Concurrency Extends Resource Forecasting Horizon to 13 Months With Kantata
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What Kantata Replaced
The Challenge
Concurrency resorted to manual workarounds to overcome the lack of communication between its disconnected solutions. The siloed systems affected the company’s efficiency and profitability while limiting the agility of Concurrency’s client services.
“Our operations were not streamlined. We were applying short-term fixes to long-term issues, and running our project management burn down and bookkeeping off of spreadsheets,” explains Kurt Spitzner, Concurrency’s Director of Delivery. “Our forecasting and resource planning involved third-party software, Power BI, and had evolved into even more spreadsheets, complex batch jobs, and manually moving data back and forth between programs.”
Concurrency sought an integrated professional services solution to streamline its processes, eradicate extra manual effort, and return accurate, actionable information to enhance its project planning and delivery efforts.
Concurrency are change enablers — management and technology specialists that transform businesses. As a leading provider of services for organizational change, Concurrency delivers value by helping organizations leverage leading-edge solutions to realize strategic goals and create secure and efficient modern workplaces.
Benefits
- Saved 20 hours monthly by eliminating spreadsheets
- Extended forecasting capabilities to 13 months
- Empowered accurate decision-making
- Improved long-term hiring strategies
- Promoted consistent repeatable business processes
saved monthly
rolling forecast horizon
“From day one Kantata provided immediate value — integrating our time sheets and reducing the friction of entering, approving, and seamlessly sharing data with NetSuite, our financial software.”
Director of Delivery, Concurrency
The Solution
The Kantata Professional Services Cloud offered Concurrency the flexible single-platform cloud-based solution it was looking for. From a functional perspective, Kantata ticked all of Concurrency’s boxes. Kantata’s dedication to consistently evolving new features and developing integrations that enable its clients to scale and connect with industry-leading business and SaaS solutions played a key role in its selection.
“Compared to Kantata, the other solutions we looked at felt long in the tooth,” says Spitzner, who drove the decision to switch. “They were over-established and no longer evolving. We just didn’t believe they would ever get any better than they already were.”
Within months of switching to Kantata, Concurrency overcame its dependency on spreadsheets using Insights, the Katana enterprise reporting dashboard. The company made its process changes smoothly, despite the complications of upgrading legacy financial software to Netsuite in parallel with adopting the new system.
“Implementing a new financial system at the same time we moved to Kantata was pretty audacious,” says Spitzner. “But, with some good training sessions and close collaboration with the Kantata team, we moved past spreadsheets and built out reports that do exactly what we need them to. We no longer need to duplicate administrative tasks to move information around. ”
“Ultimately, Kantata shows us a clear picture of the entire organization and all of our upcoming projects. That allows us to make accurate long-range hiring decisions with confidence.”
Director of Delivery, Concurrency
The Results
Enhanced Resource Planning and Long-Term Forecasting
Perhaps the largest benefit of its move to Kantata, Concurrency has retired its third-party Power BI forecasting in favor of Kantata’s native business intelligence features. In addition to efficiency gains achieved by deprecating its reliance on manual and batched spreadsheets, Concurrency is now operating with greater visibility into every aspect of the business. Leveraging up-to-the-minute data straight from Kantata, Concurrency confidently makes informed business decisions, like triggering new hiring conditions, that reach farther into the future.
“We look at Kantata weekly to show us our needs at an upcoming project and department level, where we previously operated only at a generalized team level. With Kantata we can accurately forecast staff role requirements a full rolling 13 months ahead of time, and we are continuing to improve on that.”
Accountability, Consistency, and Repeatability
Overall, Kantata has promoted a greater sense of engagement and purpose in Concurrency’s teams and project managers. By clearly defining roles, tasks, responsibilities, and processes within Kantata, Concurrency has a repeatable framework for consistent customer service. By bridging the gap between sales and delivery, Kantata also facilitates regular project reviews at Concurrency, ensuring alignment between upcoming work and available resources. The solution not only keeps projects on track but also supports collaboration, enabling the right decisions at the right time.
“With Kantata we can train our PMs in a way that makes sense to everyone in the organization — it is no longer difficult to manage resources or hold people accountable. Over time, that yields better and better results because we can take a quick look at Kantata, recognize what is off track, deal with escalations, and make early corrections.”
Improved Data Accuracy and Availability
Concurrency has also improved both the quality and availability of its reported information by leveraging Kantata to eliminate unnecessary manual data sharing and manipulation. Drawing data directly from Kantata and passing it to NetSuite using Kantata’s native and API-driven integrations, Concurrency can utilize data that was once siloed in monolithic reporting and accounting systems without fear of corruption.
“With Kantata as our system of record, our information is simply more accurate. Kantata has allowed us to validate synchronized data with a confidence we didn’t have in the old Autotask days. That alone saves us over 20 hours per month in unnecessary administrative tasks.”
Increased Organizational Flexibility
As a testament to the adaptability of Kantata, Concurrency was able to shift from a complex regional structure with three independently operating company branches to a centralized structure with a single headquarters to establish policy.
“Kantata provided the framework we needed to support the changes across the organization where other tools couldn’t.”
“Now, we rely on accurate information directly from Kantata to run our business rather than pulling out data and dumping it into spreadsheets.”
Director of Delivery, Concurrency