Kantata Reviews

Kantata is a wonderful tool for providing visibility and seamless communications for projects with clients and internal stakeholders. I love that we can use it as a document repository, replace email communications, full visibility and deliverable tracking, and project plan tracking in one place. It has transformed our PM processes for our clients! Customer support is quick as well and I use this on a daily basis and have never had down time.We also implemented a jira integration which ahs been helpful and the initital implementation was quick and painless.

I wish there was more flexibility with how to edit and sort the Task Tracker, I would like to be able to work the system like I would in excel (copy, paste etc.) and more configuration options for all parts of the paltform would be nice.

Kantata is really resolving our client communications and solutions delivery issues. It provides visibility for our clients and stakeholder to track project work in real-time and maintain delivery for milestones and deliverables. We love the document repository and Task tracker for project delivery.

I enjoy how the system provides me with data that helps the organization organize our resources within different customer portfolios. This tool provides start-to-finish support regarding consulting services and allows the organization to see project financial health and track the best candidate for certain projects. Additionally, the CSM support has been evident and very helpful. The system is the backbone to our organization.

I actually have not seen any downside of using this platform. During the time of implementation we have been able to easily track proposals, resources and Financial.

The system has solved our problems by allowing us to see the full resource availability across all customers. It supports discovering the best candidate and also supports us in seeing the financial health, as well as the project health of the services being provided. Without this system we would not have a clear overview if projects have risks, proposals are not maintained or followed up on, resources are running low, or we have over-planned certain resources which affects the ROI of a project. Seeing the cost and revenue analysis of each project allows us to make immediate decisions

Resource planning has enabled us to have better insights into resource utilization. At a team level team leads are able to manage their own resources allocating them to specific projects and manage their own capacity planning. At a business level, this has helped us identify gaps and understand when and where we need to recruit.

Managing projects end to end from schedule planning to budgeting, Kantata has been simple to to use. Communication through the activity spaces within the project helps keep teams and senior management up to date with project status.

Overall the whole system is easy to use, and provides valuable information to all levels of the business. Our customer Success manager Milda Leonaviciute is always at hand should we have any questions which is super helpful to have this contact. The support services and the ease of submitting a support ticket straight from Kantata again is a bonus as helps us get support as quickly as possible.

I think Project Risk Management would be a great addition that Kantata currently does not really have. There is status reporting but at a project level it would be great if there was more detailed risk management available.

Detailed Resource Management allows us to have better insights and make business-critical decisions around recruitment needs.

Overall better financial insights. At the Project level, we can see overall revenue against different types of projects in the system and forecasts based on pipeline projects.

Kantata Cloud impresses me with its seamless integration of project management and resource planning capabilities. The platform's user-friendly interface makes it easy to navigate and efficiently manage complex projects. I also appreciate its robust analytics and reporting features, which provide valuable insights into project performance and resource utilization. The ability to streamline workflows and allocate resources effectively is a standout feature that greatly enhances productivity.

The learning curve for new users, as the platform's extensive capabilities might initially overwhelm some individuals and the complexity of the platform might lead to occasional technical issues or glitches. Additionally, the pricing structure could potentially be a concern for smaller businesses, as the comprehensive features might come at a higher cost.

Reduces the fragmentation often seen in separate project management and resource planning tools leading to smoother collaboration, better communication, and reduced data silos. The platform's resource planning capabilities enable efficient allocation of resources based on skills, availability, and project needs. It provides real-time insights into project progress, resource utilization, and financial performance which allows businesses to make decisions. Helps in visualizing project timelines, task dependencies, and milestones, aiding in effective project coordinación. And offers scalability by accommodating larger teams, projects, and resources while maintaining control and visibility.

The platform is incredibly intuitive and easy to use. All Kanata's personnel are a pleasure to deal with and no problem is too small. Since deploying Kimble in August 2020 we have on-boarded a further three entities from Logicalis Group onto the platform so we now have a complete UK&I regional view of our Professional Services. this was made easier as certain nuances in the way other entities operated were adopted and changes understood and made by the Kanata services team swiftly.

I can honestly state that I do not have any dislikes.

Prior to on-boarding Kanata we had now way of knowing our PS demand apart from a number of days and an estimated revenue per opportunity. We ar now able to plan our demand for a number of future months not only for level but type of skill.

It would also take a number of days to complete month-end reporting and forecasting, this has reduced to a couple of hours.

There is a good user interface so easy to navigate especially to complete timesheets.

Resource planning: not easy to update multiple resource allocation forecasts in one view. High level Resource Plan Calendar view to see resources by day (project vs main project activity) in one view is currently being done in MsExcel - would be better to have this view/report in Kimble out of the box.

Consultant Status Reports: Weekly status reports by Consultant by Project are currently being done in MsExcel - perhaps this function exists in Kimble but we are not aware of it if it does exist.

