J2 Interactive Improves Resource Planning and Prevents Revenue Leakage with Kantata
Industry
Company
Headquarters
What Kantata Replaced
The Challenge
With offices and projects in the US, UK, Canada, and Dubai, J2 Interactive wanted to streamline its resource management and placement processes and gain access to more robust reporting and resource forecasting functionality than its incumbent solution provided.
“We needed a clear overview of our resources — what everybody was working on, what their skill sets were, and which projects they were a good fit for,” explains Jennifer Mooney, J2’s Executive Director of Operations. “OpenAir no longer worked for us. Instead, we relied on really complex spreadsheets in Google Docs.”
J2 also felt hampered by a lack of flexibility and transparency, especially when it came to auditing the company’s monthly employee timesheets, converting erroneously classified non-billable time to billable, and reassigning time booked against the wrong task or purchase order.
“There’s always going to be some percentage of work that people report incorrectly. But it was difficult to find those discrepancies and equally complicated to make changes,” says Mooney. “When we wanted to move time around in OpenAir, we had to export raw data to Excel and re-import with manual corrections — if you got anything wrong, you could totally corrupt the database.”
J2 Interactive, two-time recipient of the annual Best in KLAS award for Technical Services, is in the business of connecting healthcare organizations. J2 Interactive promotes information sharing through customized solutions for health systems, labs, research institutions, and information exchanges within the international healthcare community’s public and private sectors.
Benefits
- Reduced revenue leakage by simplifying the identification and correction of billing oversights
- Retired workaround systems, ending reliance on Google Docs
- Streamlined project management and employee utilization planning while decreasing administrative effort
Improved organizational adaptability to evolving project demands
Eliminated the need to execute tedious, manual data imports for time tracking adjustments
“Even though we have grown larger and more complex, Kantata makes us more efficient with less effort.”
Executive Director of Operations, J2 Interactive
The Solution
J2 turned to the Kantata Professional Services Cloud to manage its rapid expansion as the company scaled up to a 300-person workforce supporting around 200 active projects worldwide.
“We wanted a SaaS platform that allowed us to place our people, track time, track our projects, and get our invoices out to the customer accurately and easily,” says Mooney. “Kantata was the best fit. It was the most comprehensive solution. We knew it could help us manage our processes and seize new opportunities as we grew.”
Throughout the implementation, J2 received extensive support from Kantata to ensure the complex migration did not disrupt operations. In addition to receiving direct assistance from the Kantata team, customer resources like the Kantata Community provided practical guidance and real-world solutions from industry peers experienced with the solution.
“It was a massive undertaking to shift from one platform to another,” says Mooney. “Kantata worked with us from day one, always asking the right questions so we didn’t overlook anything important.”
“Kantata connects us to a wealth of information and detail we didn’t have before. Things are more straightforward — everything is easier to keep a handle on.”
Executive Director of Operations, J2 Interactive
The Results
Improved Reporting and Resource Planning
In line with those goals, J2 Interactive streamlined its real-time resource forecasting, allocation, and contractor skills inventory management.
Kantata enhanced the company’s visibility into the status of its projects and workforce, helping J2 improve the quality of its resource data and retire the workarounds it had used to augment OpenAir.
“When you are onboarding 100 people a year you need immediate access to accurate information. Kantata makes it much easier to gather, maintain, and search through the complicated combinations of data we need to choose the right people for each project. Kantata has made resourcing projects both faster and easier — and we no longer need to track resources in Google Docs.”
Enhanced Project Planning
By consolidating resource and project data using Kantata, J2 has also seen marked improvements to its project planning processes.
Where previously the company struggled with aspects of OpenAir’s rigidity, Kantata gave the company the flexibility to react to shifting customer requirements.
“Few projects go exactly as planned, each one is a constantly evolving process prone to scope creep, budget adjustments, and delayed start and end dates. Kantata allows us to accommodate those shifts. That flexibility makes a big difference in helping us avoid missed opportunities.”
Project Management at Scale
After going live with Kantata, J2 can more accurately plan, execute, and document large-scale projects involving multiple resources.
And they can all that without increasing administrative headcount, overworking employees, or leaving resources underutilized.
“Kantata is a much more efficient, straightforward way of dealing with people and their time. One of our projects alone can involve up to 30 of our people, each at a different rate. As we move resources and adjust the project costs and timelines, we rely on Kantata’s planning and reporting functionality to ensure the information we present to the client is correct and concise.”
Reduced Revenue Leakage
Another big win for J2 are the improvements to its billing and invoicing processes. Strict controls within Kantata tie every timesheet entry to a purchase order, and descriptive custom fields define each line item to simplify identifying potentially costly manual oversights.
Likewise, Kantata eliminates the need for the complicated administrative procedures and dedicated personnel J2 once depended on to remedy those oversights.
“Kantata has made it much more difficult to make billing errors — there is nothing more important than getting our invoices right. Unlike OpenAir, Kantata also allows us to easily spot and correct issues without dedicated personnel to make dangerous manual data corrections in Excel.”