SUCCESS STORY
RPI Consultants Decreases Admin Time by 20% with Kantata
RPI Consultants provides expert software consulting and project leadership for enterprise level implementations of products and solutions. RPI’s team of experts represents decades of professional services experience across diverse industries and functional areas.
20%
Decrease in time spent on administrative tasks
5%
Increase in utilization rates
Industry
Company
What Kantata Replaced
Headquarters
The Challenge
RPI’s focus on providing high quality software consulting to clients means that the company is consistently providing a wide variety of services for many different organizations, each with their own unique needs. This drove RPI to use many different forms of communication with clients to drive projects forward, including document sharing, email, invoices, automatic processing, and more.
As a result, RPI adopted numerous solutions to aid in task management duties spread across a growing team, with the business using Smartsheet for project management, ClickTime for time entry, and Zoho for reporting. However, these many disparate systems created an increasing number of complications that RPI needed to solve in order to stay successful. These included:
Manual Data Entry and Integration
Having project management, time entry, and project reporting managed in separate solutions meant that pulling data needed to be done manually. In addition, the process behind logging time and forecasting became time consuming for each team member.
Lack of Transparency and Synchronization
RPI also experienced issues with transparency into resource activity and project progress, with managers unable to tell what projects each team member was working on. The organization experienced difficulty aligning project data with project plans and the onboarding process for new hires became complicated due to the complex processes being used.
“Partnership and trust are the linchpin to the RPI Experience. Kantata has given us the tools to deliver the RPI Experience to a growing list of clients and colleagues. It was easy to implement and we have a great team working to extend the solution to improve our business even more.”
Partner, RPI
The Solution
As RPI continued to find new levels of success in the consulting field, the company decided the time had come for a project management solution that would help them move past their limitations. The search for a solution that could replace legacy systems while also integrating and synchronizing data from other solutions led RPI to Kantata. RPI was specifically looking to Kantata for the following:
Consolidated Project Data
Project data was spread across multiple systems and made it difficult for RPI to measure current performance or understand the company’s potential for growth. Kantata was able to consolidate project data and make it available in out-of-the-box and custom dashboards.
Easy Collaboration
Collaboration was complicated, with tasks and analytics spread across multiple systems. Kantata’s intuitive user interface and the ability to share, update, and communicate through individual tasks and larger projects helped RPI achieve the connectivity teams needed.
Greater Control Over Finances and Time Tracking
The ability to enter and apply time to projects in a central system was crucial to RPI success. Kantata combined time tracking with integration to RPI’s financial management system to help RPI better understand resource allocation, project budget spend, and provide insights into their financial performance for better margins.
“We’re big data nerds here, so the ability for anyone – leadership, managers, whatever your role is – to see data the same way is amazing. We’ve not only used the out-of-the-box reporting, but have created a lot of custom reports. It’s all coming from the same data pool, which makes it dependable.”
Senior Project Manager, RPI
Benefits
- Reduced time spent on administrative tasks
- Improved utilization rates
- Established single source of truth for project data
- Accurate forecasting improves resource management
“The benefits were present on day one, and continue to grow over time as we’ve learned to better utilize the system. Kantata has allowed us the opportunity to breathe in a time of both uncertainty and opportunity. We are lightyears ahead of where we were just a short six months ago.”
PMO Director, RPI