Kantata reviews

Awesome platform that's only getting better

Opmerkingen: Overall, using Mavenlink has been great - it has made a very positive impact on day-to-day functions as a business. I would recommend it highly to agencies for its flexibility and extensive functionality to manage resources and projects.

Pluspunten:

The reporting functionality Mavenlink offers is extensive and has enabled us to get much better visibility to our project, program, portfolio and resourcing data. Which in turn has allowed us to set/adjust our KPI/KRIs and better inform business decisions with the data we have available. In using Mavenlink how it's meant to be used, not only have we improved our business practices but our PMO has gained valuable insight into important aspects of the business that were previously siloed. The fact that Mavenlink actually continues to improve its platform based on user feedback is a massive plus, as new functionality becomes available to better utilize the platform.

Minpunten:

There are some small (very small in most cases) problems we have with some functionality i.e. the naming/categorization of metrics in the reporting suite could be clearer, when approving/rejecting timesheets, adding a comment to a specific entry would be preferable, rather than the comment being published to all entries.

Kantata has transformed project and cost management

Opmerkingen: Using Kantata , we finally have a way to track the time and effort put in by our engineers across all of the projects they're working on. We were able to respond to questions from our leaders much more quickly, which helped us avoid certain personnel problems.

Pluspunten:

Kantata has revolutionized our approach to budgeting and task management. The opportunity to centralize all of our initiatives in one place and provide individualized reports that tracked our development in relation to our key performance indicators is something we are really grateful for. We also take pleasure in learning where we may be under- or over-allocating our engineers, so that we may swiftly adjust our course.

Minpunten:

As far as we can tell, employing Kantata does not come with any major drawbacks. Reports are not sorted alphabetically or numerically, however these are minor issues.

Kantata review

Pluspunten:

Kantata Cloud for Professional Services is an innovative cloud-based solution that can help professional service organizations manage their operations more effectively. I found the platform to be extremely user-friendly and had a lot of features that made it easy to manage multiple projects and tasks. The built-in project management tools allowed me to quickly create projects, assign tasks, and monitor progress. Additionally, I was able to monitor project performance and profitability in real time with detailed analytics. The automated time tracking feature was also great, as it allowed me to easily capture the exact hours worked on each project. I was also impressed with the customer support that Kantata Cloud offered, as they were always available to answer my questions and address any issues I had.

Minpunten:

I would like to see an increased variety of templates for project development, as well as more customization options. Additionally, the process for creating team profiles is limited and not very customizable. The control panel and overall interface of the software is difficult to use, and its many tools and functions make it hard to get used to.

Good system but some frustrating issues

Opmerkingen: Useful overall, but the more time I spend with it the more I realize it is missing some key functionality that would save a lot of time. It's much more difficult to update a project in Mavenlink than past systems I've used, and I think there are some beneficial tweaks that could be made

Pluspunten:

From an ease of use standpoint, time entry and project creation is fairly straightforward. It's also nice to have access to so many reporting features, although I imagine that's even more valued by the leadership team rather than staff.

Minpunten:

Three major issues stand out to me and my colleagues: 1- the software is very slow at times, and the more time I spend making edits to a project the longer it takes. In some cases, the lag is so bad that a task that should take 10 minutes ends up taking 30 since I wait so long for the system respond. The more tasks and individuals assigned to a project, the worse it is. Customer service suggested I delete my cache, but this was a temporary and fairly ineffective solution 2- It'd be great to have a simple place where I can see exactly how many hours a team member has on a project. Right now, we can only see time assigned to individual tasks, and then need to calculate the total manually 3- When tasks get extended or shortened, it'd be great to have a way to have Mavenlink automatically distribute time accordingly. For example, if I have 1 hour assigned for a 1-week long task, it'd be nice if I could automatically change this to 30min/week if that task were extended to being 2 weeks long. I know time can move automatically if the gantt is updated, but that only works if the task stays the same duration and hasn't started yet. Other systems offer this feature

Kantata is a great way to handle project/task management for your business.

Opmerkingen: A great way to monitor and build your project management, tasks. Simply and easy to use application.

Pluspunten:

It has multiple ways to use for project management, task scheduling and follow-up, many other things unlike available applications.

Minpunten:

For me it is doing the job required and I have never faced an issue with the system at all. Maybe it could require some work on the interface on the mobile.

OK for the basics, advanced functionality is either missing or not well implemented

Opmerkingen: Implementation was not very well executed. We basically had to figure it out on our own. THe "integrations" through thier integration tool are very poorly built and the tool is terrible. It gets the basics right but more advanced features like the Insights reporting add on are poorly executed.

