Acquiring Efficiency: Advania UK Accelerates Growth and Financial Performance with Kantata
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What Kantata Replaced
Advania UK is an ambitious organization that joined the wider Advania Group in December 2021.
The business first selected Kantata in 2020 as Content+Cloud, going live with 40 users. Originally put in place to unify data across the various Professional Services firms that had come together to form Content+Cloud, Kantata also needed to establish a strong baseline for a business with ambitious growth plans (organic and acquisitive) and be flexible enough to grow and change with the business.
In the intervening years, Kantata has been a linchpin in driving data visibility, strategic planning, and investor confidence, first through the acquisition of Content+Cloud, now Advania UK, by Advania Group, and then through the seamless integration of various other acquired businesses into Advania UK. Kantata now serves over 1,000 users at Advania UK, which continues to grow through further acquisitions and business integrations.
“We weren’t in a position to leverage all the features in the Kantata Professional Services Cloud right away, but we knew Kantata was the Ferrari we’d ultimately need,” says Patrick Thatcher, Group Professional Services Director at Advania UK. “At the time we were just driving around the suburbs, but now we’re on the motorways and soon Kantata will take us to the autobahn.”
Advania UK, part of the Northern European Advania Group, creates sustainable value through innovative digital transformation strategies, scalable IT solutions, managed and professional professional services for private and public sector clients.
The Challenge
Acquisitions and the integrations that follow often result in information silos caused by a patchwork of tools, making it challenging for organizations to unite various parts of the business. At Advania UK (then Content+Cloud) it became a challenge for stakeholders to access the critical management intelligence (MI) and insights needed to perform essential functions like managing resources and monitoring project health.
“At the beginning, we had limited visibility—one organization was using Google Sheets, the other was using basic scheduling tools and some customizations in Office 365,” explains Thatcher.
At the time, Professional Services was contributing over 30% of Advania UK’s revenue, making these sorts of inefficiencies unacceptable. The lack of standardized processes and systems hindered the company’s ability to plan and mobilize teams while aligning projects, revenue forecasting and cost management. The inefficiencies also hindered the organization’s ability to deliver services and fulfill one of the company’s core value statements—“never lose a customer.”
“Our project managers didn’t have tools for financial health checks or the ability to monitor and control project margins. We weren’t empowered to have conversations with clients about changing requirements to improve profitability because we didn’t know where things were going wrong,” says Thatcher. “It wasn’t sustainable. Our teams were managing by reacting. We needed that baseline control — a solution that would grow with us and help us transform the organization.”
Benefits
- Real-Time Margin Optimization – Enables precise control over project margins to maximize profitability
- Proactive Residual Management – Ensures revenue stability with accurate forecasting and resource alignmen
- Integrated Technology Ecosystem – Unifies data across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and ServiceNow
faster monthly close cycle, from 12 days to 3 days
The Solution
Recognizing their need for a solution that could support long-term strategic plans while addressing immediate challenges, Advania UK chose the Kantata Professional Services Cloud. They based the decision on Kantata’s strong reputation, scalability, and robust resource management and forecasting capabilities.
Focusing first on scheduling and short-term resource allocation, the Advania UK team implemented the Kantata Cloud, consolidating fragmented systems under a single umbrella. Although Kantata provided far more functionality than Advania UK required, the company recognized the solution aligned with their greater ambitions.
The solution’s extensive functionality combined with the support and expertise provided by the Kantata team assured Advania UK they were investing in a long-term solution that would evolve with the business.
“Kantata was the right choice for both where we were and where we were heading—the Kantata team gave us incredible confidence.” says Thatcher, “Other products we looked at had a much shorter horizon before we would need to upgrade—we understood the pain involved in implementing an enterprise-wide solution and we were only willing to put that kind of strain on the organization once.”
“Kantata is at the center of our client operations, allowing us to accurately forecast revenue and demand. It is a critical tool that I’m in all day, every day.”
Group Professional Services Director, Advania UK
The Benefits
From Short-term Scheduling to Strategic Planning
The Kantata-powered shift from short-term scheduling to long-term strategic planning has enabled Advania UK to anticipate project demands, manage capacity more effectively, and proactively address gaps in resource availability.
Using Kantata, Advania UK ensures resource scheduling and utilization management align with client requirements and business objectives. This enables the company to accept, plan, and staff everything from enterprise jobs to large-scale, multi-year, high-security government engagements.
