Suvoda Streamlines Project Delivery and Reduces Implementation Time by 16% with Kantata
Industry
Company
Headquarters
What Kantata Replaced
The Challenge
Suvoda’s success in enabling their clients’ clinical research led to rapid growth. While this meant new opportunities, it also meant taking on more projects than ever and managing teams that had outgrown their existing project management solutions.
Business leaders also lacked the precise insights they needed into how team members across Suvoda’s growing workforce were spending their time and what capacity they would have available. These insights were crucial because of the nature of the pharmaceutical companies Suvoda serves. According to Steve Desnatis, CFO at Suvoda, “Pharmaceutical companies have FDA timelines they need to meet, or their drug launch can be derailed. Often, they will give priority to the company with the resources available to commit to that timeline.”
To achieve greater success, Suvoda needed to a solution that could address several business process challenges, including:
Limited Project Financial Data
The Suvoda team needed to better understand financial performance on a per project, per customer, and per engagement basis. Being able to gauge profitability in a way not possible with old solutions would provide the organization greater discipline around project financial performance.
Financial Tracking and Management
Managing raw data from several different sources, extracting the data, and performing calculations in Excel made financial tracking a very time-consuming process with the potential for errors. With its client base and team size rapidly expanding, Suvoda needed a solution that could provide greater insights in less time and without the need for manual calculations.
Deeper Project Insights
Suvoda needed better reporting on projects, including insight into the quality of projects and delivery against plan. Client satisfaction is one of Suvoda’s major focuses as a business, with their go-live dates for software implementation being mission critical for the launch of a new clinical trial. Being able to better measure project performance would translate into an ability to provide clinical trials with even greater support.
Suvoda provides software solutions for clinical trials to solve complex supply chain challenges so that medical providers have the peace of mind to focus on their patients’ needs.
Benefits
- Better understanding of project performance across portfolio
- Significant bottom line improvement through optimized resource allocation
- Expedited timelines deliver faster value to Suvoda's customers
- Reduced labor costs across projects without impacting project quality
reduction in number of team members required to deliver each project
reduction in average project duration
“We were able to drill into the differences between higher- and lower-margin projects. In some cases, we streamlined the process, and in others we automated it. At the end of the day, we dramatically improved margins across the board.”
CFO, Suvoda
The Solution
The Suvoda team’s search for a new solution to support their project management workflows led them to the Kantata Professional Services Cloud. The decision to go with Kantata Cloud was driven by its ability to meet the complex needs of a service organization in the pharmaceutical sector. Kantata’s solution offered a robust platform that integrated seamlessly with Suvoda’s existing systems.
“The initial implementation was done in under three months,” recalled Steve DeSantis, CFO at Suvoda. “We then took that initial implementation and spent another two months doing the integrations, streamlining the data, and getting the reporting out. So, within six months total we were fully operational.”
Adopting Kantata transformed Suvoda’s operations by providing comprehensive, real-time data on resource utilization and project performance. This visibility allowed the organization to make informed decisions and streamline processes, contributing to significant improvements that have driven both better client outcomes and higher professional services profitability.
“When we looked at the skill sets of the people on each project and restructured around smaller teams. We find the smaller teams can do more projects. That’s an insight we got from Kantata.”
CFO, Suvoda
The Results
Increased Billable Utilization
Suvoda has leveraged Kantata to gain crucial insights into resource allocation, with Steve DeSantis sharing that Suvoda’s teams can “look at billable utilization rates virtually at their fingertips.” By understanding where people are spending their time across numerous projects, Suvoda has been able to make precise adjustments that have yielded substantial financial benefits.
“When you’re trying to manage a large number of teams across hundreds of projects annually, you need to understand where people are spending their time. Our ability to optimize that by just a few percentage points produced a significant improvement to our bottom line.”
Ability to Deliver Projects Faster
With the help of Kantata, Suvoda has streamlined their implementation processes, reducing the average duration of an implementation project by 16%. This improvement allows them to confidently promise and deliver faster project completions to their clients.
“We’ve reduced our average implementation time by 16%. We love being able to tell customers we can get it done in 60 days.”
Efficient Team Restructuring
Kantata has provided Suvoda with insights that led to a strategic restructuring of their teams. By analyzing the skill sets within their teams, they were able to form smaller, more efficient teams that can handle more projects, reducing labor costs on virtually every project while still completing them quicker and at a lower cost than their previous team structure.
“One of the insights we got from Kantata was that smaller teams could do more projects. So we looked at the skill sets of the people on the teams and we optimized them by restructuring around smaller teams.”
More Predictable Capacity
At the same time as faster project delivery and smaller project teams have freed up resource capacity, Kantata’s robust resource management features have helped Suvoda understand precisely how much capacity they expect to have, empowering the business to accept new work they may not have had the confidence to take on before.
“Pharmaceutical companies have FDA timelines they need to meet, or their drug launch can be derailed. Often, they will give priority to the company with the resources available to commit to that timeline. With our shorter timelines, our capacity is more predictable and we consistently deliver on time, so clients are bringing us more projects.”
Streamlined Data Analysis
Kantata has transformed Suvoda’s approach to data analysis, enabling efficient, detailed examination of project and portfolio data. This has provided greater transparency to key stakeholders and significantly reduced the pain previously associated with data aggregation exercises like audits.
“I will tell you that the audit that we did a year ago was incredibly painful because we were trying to pull it all together manually. Now, we have the data at our fingertips and were able to produce profitability analyses by project and had it complete within the hour.”
“We’ve reduced our average implementation time by 16%. We love being able to tell customers we can get it done in 60 days.”
CFO, Suvoda