Pluspunten:

Ease of use, Reporting, Project Financials

Minpunten:

M Bridge integration platform is a complete failure. Its terrible. Training during implementation was not good. We've learned more on our own in a few classes. Time entry is weak and poorly designed. Lacks subprojects. User permissions are all or nothing in most cases.

Kantata Review

Opmerkingen: In general, it is a good tool for developing the workflow, although it needs to add some improvements to it. It helps to perform the various functions of the company more efficiently.

Pluspunten:

A good tool for managing resources and increasing productivity, it works to manage projects with high efficiency, helps in making appropriate decisions, and also helps in saving time and increasing profit.

Minpunten:

This platform needs to develop to increase the speed of work and shorten more time, you need to add new features that enable adding more than one user at the same time. Reports should be issued sooner than that.

Kantata can replace multiple tools to manage projects, recourses and track time

Opmerkingen: We managed to replace multiple tools with a singe Kantata:- project management-resource utilization-time entries-expenses-billing

Pluspunten:

It's great to have a single tool to manage projects, time and expenses, also it gives you a great visibility or resource utilization. Also it gives you a great overall analysis on all of your projects

Minpunten:

I takes time to configure Kantata to your business needsrequires some training due to configuration complexityvisibility of uploaded files against a single project is not great

The project management system is good and still expanding.

Pluspunten:

I appreciate the feature of being able to personalize and construct our own reports and metrics that suit our distinct business requirements. This ability to customize the reports and metrics allows us to better track and measure our progress while also enabling us to obtain the information that is most important to our company.

Minpunten:

They have introduced numerous new features that have significant potential, but there have been some delays and technical issues that they are still addressing. Also, I would appreciate having more options to personalize the project setup. In particular, the percentage-of-spend projects do not fit neatly into the Kantata system, unlike fixed-fee or other project types. The Team Builder tool has room for improvement, and it would be beneficial to have more customization options that would make it more valuable to our organization.

Great user-friendly product

Opmerkingen: It helps keep track of a project's status and time spent on specific tasks.

Pluspunten:

The clear and intuitive project and task trackers.

Minpunten:

The amount of billable vs non-billable hours is not clearly defined.

Too complicated time entry

Opmerkingen: Too complicated as an end user just trying to get my time entered.

Pluspunten:

There's a lot of functionality at the higher up space

Minpunten:

As a user who enters their time the time entry screen is an extremely overcomplicated experience. It should be as simple as picking a project, sub-code and then entering time. My experience so far is vastly overcomplicated with different places and ways to enter it. I came from using harvest to track time and their weekly view with a row of the project and code i use frequently is most excellent.

The Ultimate Services & Operations Management Software

Opmerkingen: The only way to describe this would be "It has been and still is fun to work with". It's a great piece of software, and once you get used to its logic you will be able to do great things - and by great things I mean measure exactly how much you sell your services for and how much resources you are actually using.
This, plus see employee performance, project performance, you can create custom fields to cover for any special requirement.

Pluspunten:

- Integrations and API - An excellent Salesforce bridge is available and can be fully customised (if you know Java!). You also get other connectors for Jira, Slack, and an API that allows you to do virtually anything. - Integrated GoodData reporting - If you are technical enough you can improve your workflows by adding custom fields and creating custom metrics. I used this solution to monitor the performances of the entire Professional Services team at Emarsys. - The software itself is essentially like Microsoft Project but online and with conversations & invoices generation - you can manage anything from a very small and basic project to a massive 2 years project thanks to the versatile task management interface. GANTT charts are available and, of course, if you know how to use GoodData you can dig even further into the project reports. - Resourcing wise it has a Master Planning tool which looks a bit like Resource Guru but completely integrated with the software, so you are really buying the full package with Mavenlink.

Minpunten:

I believe the biggest flaw in Mavenlink is the absence of a "real" administrator. Essentially, you can be an admin but if a project is set to "Invitation only" you cannot join it unless someone invites you. So being a Mavenlink admin is not like being a Jira admin where you can do anything you want, you are more of a "open projects administrator". The workaround is to have an integration user creating the projects and a good integration with your CRM that allows you to update fields that would be otherwise not accessible. Mind that you can still remove the integration user from the project, and at that point the only way to re-enter the project is to ask the project lead to invite you. This should clear any security concerns, if your projects require extreme privacy.

Software well tailored for our business needs

Opmerkingen: Overall, the experience is become better and better. I'd say the UI still has some usability issues.