“It’s not about scheduling anymore. It’s about how we plan for the long term, aligning complex talent programs with future business needs. Kantata is at the center of our client operations, allowing us to accurately forecast revenue and demand, and identify where we have drops in utilization or shortfalls in our sales pipeline. It has become a critical tool that I’m in all day, every day. Kantata allows us to have the right skills ready for our clients on any given day, week or month.”
Optimizing Margins to Enhance Profitability and Invest in Customer Relationships
Harnessing the Kantata Cloud’s forecasting and analytics, the company enjoys unprecedented visibility into project margins and overall profitability. The added insight helps management make informed decisions regarding the organization’s day-to-day financial health. Leveraging Kantata’s forecasting and analytics to track and optimize profitability across different projects and market segments, Advania UK can adjust pricing models, allocate resources to high-margin services, and identify areas where they can improve or manipulate margins to achieve strategic goals.
“Our overall efficiency as an organization is improving all the time. Kantata gives us the oversight to optimize and manage our margins according to market forces and our engagement managers now have clear visibility into our margin expectations. That means we can calibrate margins to align with specific priorities – fortifying profitability or investing more deeply in a client relationship. Either way, it’s a deliberate choice. That level of control is hugely powerful.”
Enhanced Residual Management
Kantata has also transformed Advania UK’s ability to manage residuals — open orders representing future billable work — something Thatcher describes as “the lifeblood of a professional services organization.”
Kantata’s real-time data and customizable dashboards have provided Advania UK with the visibility to maintain balanced workloads across all service areas, a consistent revenue flow, and financial stability. Tying Kantata’s forecast probabilities to stages in the sales cycle, Advania UK can address potential planning and resource gaps before they cause delays.
“Support services are the bedrock of our revenue-stable income stream. With Kantata we know, based on headcount and utilization, how much work we need to complete across every product type, service area, client sector, and team. Kantata tells us where and when we need to add capacity or retrain our people. Without that, we could not run the business at the level our clients and shareholders expect.”
Accelerated Invoicing and Financial Closures by 75%
Before Kantata, Advania UK’s monthly close process took 12 working days, a timeframe that delayed financial visibility and slowed cash flow. The Kantata Cloud, a single, integrated solution to synchronize customer-facing teams with back-office processes, has helped to reduce that process to three days, ensuring Advania’s invoices go out promptly and accurately. Streamlined timesheet approvals, automated invoicing, and real-time financial insights that tell team members exactly what information needs reconciling allow the finance team to close periods faster and focus on strategic business growth.
“With Kantata we close our weekly and monthly periods and get cash in more quickly. Before, we didn’t have visibility into delivered but unbilled work. Now it’s just a standard report. It sounds simple, but it’s been transformative. Our invoicing capabilities are much, much better.”
Integrating and Automating Mission Critical Tools
For Advania, a Microsoft Partner, the ability to integrate—using either out-of-the-box integrations or API-powered workflows and middleware like Workato—with Dynamics 365 Sales and Business Central, as well as other mission-critical best-of-breed tools like ServiceNow was non-negotiable. Using Kantata and the middleware they recommended, the company has seamlessly automated the flow of key information, like opportunity and invoicing data, between the complex business tools.
“Kantata ties our entire ecosystem together. From sales to delivery to invoicing, it gives us full visibility into what’s happening at every stage of the project lifecycle.”
Securing Investor Confidence and Streamlining the Acquisition Process
Acquiring established businesses is a key part of Advania UK’s growth strategy and Kantata plays a vital role in streamlining the integration process. In a recent acquisition, Advania efficiently absorbed a professional services business with 70 consultants and hundreds of projects using Kantata to consolidate project data, standardize resource management, and automate financial processes without losing business momentum.
“Because of the systems Kantata has helped us put in place, the acquisition process has become a virtuous circle — we are sure we can handle the volume an acquisition brings, so the board is confident to invest in further acquisitions.”
Improved Productivity and Employee Engagement
Using the Kantata Professional Services Cloud, Advania UK was also able to map skills and redefine employee roles and responsibilities for improved efficiency, employee satisfaction, and resource utilization. Aligning tasks with skill sets and streamlining time-tracking and approval workflows in the Kantata Cloud, Advania frees up resources to focus on high-value client work.
“We’ve been able to move the right people closer to our clients and free others to focus on internal priorities. By clearly defining our roles and utilization targets in Kantata our people are more comfortable in their roles, and we’re all aligned on what success looks like.”
“Kantata was the right solution for both where we were and where we were heading — the Kantata team gave us incredible confidence.”
Group Professional Services Director