Talan Boosts Financial Visibility and Project Manager Autonomy with Kantata
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What Kantata Replaced
The Challenge
For Talan — an international project management, software, and business consultancy operating in five continents — managing financial transactions across a broad portfolio of legal entities and business units presented a series of increasingly complex challenges. An aggressive growth strategy and plans to scale to a turnover of one billion Euros by 2025 contributed additional complications.
Reliant on an aging, in-house, time and materials management solution that labored to keep pace with its steady growth and evolving needs, Talan sought a modern, cloud-native professional services and financial management infrastructure.
“Our old system just couldn’t adapt to the way we were expanding and integrating new companies into our global network,” explains Julien Weill, Talan’s Group Delivery Director. “With our aggressive growth projections, it was crucial we find a more scalable, functional, and reliable platform to manage our customer-facing and project-related activities from pre-sales to invoicing.”
Talan began the search for a consolidated solution that could cope with varied billing models, provide multiple-entity financial capabilities, unify accounting processes, and streamline project management while increasing operational efficiency and improving financial accuracy throughout its global operations.
Talan is a leading global consulting and technological expertise group which accelerates the transformation of its clients through data, innovation and technology. Operating across multiple continents and offering services to companies in every vertical, Talan’s international talent pool of 7200 people helps its clients cultivate resilience, improve efficiency, and drive sustainable growth.
Benefits
- Enhanced project management efficiency
- Improved financial visibility
- Streamlined intercompany billing
- Increased project manager autonomy
faster KPI retrieval
faster monthly close process
“Using Kantata we have simultaneously doubled our size and number of countries while also reducing our closing time by several days and improving confidence in our figures, which are now the same for everyone.”
Director of Delivery, Talan
The Solution
Talan evaluated several professional service management solutions including the Kantata Professional Services Cloud, a powerful collection of resource, project, and financial management tools purpose-built for the unique needs of services organizations like Talan. The Kantata Cloud’s robust project management features and flexibility to adapt to the different geographical cadences of the company’s international business operations rapidly established Kantata SX as Talan’s first choice.
“There were four solutions on our shortlist, but Kantata took the victory because it handled a non-negotiable core requirement the others couldn’t,” says Weill. “The Kantata Cloud offered the flexibility to operate in resource hours in North America and seamlessly switch to resource days for our European operations.”
“Kantata just had more of the functionality we were looking for. It was very complete,” says Amaury de Brisoult, Talan’s Director of Delivery. “It stood out because it met our very specific requirements, particularly with its robust project management features, seamless Salesforce integration, and transparent approach to resource availability.”
When it came to implementing the solution, Talan, who specializes in transformation, saw the switch to Kantata as more than just a software upgrade. Instead, the company used the Kantata Professional Services Cloud implementation as a catalyst to promote ongoing improvements to its project management and delivery operations.
“To Talan, adopting Kantata was not just a question of changing tools,” says de Brisoult. “The move provided an opportunity to create a cohesive global process — a strong, standard way of doing things everywhere across the business.”
To continually enhance both business processes and platform performance, Talan leverages Kantata’s unique Success package offering, which provides, among many other benefits, a dedicated Technical Account Manager (TAM). By partnering with their TAM, Talan has proactively identified opportunities for optimization, leading to significant platform improvements. The TAM’s proactive approach and deep expertise have enabled Talan to fine-tune job processing, detect and address errors early, and achieve a more efficient and robust platform.
“The proactive support of Zach, our Technical Account Manager, has been instrumental in enabling us to detect errors early, resulting in a cleaner, more efficient platform,” says de Brisoult. “This has not only improved platform performance but also accelerated our monthly close process by 2 days so far. We anticipate reducing this to just 3 days by year’s end—a significant improvement!”
“Working in our previous system became more and more of a struggle as the business grew — I would often need to wait two days to get the KPIs I needed each month. Now, using Kantata SX, we run reports and extract current KPI data on demand, multiple times daily, and we are confident the results returned are both accurate and actionable.”
Group Delivery Director, Talan
The Results
Redefined Roles for Enhanced Autonomy and Project Management Efficiency
One way Kantata has improved project delivery at Talan is by helping the company redefine the roles and responsibilities of its project managers. By reducing project teams’ dependence on back-office support for key information about projects, Talan freed up accounting teams to refocus on the company’s other business objectives while empowering project managers to deploy customer-facing resources more effectively.
“Working in Kantata has been a complete change from how things were before — our project management stakeholders all agree that Kantata has empowered them with increased autonomy and greater control over their projects.”
Consolidated Organizational Data Improves Financial Visibility
Talan has significantly increased the oversight of management at all levels into its ongoing customer engagements. Facilitating greater visibility into every aspect of the project lifecycle from delivery status to project margins, Kantata has enhanced both Talan’s service delivery and bottom line. Features in the Kantata Cloud like portfolio management further augment Talan’s view of the big picture with a few mouse clicks.
“Everyone from our leadership to our project, resource, and business unit managers has access to dashboards providing instant, context-specific insight into team activity, project status, and even project margins. This Kantata-driven availability of information simplifies our project lifecycle management efforts, streamlining everything from resource allocation to decision-making and accurate customer invoicing.”
Streamlined Intercompany Accounting Processes
Where previously Talan struggled to efficiently manage internal transactions and invoices between different international resources, service providers, and business units, Kantata has been instrumental in helping the company tame its intercompany billing process. Switching to Kantata, Talan has eliminated the need to duplicate invoices across disconnected accounting systems, eliminated errors and inefficiencies, and enhanced the accuracy and reliability of the financial data it shares with both its stakeholders and customers. To learn more about Talan’s use of Intercompany Accounting, check out the full Feature spotlight here.
“By replacing the mix of tools we were using to raise invoices and track revenue and transactions between business units before Kantata, we have automated many actions around intercompany billing, making the process much more transparent and efficient.”
Improved Accountability and Data Accuracy
With enterprise-wide project delivery and financial data consolidated in Kantata, Talan has also significantly reduced the time it takes to compile reports and retrieve important KPI data. In Talan’s previous system, the flow of information had become so constricted that a simple management report could take days to process. Now, with optimized reporting turnaround times and an improved KPI retrieval workflow in the Kantata Cloud, Talan’s management can work in real time to efficiently retrieve and verify data, identify and audit inaccuracies, or hold resources accountable for imprecise or erroneous data entry.
“Working in our previous system became more and more of a struggle as the business grew – I would often need to wait two days to get the KPIs I needed each month. Now, using Kantata, we run reports and extract current KPI data on demand, multiple times daily, knowing the results it returns are both accurate and actionable.”
Reduced Monthly Closing Cycle Times
With Kantata consolidating customer engagement data, automating and simplifying intercompany data exchanges, and enhancing reporting and financial oversight across the organization, Talan has knocked multiple days off of its global monthly closing and invoicing cycles — all during a period of unprecedented expansion. Besides achieving significant cumulative time savings across the organization with the streamlined closing process, Talan has optimized both the accuracy and delivery time of a series of monthly shareholder reports it once struggled to compile manually.
“Using Kantata we have simultaneously doubled our size and number of countries while also reducing our closing time by several days and improving confidence in our figures, which are now the same for everyone.”
“By replacing the mix of tools we were using to raise invoices and track revenue and transactions between business units with Kantata, we have automated many actions around intercompany billing, making the process much more transparent and efficient.”
Director of Delivery, Talan