West Monroe Uses Kantata to Forecast with Confidence
INDUSTRY
CHALLENGE
EMPLOYEES
GEOGRAPHY
Leading digital consulting firm West Monroe began the search for a purpose-built professional services solution when the organization’s growth trajectory started to outpace the functionality of their home-grown system. While this custom solution initially met the team’s needs, it would not be able to keep up with plans to scale. Today, West Monroe leverages the Kantata Professional Services Cloud to build accurate forecasts and manage resources proactively.
With Kantata, West Monroe has:
- Improved visibility, accuracy and comprehensiveness of resourcing data
- Improved accuracy of resource and revenue forecasts
- Increased confidence to make proactive and strategic resourcing decisions
West Monroe is a digital services firm that was born in technology but built for business. West Monroe partners with companies in transformative industries to deliver quantifiable financial value and shift the traditional ways of working to digital operating models.
Challenge: Scale Outpaces Home-Grown Solution at West Monroe
West Monroe is an award-winning, US-based, technology consulting firm focused on helping businesses through digital transformations. West Monroe is committed to delivering strategic solutions that drive client profitability and progress.
Before Kantata, West Monroe was using a home-grown PSA to manage and track resources. While the system met the team’s needs when initially built 15 years ago, it was quickly being outpaced by steady growth, increased demand and increasing project complexities.
There was an overall lack of visibility into resourcing data — which impacted consultants trying to enter time against engagements and managers trying to proactively schedule resources. Additionally, the business recognized they needed a tool that would improve the accuracy of their resource forecasts and confidence in data — they wanted to make strategic business decisions based on up-to-date, accurate and comprehensive information.
“The features within Kantata that we find the most valuable are the ones around forecasting and utilization. It’s given us a lot greater insight into our business and where we’re going to be in the future.”
Director, West Monroe
Solution: Kantata Drives Decisions Rooted in Data
West Monroe was already using Salesforce for all sales, engagement and CRM data, so adopting a PSA that could easily integrate with Salesforce was critical. The fact that Kantata offered a solution built on the Salesforce platform where all sales and delivery data could be integrated with ease made Kantata the clear choice for PSA. With Kantata, West Monroe could be sure all data was comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date.
West Monroe began using Kantata in 2018 and have reported significant improvements across key metrics such as utilization, margin and project profitability. One key impact Kantata has had for West Monroe is improved confidence to make strategic business decisions that are rooted in data. With Kantata, West Monroe was able to successfully scale and optimize their entire resource management process all while improving margin and utilization and growing revenue.
Best Practices Embedded in PSA
Today, West Monroe uses Kantata to enable and encourage project delivery best practices across the entire organization. All 2,000 employees at West Monroe use Kantata for their day-to-day operations. Kantata provides guidance across every step of the project lifecycle — enabling consultants to easily enter time and expenses, project managers to quickly make adjustments and resource managers to get the best-fit resources onto projects. Kantata guides users towards the next best step and helps create visibility and accountability throughout the organization. For example, projects that are departing from the plan are highlighted at an early stage and time can only be logged against projects that have actually been assigned to a resource.
“Kantata’s out of the box solution really helps users understand what the best practices are. In everything from time entry to forecasting and calculating utilization, it really does point users in the right direction as to what they should be doing on a day to day basis. That helps us to make better decisions going forward.”
Complete Visibility into Resource Utilization
With Kantata, West Monroe has complete access to all resourcing data and keeps a close eye on utilization. Detailed visibility into resourcing details such as skills, cost and location enables West Monroe to quickly make adjustments to improve billable utilization — which has a significant and direct impact on overall revenue. Kantata makes it simple to get the right resource on the right project, as resource managers have a complete view of who’s on the bench, who’s available and who would be most likely to deliver a successful project to a satisfied customer — all at the optimal margin. Assigning resources to projects is approached proactively, with two key metrics in mind: utilization and profitability. With Kantata, West Monroe has a complete picture of both sides of the supply and demand equation, setting them up for success when it comes to getting the right resources onto projects.
“One of the best parts of Kantata is the increased confidence in our forecast utilization going forward. Kantata really puts the onus on the end users to have their data correct, which the whole firm can leverage to make better decisions going forward.”
Increased Forecast Accuracy
One of the biggest efficiency gains Kantata has delivered to West Monroe is in resource and revenue forecasting accuracy. With Kantata, decision-makers can be confident that the data fueling these forecasts is accurate and up-to-date. Kantata makes it easy to see what type of resources will be in demand according to the sales pipeline and to compare that to the resource forecast to see where there may be gaps. If there are not enough resources to tackle projects, or potentially too many resources for incoming demand, West Monroe is able to manage staffing balance before it’s too late. By approaching these challenges proactively, the team is able to positively impact utilization and profitability.
“One of the greatest improvements we’ve seen with Kantata is the ability to forecast accurately. Having accurate resource forecasts has provided us with the insight to better predict where we’re going and what adjustments we may have to make to impact business performance.”
Salesforce-Native Solution
When West Monroe began looking for an enterprise PSA, they wanted to find one that was native to Salesforce. Having already adopted Salesforce as the business’s CRM platform, they wanted to be able to share the data seamlessly in the PSA. Ease of integration between the two platforms was a priority and Kantata having a solution that was embedded in the Salesforce platform was a key factor in the business’s decision to adopt Kantata. With Kantata, West Monroe is able to seamlessly leverage all existing Salesforce data, providing a complete picture of engagements all the way from sales to reporting.
“We love the fact that Kantata sits on top of the Salesforce platform. We use Salesforce for a lot of our business development and opportunity management so it was great that that data already existed in Kantata and we could easily integrate the two systems.”
Results
- Optimization of resource management processes
- Comprehensive visibility of resourcing data from the sales pipeline to delivery
- Improved accuracy of resource and revenue forecasts
- Increased confidence to make proactive and strategic resourcing decisions
- Widespread adoption of Kantata best practices as they are baked directly into the product