Kantata has announced the Summer ’23 release of Kantata SX. With this release, Kantata Cloud for Professional Services has significantly improved usability and platform features. During an introductory webinar Lucy Butterton, VP Project Management at Kantata, revealed that around 70% of the release is focused on improving usability.
Those improvements include navigation and also some core architecture. Kantata has improved some core page loading times by 50%. In addition, there are many new features, 70% of which are self-service. This is helped by the adoption of Salesforce Lightning, which most pages are now ported to. Butteron noted, “We’re delivering some simple navigation improvements and performance improvements to help with assignment search usability and performance.”
Sarah Edwards, Chief Product Officer, Kantata, commented, “Professional services organizations and embedded services organizations are more focused than ever on margins and utilization due to ambitious client expectations and a workforce motivated by meaningful projects that drive personal growth. With these new features, we further ensure that organizations can collaborate easily, forecast confidently and innovate while meeting customer and employee demands.”
What is in Summer ’23?
While much of the work for this release revolves around usability, Kantata has also delivered updates for enterprise customers. The software is seeing traction in larger customers, with Deloitte Central Europe selecting and implementing the solution a few months ago.
With this release, Kantata has introduced its enterprise billing application. Fully developed in Lightning and integrated with Kantata SX, organisations can manage invoicing better. Billing teams can manage larger volumes of billable items and adjust time entries at volume before any billing. Users can quickly correct and approve invoices, and the solution extends the lead-to-order process already embedded in Kantata PSA.
There are new enterprise-level improvements for multinational companies. Summer ’23 includes support for intercompany what-if scenarios for FX Rates and factors derivation. There is also more granular support for multiple internal business units, enabling organisations to drive revenue sharing. There is greater visibility of internal revenue sharing and the ability to adjust as resources move around.
In Summer ’23, Kantata also leverages Tableau to help companies look at revenue slippage. The new forecast evolution component enables organisations to examine revenue positions and slippage across projects and time. Users can now track and analyse how financial forecasts build month-on-month to track revenue leakage improving forecast accuracy. Where slippage is identified, users can drill down to better understand the cause.
Kantata has also added a new delivery analyser, which adds to the resource and financial analyser it has already released. The delivery analyser is a configurable dashboard that offers insight into delivery governance, risk performance and commercial data tracking projects and portfolios over time.
There are enhancements to the management of credits with better flexibility and support for pre-paid billing models. The update provides better support to manage the drawing down of customer credits.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
There is a lot of work in this release, which under the coversis providing better performance for its larger clients. Kantata has also improved archiving, platform diagnostics, and the period-end process, allowing users to schedule more jobs.
The new billing functionality is only the first phase, with more promised in future releases. Winter’24 will likely contain more usability improvements, notably around the delivery dashboards and Gantt Charts. Enterprise will have greater flexibility around selecting billing currency, and there will be an ability to quickly set up and manage small works and activity-based billing.
Another substantive release from Kantata follows from its Spring ’23 Kantata OX release. With the updates rolling out, customers seem happy with the direction and cadence of innovation by Kantata. Seweryn Dabrowski, Chief Operating Officer of Deloitte Central Europe, commented, “We chose Kantata’s solution as with the level of flexibility and breadth of features it offers, we can optimize our talent pool and continue to deliver outstanding services to our clients.”
