Category: Operational Efficiency
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Top Professional Services Time Tracking Software Compared: Features, Pricing, and Benefits
You know how it goes. It’s the end of the month, the invoices flood in, and you’re trusting that your contractors or hourly employees tracked their time accurately. But in professional services (PS), time tracking is far more than just a payroll function. Professional services time tracking is the practice of capturing hours as the…
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How Expense Management Software Prevents Revenue Leakage in PS Firms
Revenue leakage in professional services (PS) rarely announces itself. It accumulates in small gaps: a client dinner logged too late to invoice, a project material categorized as overhead when the contract made it billable, a consultant’s travel expenses sitting unsubmitted at month-end while the invoice has already gone out. Individually, each gap seems small. But…
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From Data Chaos to Clarity: How Kantata Helps Professional Services Firms See, Decide, and Act Faster
For many professional services (PS) firms, data lives everywhere and nowhere at once. Project details sit in one system. Financials live in another. Forecasts rely on spreadsheets that get updated just often enough to be risky. Leaders know the information exists, but pulling it together takes time they don’t have. IDC’s The Business Value of…
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The Productivity Multiplier: More Projects, Zero Added Headcount
When professional services firms talk about efficiency, they often point to automation or incremental gains. The organizations IDC studied for The Business Value of Kantata were aiming higher. They wanted to change how work happens. What they found wasn’t just a better way to manage projects, but a model that helped them deliver more value…
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The 3 Pillars of AI Maturity
AI has already rewritten the rules for professional services. The firms moving fastest aren’t simply experimenting with it — they’re reshaping their entire operating models around it. The real differentiator now is AI maturity: the ability to weave artificial intelligence into the core of how a business thinks, plans, and delivers. AI maturity goes beyond…
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IT Services Leaders: The Key to Answering Tough Business Questions? Smarter Forecasting
Let’s just cut to the chase—accurate capacity forecasting is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s your frontline defense against chaos. When resources are misaligned, it’s not just about missed deadlines—it’s missed revenue, burned-out teams, and clients quietly heading for the exit. And when your boss comes knocking with tough questions like: “Do we have the right…
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Kantata Feature Spotlight: How Talan Streamlines Financial Operations with Intercompany Accounting
Talan, a leading global consulting and technological expertise group which accelerates the transformation of its clients through data, innovation and technology, faced challenges managing internal transactions between business units across its global network. Following a strategic imperative to streamline financial operations and enhance transparency in the face of rapid expansion, Talan turned to Kantata. This…
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Breaking Free from Data Silos – The Key to Professional Services Success
Having access to real-time financial and operational data is essential for making smart, impactful decisions. However, many companies find themselves tangled in a web of different tools and software, leading to data silos that block real-time insights. Imagine data silos as giant containers on a farm—while they keep information secure, they also limit the flow…
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Building Connections: How Community Engagement Elevates User Experience
Are you a professional services software user who dreams of spending less time drowning in updates and more time doing things that spark joy? Joining a community might just be your golden ticket. Not only will you get access to peers in your industry, but you’ll also feel like part of a secret society that…
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Kantata Feature Spotlight: How Scott Logic Maintains Revenue Accuracy With ‘What-If’ Modeling
In the world of consulting, where time is quite literally money, managing multiple currencies, cost rates, and project variables is fundamental to both the bottom line and strategic growth. This Kantata feature spotlight highlights how Scott Logic, a bespoke software consultancy, is leveraging Kantata’s ‘What-If’ Scenarios to tackle these complexities head-on, ensuring precise forecasting and…
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Breaking Down Tech Debt: Strategies for a Healthier Tech Ecosystem
When considering critical issues regarding technology used by businesses, technical debt is a concept that often gets overlooked, yet its effects can ripple through an organization significantly hindering growth and efficiency. The recent webinar “Tech Debt Unmasked: The Culprit Behind Your Costliest Blind Spots and Bottlenecks” brought together industry experts from TSIA and Kantata to…
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Breaking the Blame Game: Key Strategies for Sales-Services Alignment
In the fast-paced world of professional services organizations, achieving alignment between sales and services is crucial for success. Too often, these two departments find themselves in a blame game, where promises made by sales are perceived as unattainable by services, leading to financial and client outcomes that fall short of expectations. To break this cycle…
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Kantata Feature Spotlight: How West Monroe Completes Month End in One Day
This Kantata feature spotlight highlights how leading digital consulting firm West Monroe leverages Kantata’s robust period management capabilities to build accurate forecasts and manage resources proactively. The Strategic Imperative West Monroe needed a solution that could support a disciplined operational cadence. Closing weekly and monthly periods on a strict timeline is very important to West…
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Benchmarking for Success: Performance Measurement in Professional Services
In the fast-paced world of professional services, staying ahead of the competition requires not just hard work and talent but a strategic approach to performance measurement. Understanding how your organization measures up against industry standards and the highest performers in your sector is crucial. Benchmarking, particularly against well-established professional services KPIs, offers a clear, data-driven…
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The 5 Biggest Barriers to Resource Management Governance