Financial Reporting: By period (month or quarter) the financial reporting and forecasts could be easier to set up by portfolio

Define what data and views you need and verify the flow of data in Kimble

n/a

As a SaaS solution provider, we were looking for a professional services management tool that provided the key elements of project performance tracking (tasks, margin, etc.), team utilization, resource planning, and finally project execution collaboration with our end clients. Kantata OX provided a combined and integrated solution to address all of these needs in one package. The onboarding and adoption process with the Kantata team was excellent. Our implementation manager set a very clear path for us to succeed - ensuring we did not go too fast or too deep/wide at the start, but focusing on the key elements of the product that we needed to implement successfully to drive the initial value we were looking for. We are now 2 months into the post-deployment phase and we are using Kantata OX effectively to track our ongoing projects, get visibility into team utilization, and provide a collaborative interface for our end clients. The last aspect is highly valuable - having a single sheet of paper (Task Tracker/Gantt) that our customers can see the plan, the progress against that plan, and can track their tasks that support that plan as well.

One of the challenging areas of the implementation process was an attempted integration with HubSpot as our CRM. The goal of the integration was to automatically create projects in Kantata based on deals in Hubspot that hit a certain milestone, with the end goal of forecasting our potential resource demand based on the sales forecasted deals. Due to a combination of how our Hubspot instance was set up (we had to set up the integration to work with line items versus the deal level) and what appeared to be some limited experience with Hubspot integrations on the Kantata team side, the overall results of the integration did not meet expectations. We were left with ongoing manual clean-up of auto-generated projects in Kantata for deals that ended up closed/lost and some other fields did not sync effectively. The overall lesson learned is to do a bit more due diligence in the upfront proposal stage with Kantata to verify the integration could achieve the desired goals within the constraints of the existing architecture of your Hubspot instance.

Kantata is solving our problem of visibility into project progress, team utilization, end-customer collaboration, and project financial tracking. Kantata allows us to see what work is upcoming and what staffing adjustments (hiring) are required to meet those demands. That benefits us by not overstaffing or understaffing, allowing us to optimize our costs while ensuring we can deliver for our end customers. In terms of project tracking, we can now track hours of effort executed against milestones and tasks within a project. This benefits us by providing data to take continuous improvement actions against. We can see what parts of the projects are taking longer than planned, where we may be getting stuck in our delivery process, and also what tasks/areas are taking way more effort than we had planned.

The software as an incredibly easy UX that is quick to learn, easy to adopt, flexible to meet the unique needs of our business, and power to provide data insights. The team a Kantata are focused on listening to customers, advocating for their needs and making high impact product updates that are useful, meaningful, and impactful. The reports are easy to figure out and are dynamic, allow the ability to customize and view the data in a way that makes sense for our business. The real time insights provide actuatable data. The timesheet reporting functions make tracking time for PS industry professionals easy and seamless.

My biggest challenge with the tool is the estimates functionality which is challenging to have the separate estimates Mavenpage. The estimates are not as flexible as we would like and don't allow for customized section for budgeting out expenses, 3rd party costs, and markups. It would be helpful to have a more robust estimation tool that would time roles to rates, make discounting easier and more transparency, and allow flexibility to budget for, track and code expenses

It's allowing access to view, allocate and schedule resources across our organization while tracking project status, timelines, burn, and actuals. It allows us to access the critical data of our teams including capacity, utilization, and financials in one place with real time data.

I started using Kantata last year when I joined my new company.

I personally like best the visibility about revenue, cost, margins and the improved way to manage our staff and allocate them. We have much more granularity and control over our business compared to what we had in the past.

We had Kantata for a few years, but only used it to log time, once we started using it for real and taking advantage of the very relevant insights, we had a powerful tool to steer some elements in our business

Kantata still has an "old fashioned" look and feel and I think it would benefit from a user interface refresh. I also hear quite some complaints from my more technical colleagues about the complexity of the code, the way certain features are duplicated instead of using the standard salesforce ones (e.g. permissions) and I think it would help Kantata gain customers if the IT department would be onboard with the application.

As an end user and a manager, I have no complaints with the application.

We were not making use of Kantata as we should have, and there was quite some bad feeling about it, to the point that we were using other tools in addition to it. We started then a project to improve our way of working and data quality supported by an amazing team (Peter Fitzpatrick, Kate Oliver and Donna Cooke). Thanks to their support, we have now improved our way of working and can get the most out of the application, which is starting to pay off as we have obtained the transparency we wanted. I would really like to express my gratitude to Peter, Donna and Kate for their professionalism, competence and customer service, it has been an enjoyable and productive experience so far.

The thing I like the most about Kantata is how helpful a tool it is in so many areas in our business bringing together projects, analysis and reporting into our Financial Systems so seemlessly and with great automation. Being the System Administrator at Credera and picking up this tool it has been a joy to learn so far, and it links together so many functionalities so well and has added so much value to Credera and my personal learning journey. I use the system and administer the system on a daily basis and in my Finance Systems journey up until now it is a great cloud based solution in Professional Services. We have a great relationship with our Kantata representative Josh Steele who regularly arranges catch ups, invites us to seminars and to new Kantata innovations that are coming in future releases.

The least helpful thing is in some areas of the Kantata system because it covers so many necessary functionalities for our business and so many teams, when you do occasionally come across an issue, sometimes it can be a challenge to find the optimal solution quickly. When I raise a ticket with Kantata Customer support these solutions can sometimes take time to resolve, but they do get resolved in time and fortunately there are not many issues like this.

Kantata is solving the issues of keeping all our business data together in one place where we can maximise our output and track all of our Clients and Consultants on the field. It links well into our Microsoft Business Central ledger and adds real value to our all round Actuals month end reporting and also to our Budget and Forecast analysis.