Pluspunten:

Great master planning for resources and allocations.

Minpunten:

Two biggest pet peeves are the following: 1. It's irritating that you must delete a recreate a time entry if you enter it on the wrong day of the week on the Timesheets view. Should be able to just change the date of the entry. Other similar software allows this. 2. On Master Planning, I want to see how many hours are represented in the allocation every week not just how many hours by percentage across the span of weeks the allocation runs. This make it hard to determine quickly how many hours the resource has for each allocation for that week.

Mavenlink feedback

Pluspunten:

The reporting and overview of the project is very helpful. .I also like how you can budget towards individual tasks/milestones. It's also good to see an overview of staff's availability and schedule them on specific days for projects.

Minpunten:

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. When you have to do this for multiple users across different projects, it takes a lot of time!!! Should be able to do a recurring staffing - define the time period, how many hrs for which user and project. If there are changes to hrs or staffing for a project, you then have to go in and change across the board - should be able to change that recurring staffing to a different number/person

Mavenlink is a Great Project Management Tool

Opmerkingen: Mavenlink has allowed us to track everything coming in and out of our department on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. This has shown the demand for our services and how well we manage our time with this demands. We are also able to easily invite those outside of our department to join in and collaborate, which has simplified our daily request process. Everything can be found in one place.

Pluspunten:

Mavenlink allows for our team to easily collaborate on projects from beginning to end. We can cater our tasks to our specific needs and show the progress along the way for everyone to see. The updates that are sent via email keep me on track with the numerous projects I have at hand. The time tracking integration is beneficial to us when we are working with outside clients. This function is simple to use!

Minpunten:

I find it difficult to access archived projects when I need to refer back to them. It appears that you need to know the exact title of the project in order to search it. Even though the time tracking function is simple to use, I do wish I could pause my time on one project without tracking it and move to another project where I start tracking time as well. I feel that I have to submit small increments of time often because I cannot do this.

Mavenlink is feature rich and user friendly

Opmerkingen: Mavenlink has been a feature-rich tool that has been adaptable to our unique model.

Pluspunten:

Mavenlink has a lot of custom features and functionality which was an important factor in that we needed to find a tool that met our many custom processes and workflows.

Minpunten:

Mavenlink does not allow customers to see budget in hours or dollars, so clients can't see any sort of project burndown. New features and functionality are slow to be released, but for a platform its size, ML does a decent job of staying on top of squashing bugs.

Increased capabilities for our company as a whole

Opmerkingen: I really like both the time tracking and invoicing modules. I find them to be pretty flexible and easy to use. Some other areas require more manual work than I'd like, but overall, we are happy with Mavenlink and can live with the things we don't like.

Pluspunten:

I like the ease of updating time tracking and making changes after the fact. I like the ability to quickly see project run rate and status. Our last CRM had very limited skills and resourcing capabilities, and so this was both one of the big reasons why we switched to ML and one of the best things about the product.

Minpunten:

I don't like the limitations on setting boundaries on projects. Mavenlink requires much more manual work than our last CRM in the invoicing and expense categories. There are some things that just don't make sense to me, like having the ability to mark expenses as paid. We've had to create a tracking system outside of ML in order to deal with expenses. I also don't like that administrators can't update/edit expenses.

Mavenlink Rocks

Opmerkingen: We use Mavenlink to project management all new school openings and are now starting to use it for all of our large national events. Mavenlink has definitely helped us open more schools worldwide efficiently and effectively. Before Mavenlink, communication and documentation were major issues around our projects. With Mavenlink, we are able to document our calls and follow ups within the system itself. Tasks linked to communications are also very helpful. The features I like best are ease of use, Dashboard view of all projects, Templates, sync to Google Apps, and Gannt.

Pluspunten:

Ease of use and communication. The ability to start threads regarding specific tasks, upload/share google docs, post messages that also go to email, etc. has been critical to successfully completing projects.

Minpunten:

The only dislike I have is that I cannot push a change across multiple projects at one time. We use templates for almost every project we launch. Sometimes those templates get updated and those changes need to be applied to current projects.

Big Upgrade compared to our previous PM software

Opmerkingen: Overall I am very happy with the product, big upgrade compared to our previous PM software. (PM.com)

Pluspunten:

It meets all our department's needs, I love the activity feed and the overall view of all our projects. Also great reporting tool!

Minpunten:

The gantt chart, I wish the reporting would be more user friendly.

Great for project management, not great to interface to any other system.

