What is Kantata?
What do you like best about Kantata Cloud for Professional Services (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble)?
The most helpful thing about Kimble is that all of our deals are in one place from start to finish. We are able to watch the lifecycle of each deal from opening the Opp to closing the Engagement once final billing is complete. Kimble is a place for us to keep track of all deals in the pipeline as well as all deals in delivery, financials, supporting documents, billing information, resourcing, and so much more.
Kantata has enabled our PS team to take control of our business and give us insights we never had before. The ability to assign resources with confidence has been the single biggest improvement to our departments efficiency. In addition we appreciate the accuracy of forecasting which has improved the standing of PS within our company.
The best thing about Kantata is that I can see budgets and time entries in real-time. I struggled with our old project management software because it didn’t include time tracking. I spent so much time trying to see where we were at on budgets before Kantata. Now, I can know in real-time.
In theory, the big selling point on Mavenlink for us was their integrations. But what we’ve since found is deploying it (without buying more extras) requires such an overhaul of our existing instance of Jira (and its integrations) that it is unusable. We never made it to the point of integrating it with anything else.
What do you dislike about Kantata Cloud for Professional Services (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble)?
We made a grave error in selecting Mavenlink as our solution. I am sure it will work for some organizations, but after several months of deployment, several more months of trying changes to make it work and then over a month their team evaluating options to salvage the deployment – we’ve abandoned Mavenlink. It was costing so much in lost productivity and staff time/workarounds that we’ve reverted to our old systems until we can select a new vendor. That is on us (the client) – we own that mistake. At least for our deployment, any change in staffing on a project requires significant manual effort – and on complex months long projects those changes are inevitable (and in fact desirable). There are apparently workarounds for this, but they require additional licensing fees and professional services costs.
Unfortunately, we signed a three year contract with Mavenlink. So despite paying the deployment and professional services costs and two quarters worth of subscription fees to concretely find out it won’t work for us – we’re trapped in a 3 year term that Mavenlink is insistent we pay for even though we aren’t using the solution. I can’t recommend enough that if you are considering Mavenlink you:
1. Ensure the term of the software subscription does not start until the actual deployment is complete and you’ve run it for one month to see at the end of the month it actually did what you needed (you got the EOM reports you needed and they worked).
2. You minimize your first contract term to no more than 1 year
After some significant analysis, we’ve determined it is cheaper to abandon Mavenlink (but keep paying for it) and deploy/procure another solution than to try to slog through another two years manual labor and lost productivity if we were to keep using it. We’re in a position I’ve never been in before, where we will be paying our Mavenlink subscription fees for another two years, while we actually use/pay for a competing platform.
What problems is Kantata Cloud for Professional Services (formerly Mavenlink + Kimble) solving and how is that benefiting you?
The solution was supposed to help us do a better job at automating how we did capacity management, resource allocation and overall understand the health of our projects. However, in reality it turned out that the costs of the manual effort required each month to make it work were a bigger level of effort than our previous solution. So in the end – wrong solution for us, a failed deployment and after several quarters we’re searching for another vendor.
My biggest business problem that I’m able to solve with Kantata is knowing where a project stands with regard to budget, in real-time. It doesn’t take me hours to figure it out. I know at the click of a button. This has made project management more efficient.
We are solving efficiency problems with month-end billing and allowing the PS team to control our business rather than relying on the finance department. In addition we are improving forecasting accuracy and reducing bench time for our team.
The biggest problem for us that Kimble has solved is it has removed a majority of the manual aspect of our job – especially with end-of-month billing. Our new billing process within Kimble has proved to be time efficient, accurate, and user friendly.
Kantata Features
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Resource Management
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Portfolio Management
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Proposal Generation
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Quotes/Estimates
Pros
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“Time entry is pretty good. Project feed is pretty good.”
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“Great software that allows for us to complete a great project.”
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“We really love MavenLink and especially love working with a company who is constantly evolving and taking their clients feedback and evolving.”
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“The ease of reporting time sheets, having the ability to copy information from pervious weeks is great.”
Cons
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“We’ve learned more on our own in a few classes. Time entry is weak and poorly designed.”
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“Interface is sluggish and lack of real time reporting.”
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“It’s very frustrating when you need to allocated in the same amount of time per user across a long period. You have to go in individually to each week to add that time.”
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“With the price tag, the team is forced to learn it and integrate it themselves which in turn results in improper use of the tool.”
Kantata Pricing
$59.00 /month
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Yes, has free trial
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No free version