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Sales of professional services automation (PSA) software have failed to take off in the way many IT industry analysts anticipated when the category first emerged in the late 1990s.

However, customers that have invested in PSA - which semi-automates service provision processes such as project management, time and expenses capture and billing - are already reporting striking business benefits from their deployments.

Analyst David Hofferberth of IT industry research company the Aberdeen Group, an internationally recognised expert on PSA, recently surveyed 55 companies that have deployed PSA packages.

Respondents - who came from services companies such as IT consultancies and law firms, or the internal services division of large organisations (such as IT departments) - reported better management control over projects and more effective resource allocation.

Employee utilisation rates, for example, rose an average of 8%, says Hofferberth. "That translates into three or four weeks per year of extra billable project work," he says. Invoice cycle times, he adds, were typically cut by around 10 days. Because of the savings they made, most organisations recouped the cost of their PSA implementation in less than a year.

The case for deploying PSA software is extremely strong, agrees Rob Vergeer, vice president of the consulting services arm of storage management software company Legato Software in Europe - and a PSA user.

Legato Consulting Services has rolled out PSA software from supplier Changepoint across its global operations, and the results have been "transformational", according to Vergeer. They include: more accurate customer billing, quicker and less costly time and expenses capture and approval, greater visibility into potential sales revenue, improved resource forecasting, and increased customer satisfaction. "Employee productivity is up between 4% and 5% - that justifies the investment in itself," he says.

Similar benefits were seen at French steel company, Usinor, which also deployed software from Changepoint throughout its internal IT department. The project was managed by consultants from Artemis International, and according to Patrick Ternier, president of Artemis' French and German operations, the 930-seat implementation is Europe's largest PSA deployment to date.

One of the key benefits cited by Ternier is improved data management. Usinor's IT department has 482 in-house consultants and about the same number of third-party consultants working on over 1,000 discrete projects across six regional sites. All consultants working on all projects now access project data from a single, centralised system.

"This means data is more coherent and that there is a unique baseline for performance management. Overall, this has led to better control and management of activities within the organisation," says Ternier. In effect, he adds, Usinor has transformed a traditional corporate IT organisation into a flexible, dynamic provider of IT services to a wide range of business units.

Managers at both companies have been so pleased with these benefits that they are planning further investments in PSA. Legato, says Vergeer, plans to integrate the PSA software with its back-office Oracle Financials accounting system, its Microsoft Outlook email package, and its customer relationship management applications from Onyx and Frontrange.

Usinor, meanwhile, is planning to implement Changepoint's request management module to support its IT help desk operations and to evaluate Changepoint's OLAP reporting system.

Many organisations go on to extend their use of PSA software after its initial deployment, says Hofferberth. "They see what PSA helps them to achieve in terms of improving business processes, increasing operational control, enhancing executive visibility, and enabling them to measure performance more accurately, and they just want more of it."