From 4 Weeks to 3 Days: Waeg Dramatically Reduces Time to Generate Invoices with Kantata
Industry
Company
Headquarters
What Kantata Replaced
The Challenge
Following Waeg’s acquisition by IBM in 2021, the company transitioned from a boutique solutions developer with 50 employees into one of Europe’s leading Salesforce consulting and development partners. Striving to cope with rapid growth without a cohesive professional services management system in place, Waeg wanted to eliminate the data silos and lack of transparency restricting its ability to efficiently plan projects and manage its workforce.
“We depended on information in disconnected systems, emails, Excel spreadsheets, and, early on, even our memories. We were in the dark, especially when it came to utilization forecasting and making sure we weren’t under billing,” explains Waeg’s Chief Operations Officer, Maura Marangon. “As we reached over 200 people, we needed to upgrade, connect, and automate our processes to improve our data quality and operate in a more structured way.”
Waeg, Old English for wave, is a Salesforce Platinum Partner at the forefront of multi-cloud software and business automation development. A member of the IBM family of companies with an expert workforce across eight European countries, Waeg integrates technology and expertise, providing its clients with high-ROI enterprise-strength solutions and enabling business transformations that turn ideas into better business and customer experience outcomes.
Benefits
- Consolidated access to organizational data
- Enhanced budgeting efficiency with live project overviews
- Increased transparency and invoicing accuracy
- Improved bench utilization through optimized staffing
reduction in time to invoice customers
forecast vs. actual performance, with 6 month forecasting horizon
“The Kantata Cloud has given us absolute confidence in our numbers and how we record our data — we can use those numbers to report to our parent company without spending weeks parsing spreadsheets and double-checking data.”
Chief Operations Officer, Waeg
The Solution
When a 2022 change in management mandated a more agile, data-driven approach to the company’s decision-making, project planning, and reporting workflows, Waeg re-assessed its tech stack and realized it already had the tool it was looking for — the Kantata Professional Services Cloud, a powerful, unified collection of resource, financial, management and project management tools and team collaboration, business intelligence, and workflow automation functionality.
Although the company was using Kantata in a rudimentary capacity to manage timesheet submissions, it had barely scratched the surface of the solution’s capabilities. Working to familiarize itself with the Kantata Cloud, Waeg began a detailed audit to evaluate its needs against the Kantata ecosystem’s potential.
“We were looking for a professional services management solution that integrated with Salesforce and consolidated data without extensive customization. The last thing we wanted was to reinvent the wheel,” says Maura. “When it turned out Kantata did everything we needed and we already had the license, we started building up the solution, leveraging everything we could out of the box.”
Throughout the implementation process, Kantata’s elite consulting and implementation teams worked with Waeg stakeholders to identify and prioritize the company’s needs, accelerating its effort to optimize and elevate operational efficiency.
“Kantata’s team was with us the whole way providing the knowledge we needed to understand and embrace the system without trying to upsell additional services or unnecessary customizations,” says Maura. “Migrating all the data stored in scattered Excel files into Kantata took us under six months. After that, we went quickly from using Kantata as a niche time-keeping application to having it manage our entire professional services lifecycle.”
“It used to take us four weeks to get our invoices out — every invoice we ran was a painful process involving multiple stakeholders. Now we complete our invoicing in days, secure in the knowledge that our amounts are correct.”
Chief Operations Officer, Waeg
The Results
Eliminating Silos, Disconnects, and Redundant Systems
With universal access to organizational data in the Kantata Cloud, Waeg simplified its professional services management infrastructure, retiring cumbersome workarounds and redundant support systems while gaining much-needed functionality. In particular, Kantata replaced a stand-alone utilization reporting application that was unable to track critical information like holiday and training time, or pre-sales activities.
“We were never quite sure of the utilization or availability of our people. With Kantata, we suddenly had all this insight from forecasting and forward-looking utilization putting everyone in the loop and giving us much better control over our revenue and margins.”
Increased Transparency and Invoicing Accuracy
Kantata’s advanced project accounting features have also improved Waeg’s accounting accuracy. The Kantata Cloud provides Waeg with better visibility into its revenues and margins by replacing an invoice generation tool that could not process or record fee reductions, discounts, or special arrangements with clients. Without manual intervention, this resulted in inaccurate financial reporting.