Most professional services (PS) companies know they need better resource management, but they find themselves running into the same obstacles over and over again. Despite investing in new systems and processes, their efforts keep getting derailed. To help these organizations better understand the role governance plays in their long-term success, Kantata has sponsored new research…
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Shaping a Future of Excellence: Kantata’s Vision for the Professional Services Cloud
By Michael Speranza, CEO, Kantata In an ever-evolving professional services landscape, services organizations are grappling with business opportunities and challenges that require more effective technology solutions. I am thrilled to unveil Kantata’s vision for the Professional Services Cloud (PS Cloud), which reshapes the boundaries for what technology designed for services organizations needs to do. As…
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Effective Scaling Strategies for Smaller Consulting Firms
By Moira Alexander, Founder of PMWorld 360 Magazine and Lead-Her-Ship Group Of the approximately 2.4 million professional services (PS) and consulting services (CS) businesses in the US, a whopping 96.3% employ less than 20 people. With a complex project lifecycle, massive competition, and limited resources, smaller firms face tremendous challenges when it comes to scaling…
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Optimizing the Professional Services Value Chain: How to Demonstrate Value at Every Stage of the Project Lifecycle
Powerful forces are reshaping the professional services industry, changing client expectations. Demand is volatile. Competition is fierce. And needs evolve rapidly. To win projects, meet client expectations, and build long-term relationships, professional services firms must adapt, too. Traditionally, sales conversations centered around exactly what the customer was buying. For product-based businesses, it was all about…
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Scaling After an Acquisition: Strategies That Guarantee Success
By Moira Alexander, Founder of PMWorld 360 Magazine and Lead-Her-Ship Group The recent acquisition of a business is certainly a cause for celebration, but there is still much work to be done to make sure both companies are integrated into one well-functioning entity in order to secure future success. In this article, we will delve…
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Why Your Integrated Data Matters
Your company has tons of data. You can get it from your workers clocking in and out, the amount of work done per day per person, cash flow, and many more elements of everyday work. But if you don’t have any way of tracking this data, then there’s no way to know how it affects…
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What is Operations Management and Why Do You Need It?
Running any professional services business is complicated, even for experienced managers and C-level executives. But when an organization grows – and the range of responsibilities and team members in the workforce grows along with it – it can be overwhelming. While detailed resource management and project management is crucial to taking control of the day-to-day…
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How To Accurately Estimate Projects for IT Services and Consulting
In the worlds of IT services and consulting, it’s not enough to provide great projects that benefit clients. These projects need to be planned in detail so that companies can keep budgets and timelines in check while providing clients with work that meets their high expectations. But in a hectic, fast-paced industry, it can be…
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The Three Biggest Resource Forecasting Challenges and How to Solve Them
The latest episode of Kantata’s Professional Services Pursuit Podcast focuses on why resource forecasting continues to be one of the largest inhibitors at services organizations, and recommendations for how to overcome this challenge. Banoo Behboodi hosts the episode, with special guest Marc Lacroix, who is a partner at RTM Consulting and on the board at…
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Project Burn Rate: How to Effectively Gauge Your Project Progress
Even the most experienced professional services businesses can have trouble tracking project costs without a reliable system. Thankfully, there is a reliable process for gauging financial progress so that project managers can make effective decisions before issues arise – project burn rate. If you think of your project like a candle wick, burning from one…
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5 Ways To Improve Business Performance
As businesses begin their new fiscal year, questions are bound to come up about what teams across the organization can do to improve performance and ensure the business is able to hit ambitious targets. In this blog, we’ll look at five keys that will help professional services organizations improve business performance: Define the Present and…
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Cloud Collaboration: What Is It and Why You Need It
Every professional services company is the sum total of not just the talented employees that make it up, but of the great work produced through their collaboration. The skills of each resource can come together to create great work and the shortcomings of any individual team member can be made up for through the skills…
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Workflows: The Next Step in Your Project Management Evolution
No task stands alone in a project. Every single piece of work comes within a connected stream of decisions, whether large or small, that lead to a complete project. But many companies become so focused on getting individual pieces of work done that they neglect the larger connective tissue between them. These are known as…
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5 Simple Ways to Smooth Out Your Tech Integrations
Modern professional services businesses don’t just run on one type of software solution, they thrive on an ecosystem of technology that provides support for many different daily business needs. It’s no longer enough to simply create a project within a project management solution; organizations must also manage their resources in detail, organize the financial impact…
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Automate Your Workspace With PSA Software
In any industry, you want to maximize the billable hours provided by your workforce. The work you do for your clients is the heartbeat of your business, so you want to spend most of your time meeting your clients’ needs and finishing projects as far in advance of deadlines as possible. If you get to…
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10 Important Aspects of Project Efficiency
This blog covers the 10 important aspects of delivering successful projects in the professional services industry.
