Elevating Professional Services: Beyond the Billable Hour
In professional services today “getting the job done” isn’t enough anymore. Clients want real value, predictable outcomes, and a genuine partnership—not just completed projects.
Yet most firms still obsess over utilization rates and billable hours, and whilst these metrics are important, if service delivery feels clunky, reactive, or impersonal, these metrics are missing the wider context
The firms winning today understand what really drives success: service quality. Not just what you deliver, but how you deliver it. Every touchpoint, every communication, every problem you solve before the client even knows it exists.
Master this, and everything changes.
Services Quality relies on Accurate Data
High-quality service isn’t just about technical expertise; it’s about the entire client journey. In a competitive market where technical skills can often be comparable, the “how” of your service delivery is what truly differentiates your firm. This focus on quality allows for premium pricing, expands client relationships, and lays the groundwork for sustained long-term growth. Firms like Deloitte CE are proving this, achieving impressive growth by focusing on services operations and control. .
“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,” noted Seweryn Dabrowski, Chief Operating Officer of Deloitte Central Europe.
Kantata SX: Your Next Step Towards Service Excellence
Kantata SX isn’t just keeping up with industry changes – it’s leading them. Enterprise services are complex, but flying blind doesn’t have to be part of the job. The difference between project managers who deliver and those who firefight? Real-time visibility into what actually matters. For project managers navigating the complexities of enterprise services, having clear measures and governance is crucial for proactively controlling project finances, resourcing, and deliverables. This is where customizable views in Kantata are a total game-changer.
Kantata’s customizable views transform chaos into clarity. Views give you real-time visibility of project health, including milestone tracking, RAID logs, and variance analysis across measures like revenue, cost and realisation.
This isn’t prettier reporting. It’s proactive project leadership. You spot budget creep before it becomes a crisis. You identify resource conflicts before they become client complaints. You track deliverables before deadlines become disasters. The result? Projects that finish on time, on budget, with clients who can’t wait to work with you again.
See the Blind Spots Most Firms Miss
Perfect financials mean nothing if your client feels ignored throughout the project. Kantata Pulse tracks team sentiment alongside financial health revealing which projects are renewal goldmines and which are ticking time bombs. Even if your margins dip temporarily, strong client sentiment data means you can intervene before small issues become reputational challenges, proactive client management will significantly increase the chances of realizing any outcome-based revenue and securing future work.
Strategic Revenue Control
Professional services firms are rapidly moving away from traditional time-and-materials models toward outcome-based pricing that ties success directly to value creation. This shift reflects a growing client demand for predictable results over billable hours, fundamentally reshaping how services are packaged, priced, and delivered.
But outcome-based models also bring new financial complexity—challenges that most legacy PSA systems simply can’t handle. In our latest release, SX extends its advanced revenue management capabilities to support revenue deferral and incremental drawdowns, giving firms the tools to better manage risk and easily manage revenue obligations on post-delivery warranty commitments.
Don’t Get Left Behind
While you’re reading this, your sharpest competitors are already reinventing how they deliver services. They’re identifying opportunities sooner, creating seamless client experiences, maintaining full commercial control across complex operations, and turning one-off projects into long-term partnerships.
Take iA, a robotics and software company that scaled to three times its size while increasing margins by 15% through operational intelligence. With more than 250 specialists managing complex global deployments, iA unlocked efficiency gains with Kantata that not only cut costs but also amplified revenue from added headcount—ultimately driving profitability well beyond expectations.
Their CFO, Dave Ristow, summed it up perfectly: “The most significant benefit we’ve seen is a continuous increase in service margins by centralizing everything and managing scope to contracted terms.”
Firms like iA that embrace intelligent project management aren’t just improving operations – they’re positioning themselves as market leaders. They’re winning bigger projects, commanding premium pricing, and building client relationships that competitors just can’t match.
For Kantata customers, SX is the operational engine, delivering real time information and commercial control across sales, delivery and finance..
Every day your firm sticks to traditional project management, your competitors are gaining ground with smarter systems. They’re spotting opportunities faster, solving problems earlier, delivering more profitable engagements, and building stronger client relationships through superior service quality.
The choice is stark: evolve or become irrelevant. The firms that master service quality today will dominate tomorrow’s market. Firms that choose Kantata SX aren’t just implementing software; they’re putting themselves at the forefront of industry transformation. They’re building operational capabilities that turn complexity into a coherent competitive advantage and data into decisive action.
Don’t let competitors define your market position. The tools exist. The proof is real. The only question left is whether you’ll use them before your competitors do.