For Esri UK, Kantata Opens Up “A Pathway To Continuous Improvement”
Industry
Challenge
Employees
Geography
Esri UK works across the public and private sector, helping organizations visualize and understand their data and use spatial intelligence to make better decisions. When their professional services team experienced rapid growth, it became clear that the business had “reached a stage where we needed a more scalable, robust solution to underpin our operation,” according to Peter Wilkinson, Head of PS at Esri UK.
Prior to adopting Kantata to encourage more joined up working, Esri UK used what Peter describes as “a hodge podge of different systems that were glued together with spreadsheets.”
“With Kantata in place,” he says, “we have a much more joined up, contextualized system. We get a lot more insight into the business through the dashboards we have created.”
Esri UK provides world-class geographic information systems (GIS) and has the single largest pool of GIS expertise in the UK. Every day millions of decisions are powered by GIS, helping businesses become more profitable and public service more efficient through a better understanding of location analytics.
“Every week we develop our use of Kantata in ways that help us build a pathway to continuous improvement.”
Executive Manager Business Improvement, Esri UK
The Solution
Whatever solution Esri UK chose needed to align with a very established business culture. “Kantata fits right into that,” says Peter. “For example, we have created a health and well-being dashboard monitoring how many clients people have, how many hours they are booked for, trying to make sure that individuals don’t become overloaded.”
According to Alice Jones-Evans, Executive Manager of Business Improvement at Esri UK, the health and well-being dashboard was built to monitor workforce-centric key performance indicators such as workload, “Someone might be working at 90% with one customer and they may be fine, but someone else is at 60% utilization but they have nine different projects with nine different PMs and customers – and they are spinning too many plates. We can also look at what is planned for each person.”
Peter Wilkinson said that looking ahead and building accurate forecasts is “much easier now — it just happens. Resourcing is now linked to all other parts of the end-to-end solution, which drives increased forecasting accuracy. It is in the same place as the skills map, it is automatically updated to take account of leavers and joiners. It is linked to invoicing. Our whole operation is smoother and we really appreciate the insight we are able to get.”
“With Kantata, resourcing is now linked to all other parts of the end to end solution, which drives increased forecasting accuracy.”
Head of PS, Esri UK
The Results
With Kantata, business leaders are able to access dashboards that give insight into various areas of the business. According to Alice, “We can very easily see the day rates at which proposals are sold and slice and dice that in various ways. We have good conversations with our colleagues in sales around that.”
Project managers also appreciate the ways Kantata has transformed their processes. “Project managers love having a single system,” says Alice. “All the information related to an engagement is on one page, where previously, they would have had to go to multiple systems. They can invoice quicker, understand revenue figures quicker. They have more insight around margin and cost, which was a bit more hidden in our old systems.”
All these changes mean that Esri UK “has more confidence that the data is accurate and reliable,” says Peter. “When the data was going through a few different spreadsheets, there was that concern that errors could creep in. Now we have one source of the truth and if there are problems, they are a little bit easier to spot, and to correct.”
Benefits
- Increased reliability of data
- Better visibility into the pipeline
- More accurate forecasts
- Streamlined invoicing process
Improved employee experience
Improved cash flow