Pluspunten:

This system does it's main job well, which is to manage projects.

Minpunten:

Attempting to interface this system into any other system is extremely difficult. Mavenlink staff don't seem to have a lot of experience with interfacing their system. We eventually had to come up with our own solution that relied only on a simple data download. Their pricing model is such that you end up paying a lot of money for relatively little value add i.e. in the area of time keeping. A more extensive licensing fee is charged for people to approve time. Mavenlink would be well served to change their model to charge less for the functions that are not their core competency and more for project management functionality, which is.

Good tool for Internal improvements

Opmerkingen: Our organisation has been able to streamline a group of integrated teams into a well structured project management tool. It's helped to track our progress in many ongoing projects. It made the team fulfil tasks faster.

Pluspunten:

Absolute perfect customer support. We have put resource planning somewhere easily accessible for the whole company. Even before Mavenlink, we had Microsoft Project for this, and it was not as easy-to-use as Mavenlink. The support we've gotten from the Mavenlink team is awesome. Whether it's getting questions answered, prioritising potential feature enhancements, or giving feedback on the product road map . I always know that our voice will be heard and considered.

Minpunten:

Everything is fine, it is just we use custom fields on almost all tasks we create, so when created templates with these task lists because we re-use a lot of the same tasks. Unfortunately, templates do not save custom fields so we've had to add these each time we apply a template. It could be improved.

Efficient Project Management System

Opmerkingen: I love having Mavenlink as our project management system. It's much more efficient and user-friendly than the system we used before, and they seem to always be improving it which is good to know from the user point of view.

Pluspunten:

The ability to keep up with each individual project, its tasks and subtasks and everything else involved, without worrying about it getting lost in our Google Drive or desktops. It's a good place to store information, communicate with coworkers, and stay up-to-date on the project's status.

Minpunten:

The recurring projects (which make up about 75% of our company) sometimes have trouble repeating correctly each month. The dates will be off and we have to go in and manually adjust a few things, which isn't a huge deal but it's an inconvenience that we'd prefer to avoid.

Great Product to Bring the Team Together

Opmerkingen: Since our startup we've used basic spreadsheet tools to capture and analyze data. It was possible to generate project metrics and profitability, but the process was cumbersome. That information is just a click away now. We've also eliminated much of the possibility of our employees entering time to the wrong codes with the task assignment functions.

Pluspunten:

Our organization includes some office staff, but is mostly made up of remote employees on our client's project sites. Mavenlink has given us a great tool for communicating with our team, as well as capturing time and expense entries via the Cloud. Our employees really like the interface and the ability to log time and expense from their mobile devices. Also, we've found the online workspace to be of great value in transmitting and archiving information and files. Our implementation included support from Laura Pierce and her BIASS team. Laura led us thru integrating our processes with the capabilities of the tool via a weekly meeting. Action items were identified and quickly addressed. Laura was always there to assist with answering questions and being a sounding board for my ideas. It was also a neat experience to have the BIASS team use the Mavenlink tool to setup and manage the BIASS project.

Minpunten:

Most of the opportunities I see with the tool could be considered enhancements to the time and expense processing function and invoicing processes. These include: * More flexibility in the Admin's abilities to review, edit and approve project charges in the invoicing cycle would be helpful. *The ability to provide greater detail of expense charges on the invoice (which is a current action item with Mavenlink for us), and * The ability to push transactions that are not time and expense entries, such as taxes, unit bill amounts, etc. to QuickBooks would be helpful.

Upped Our Utilization!

Opmerkingen: We took on Mavenlink when we needed a 50,000 foot view of our department's capacity. The levels of organization that Mavenlink has brought our team's creatives have gone way beyond our expectations. People know exactly what they need to be working on when they come in in the morning. Plus, it allows us to monitor our team's capacity so we know when we need to add more than one creative to a job or even gives us backup when we need to prove why we need to hire more staff.

Pluspunten:

I love the way Mavenlink automates communication as the project moves on down through the workflow. By using dependency arrows on the gantt chart, our creatives are automatically notified when their tasks are ready to start. It's pretty slick!

Minpunten:

How unforgiving the gantt chart is. I realize it's web-based in a browser, but it really needs an "undo" button.

Program Manager Review

Opmerkingen: It has been positive and has definitely streamlined a lot of my work on a day to day basis as a PM

Pluspunten:

The invoicing and billing functionality is great as well as allowing resources to be forecasted and allocated to multiple projects

Minpunten:

It is a bit clunky to use at first as there is a lot of functionality within it