Introducing the 2022 Professional Services Automation End-user Survey

By Sarah Edwards and Jared Haleck, Chief Product Officers, Kantata

This is an excerpt of Kantata’s introduction to SPI’s 2022 Professional Services Automation End-User Survey report. Click here to download the full report for free.

This is a very exciting time to be shaping the product vision for a technology vendor serving the needs of professional services organizations. As SPI’s annual Professional Services Benchmark survey shows each year, the professional services industry is truly dynamic and resilient to adversity, with the most mature organizations able to convert that dynamism and resilience into consistent, transformational success – both for their business and for their clients. 

Now, with the publication of the Professional Services Automation End-user Survey, we are able to share new SPI data that clearly shows why PSA solutions are absolutely essential to that success. In the independent research study ahead, you will see that business leaders say that they have seen 8.2% absolute improvement in employee billable utilization and 6.1% improvement in project margin since adopting PSA, with revenue leakage and time to generate invoices cut nearly in half. These improvements, among many others, roll up to an average net present value of approximately $32.0 million driven by PSA across five years for a business with 376 employees, according to ROI analysis conducted by SPI.  

When you see the business-altering outcomes PSA is delivering, it becomes clear why there is more investment and growth happening in the PSA software space than ever before, with the recent merger of Mavenlink and Kimble to form Kantata indicating where the future of PSA is heading: towards providers with the industry focus, domain expertise, and scale to innovate ahead of change.

The rapid growth of providers in the PSA market does carry some risks for buyers, who need to be sure they are choosing a future-fit solution from an ever-expanding list of options. The survey shows that selecting the right solution with the right capabilities does matter, and directly impacts the potential of the tool to deliver value to the organization. Buyers need to be sure they are gravitating towards solutions that:

• Operate in the cloud – 82% of organizations not using cloud-based PSA said they would be moving to a cloud solution soon.
• Have the ability to integrate intuitively with other essential solutions in the services tech stack – PSAs that were integrated with CRM delivered twice the value through improvement in billable utilization compared to those that weren’t integrated with CRM.
• Provide comprehensive real-time visibility to executives – organizations using PSAs that provided comprehensive visibility had an average project margin 4.7% higher than those using PSAs that provided minimal visibility.

Learn More

Download the 2022 Professional Services Automation End-user Survey to discover how PSA solutions are delivering benefits for services organizations. And learn more about how Kantata is taking professional services automation to the next level – as a preface to the end-user survey, we demonstrate some of the many ways the Kantata Professional Services Cloud is driving transformational outcomes for Kantata’s clients – who make up 44% of the surveyed users in this study, the most of any provider.