“Our previous system couldn’t support extra line items so we had to apply adjustments manually to the final PDF. In Kantata, every transaction is auditable before we create the invoice — now discounts automatically reflect accurately on the bottom line.”
Streamlined Billing Workflows
Kantata streamlined Waeg’s invoicing workflows by enhancing communications between its financial, HR, project management, and sales teams. In the Kantata Cloud, Waeg moved from the uncertainty of manually reconciling spreadsheets to a structured workflow that shares information across departments in real time and provides checks and balances that save the company time and money.
“It used to take us four weeks to get our invoices out — every invoice was a painful process involving multiple stakeholders. Now we complete our invoicing in days, secure in the knowledge that our amounts are correct.”
Controlling Burn with the Engagement Dashboard
Using the Kantata Engagement Dashboard, Waeg has enhanced budgeting efficiency. Working with Kantata’s live project overviews, Waeg’s managers make data-supported decisions rather than relying on spreadsheets and professional intuition. This allows managers to identify problems and make corrections before spend becomes a problem.
“In Kantata our managers can see in real time what effect their choices have on cost margins and revenue. They can ask themselves, ‘What happens if we keep going at this rate of burn?’ The result is a major improvement in budget control across all our projects.”
Faster, More Efficient Approvals Processing
The Kantata Cloud provides Waeg with the interdepartmental approvals process it previously lacked. From billing hours worked to processing vacations and training leave, Kantata expedites verification by giving project managers and team leaders the ability to share information and approve work done or pre-validate time sheets with the click of a button.
“We used to approve time manually over emails tracked by HR, but Kantata has dramatically improved the efficiency of that process and the way we work — now, nothing falls through the cracks.”
Cleaning up Loose Ends with Period Management
Kantata’s Period Management dashboard brings additional efficiency to the table by reducing the time it takes to close out each financial period while accounting for unsubmitted, unresourced, or unutilized time.
“Period Management helps us to stay on top of our forecasts, timesheets, and approvals, providing a detailed picture of who and what we need to chase to close each project. It ensures that if we need to look back, we always have proper data.”
Improved Bench Utilization
Employing over 200 Salesforce developers, project managers, solutions architects, and solution specialists, Waeg needs to keep its bench busy to maintain profitability. Kantata’s resource management capabilities like soft and hard allocations and color coding have improved the company’s ability to effectively assign staff to projects where and when they are needed.
“Allocating resources in Kantata was like switching the lights on and being able, at a glance, to drill down and make accurate decisions. When we realized we could do the same amount of work in less time, with greater accuracy and fewer people, it was a real eye opener.”
Reducing Overheads with Agile Sales Strategies
Using insights in the Kantata Cloud, Waeg is also able to improve utilization and proactively generate revenue over slower periods. Leveraging enhanced visibility into the status of every resource on its bench, Waeg can confidently pursue and even create opportunities that would previously have gone unrealized. Having an accurate understanding of project costs also allows Waeg to incentivize and apply discounts without eating too deeply into project margins.
“Because we can see weekly availability and utilization reports in Kantata, we can combine resources to form teams for ad hoc projects that we can sell immediately. Being able to recognize and act on these smaller opportunities reduces our overheads and helps keep our bench active.”
The Big Picture
Perhaps the biggest win for Waeg after consolidating data in the Kantata Cloud is the company’s ability to plan for the future and seamlessly adjust to fluctuating demand. The availability of accurate data on an organizational level also helps the Waeg C-suite to accurately report growth and identify areas for improvement.
“With Kantata, we can see what is coming up to a year ahead, and our three to six-month forecasts are remarkably close to the reported actuals – usually within one or two percentage points of the forecast. The Kantata Cloud has given us absolute confidence in our numbers and how we record our data — we can use those numbers to report to our parent company without spending weeks parsing spreadsheets and double-checking data.”
“Allocating resources in Kantata was like switching the lights on. When we realized we could do the same amount of work in less time, with greater accuracy and fewer people, it was a real eye opener.”
Chief Operations Officer, Waeg