Beyond Back Office: Turning Your Finance & Operations Data into Competitive Advantage
Webinar Recap
Professional services firms are drowning in data but starving for insights. That was the central theme of our January webinar, where we brought together two practitioners living this reality every day: Kyle Enke, Principal Consultant at OpMentors, and Peter Breglio, EVP of Professional Services at Orion Global Solutions.
The conversation cut straight to the pain points that keep delivery leaders up at night, and showed what’s possible when you stop treating your PSA as a system of record and start treating it as a source of intelligence.
Here are the highlights.
The Rearview Mirror Problem
Kyle framed the challenge perfectly: most firms have robust PSA tools capturing everything from project planning to resource management to financials. But that data lives in silos. Delivery teams operate in one world, finance tracks invoicing separately, and sales works from opportunity records. By the time anyone pieces together project health, the moment to course-correct has passed.
He used the metaphor of driving with a rearview mirror: you can look back and see where you should have swerved, and maybe you’ll remember next time, but you're still reacting to what already happened rather than seeing what's coming.
Peter shared Orion’s journey from spreadsheets and Word docs to Cloud Coach PSA in 2023 to now integrating with Moonnox. The problems they’re solving today are the same ones they solved years ago, he noted. Back then, it just took more time, more people, and more meetings.
Your PSA Has the Answers. Why Doesn’t Sales?
The conversation shifted to where the value of PSA data actually begins: not at project kickoff, but in the sales motion.
Peter described a scenario that will sound familiar to anyone in professional services: a salesperson Slacks him asking, “Have we ever done Service Cloud?” As Orion grows, it’s harder and harder to remember every project, every client, every industry. Even when the data exists, the team has to pull billable resources off client work to talk about a project where the information is already sitting in a system, they just can’t get at it.
“We've seen it happen before,” Peter said. “Solution architects who worked on a specific project leave, and suddenly we’re implementing something similar but don’t know where all the risks were buried.”
What Gets Lost When the Deal Closes?
Kyle called the sales-to-delivery handoff the number one process where firms lose control. If the data required from resource managers, finance, and delivery isn’t clear and in the right places, the project starts on the wrong foot, and you’re constantly playing operational catch-up.
Peter reinforced this from the customer‘s perspective: “The value for our customers is not missing something that was discussed during the sales process. We want to arm our delivery team with the right information so they can deliver. That starts with not losing context from the sales cycle.”
The more context flows through, the less the prospect has to repeat themselves, and the better the customer experience from day one.
From Reactive to Proactive
RAID logs came up as a feature that exists in every PSA but rarely gets used well. Why? Because it‘s manual. Unless someone physically logs a risk, it doesn‘t exist in the system.
Kyle pointed to AI as the unlock: the context of conversations, similar projects, similar industries, etc. can surface risks before they become issues. The goal isn’t just to track what went wrong, but to preemptively identify what might go wrong and have a mitigation plan ready.
Peter agreed: “Proactive means those risks being surfaced before the client...has to pick up the phone to call us.”
The Demo: From Prospect to Proposal in Minutes
Robert Ong, Moonnox Co-Founder and CEO, walked through a fictitious scenario of a ProServ firm prospecting, building a relationship, and then providing a proposal with resource staffing to Nike’s SVP of Global Supply Chain Operations leveraging Moonnox.
The demo showed how context from a sales call, an emailed charter document, Google Drive client stories, and Certinia PSA data all flow into Moonnox and gets synthesized by purpose-built agents into a staffing recommendation and business case. What used to take hours of Slack messages, huddles, and manual assembly now happens in minutes.
As one attendee put it in the chat: “A sales rep can now be minutes away from a business case without ever needing to call Kyle!”
The Takeaway
AI (...and your PSA) are tools. Your collective intelligence is your superpower.
The technology is impressive—but the real challenge is making it real in your organization. That means bringing your team along on the journey, starting small, and creating space for people to learn and grow together.
Peter’s advice for firms still on spreadsheets: focus on the data that’s key to making decisions and driving the business forward. Get that into a structured system first. The bells and whistles can come later.
Watch the Full Recording
To see the complete conversation and demo, get the full webinar recording.
