rounds things off for us, because we can transfer the data recorded in the time recording directly into the invoicing. The activity record for our clients is then automatically attached to the invoice without any additional manual work being required."

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