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Quick Guide: How to Define & Calculate Billable Performance to Target
Services firms have a profound need for business intelligence (BI) to make sense of vast information in order to make profitable decisions. Without this clarity, success is just an illusion. So how do you move from busy to breakthroughs? The following article will discuss one of the five most critical metrics that every services business…
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Stay on Budget With Project Accounting
If you’ve worked in project management for any period of time, you understand how crucial it is for professional services teams to stay on budget. This isn’t just about execution, it also involves rigorous planning. Setting realistic project budgets requires you to level-set with clients, thoroughly going over expectations and needs to ensure that what…
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7 Key Components of a Change Management Strategy
Change can be intimidating for any business. Whether it’s at a professional services organization that has done things a certain way for decades or at a new startup business that’s still figuring out what works well for their nascent teams, changing processes, technology, company structure, methods of communication, and more can be intimidating and confusing.…
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The 6 Models of Change Management: Which Is Right For Your Professional Services Business?
Change management is crucial for professional services organizations, but it can feel overwhelming. Whether your business is adapting to new technology or shifting core processes, managing change is essential for long-term success and staying competitive. Through this article, we highlight six proven change management models, each offering unique approaches to guiding organizations through transitions. Understanding…
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What is a Project Proposal and Why is it Important?
This blog answers the following questions: What is a project proposal and why is a project proposal important in services success?
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Unlocking The Power of Project Budgets With Kantata
This is part 2 of a three-part series on how your professional services business can unlock hidden value with the Kantata Professional Services Cloud. Learn more about the power of resource allocation in our previous post in the series. The Hidden Value of Project Budgets If you’ve been working in professional services for any length…
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Intelligent Orchestration: The Key to the Future of Professional Services
Successful resource and project management in the modern era of professional services needs to be backed up and guided by dependable data insights. But simply having a data lake of potential insights pulled from the many different software solutions that your company runs on is not enough and is, frankly, overwhelming to most busy managers.…
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Workforce Optimization: Getting More for Less
Every team manager dreams of getting their business to a place of true workforce optimization, where decision-makers have the tools they need to make the most out of limited resources, hours, and employees. This can only happen when an organization is working at peak performance. However, focusing on the strategy and discipline that leads to…
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Real Life Insights Into Professional Services Strategy and Operations Roles
Melissa Korzun, the Managing Director of Client Transformation, Strategy and Operations at TeleTracking recently joined host Matt Finch on The Professional Services Pursuit podcast from Kantata. This episode sheds light on Melissa’s approach to transforming TeleTracking’s operational imperatives and how that has helped to define the business’s organizational direction and culture. Melissa opens by pointing…
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Building the Optimal Implementation Team
So you’re ready to make the move to the Kantata Professional Services Cloud and your Client Success Manager (CSM) is asking for dates and times for the kickoff and wondering who will be involved in your implementation. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all the upfront important decisions that need to be made. So here’s…
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What Sets the Highest Performing Professional Services Teams Apart?
One critical component of successfully growing and scaling a product-centric business is maintaining a high-performing services team that can hit the ground running at the start of each engagement and deliver value to customers quickly. Product companies that get a strong reputation for customer service can build on that foundation, using glowing reviews and references…
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How Closing Financial Periods on Time Fosters Business Predictability
It’s the end of the month again. Actually, it’s already eight days past month-end, and you’re chasing different departments for the information you would need to close the financial period. Your team is scrambling to hunt down revenue that was supposed to be recognized this month. What happened to that revenue? Until you can answer these…
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Make Every Minute Count: Why Time Tracking Still Matters
When it comes to time management, companies in the services industry need to strike a balance between oversight and insight. Understanding the value of time tracking and how to manage it in a positive way will help your services company stay ahead and build even greater success.
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The Critical Role of Sales Engineering in Product Success
Learn 3 critical roles that sales engineers should play in the long-term success of a product at your services organization.
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Why the Professional Services Project Life Cycle Needs More Focus on Collaboration
Project life cycles live and die on good collaboration. Here’s how you can improve your project management strategies through team work.
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13 Tips & Tricks to Maintain A Healthy Work Life Balance
Today, it is harder today than ever to pull yourself away from work—thanks, in large part, to mobile technology. So, how do we manage to balance work and life today? Even when work was strictly considered a 9-5 commitment, trying to maintain a work life balance has always been a major stress on the workforce.…
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10 Performance Metrics Examples Project Managers Can’t Afford to Miss
Project managers MUST learn how to leverage key performance indicators (KPIs). Check out these 10 popular performance metrics that you can’t afford to miss.
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The Four Biggest Threats to Profit in Services
Growth isn’t automatically coupled with profits — this blog explains the 4 most common issues associated with profitable project management.
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How to Measure Planned and Actual Utilization Percentages
Do you know the difference between planned and actual utilization? This blog teaches you how to measure both metrics to help drive business.
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The Five Most Important Factors in Professional Relationships (According to Modern Thought Leaders)
What makes great professional relationships? Thought leaders from Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Chron weigh in on the five most important factors in 2017.