Taylors Improves Utilization Rates by 15% with Kantata
Industry
Company
What Kantata Replaced
Headquarters
The Challenge
As Taylors grew in size and opened international offices, the company sought to provide team members with the information needed to enable more accountability in delivering projects. Doing so would help better analyze performance efficiency in individual projects and empower people to play a more effective role in larger team projects.
Taylors built its own system, QBoss, for project management because the company could not find what it wanted in the market 15 years ago. However, the homegrown solution was built when the company was composed of approximately 50 team members. As the company grew, the system couldn’t keep up with Taylors’ business requirements. Taylors needed to move past certain limitations, including:
Lack of Workflow Control
As a diverse company, many projects at Taylors involve team members from across the country simultaneously working together despite their distance. The business needed a solution that could improve the workflow and strengthen task coordination while still allowing team members to maintain their flexible schedules.
Complications from a Growing Team
As Taylors grew in size, it also embraced a more flexible and remote approach to work. As such, the business needed a project management solution that could allow people to work from anywhere and at any time, working both online and offline, without unnecessary complications. But their legacy system could not keep up with the number of tasks being assigned and could not provide the necessary level of insights.
Taylors Development Strategists is an Australia-based urban planning, landscape architecture, building designer, surveying, and civil engineering organization that has worked in urban development, project strategy, and delivery for more than 50 years. Taylors strives to explore new frontiers, challenge the industry, and grow the space of groundbreaking project and development activity.
“For me, the workflow management capabilities and ability to implement workflow management by individual tasks within Kantata are the keys to success and are critical for the future of our business.”
Managing Director, Taylors
The Solution
Continued company growth and business processes that relied on coordination between multiple offices in different countries led Taylors to look for a new solution. While the company considered several different project management solutions, Taylors selected Kantata. There were multiple reasons why Taylors chose Kantata to fulfill its project management needs, including:
Effective Project Reporting
Kantata helped Taylors eliminate manual processes for invoicing and project reporting through the use of fast, customizable, automated reports for teams across the organization.
Multi-Office Coordination
Taylors used Kantata to better coordinate its many different offices and the various tasks being completed across the country for improved collaboration and greater efficiency.
Strong Integration Capabilities
Kantata’s ability to integrate with other solutions, specifically Netsuite, that were critical in Taylors’ business processes was a major reason behind its adoption of the project management solution. “We feel like we can grow with Kantata,” said Richard Cirillo, Managing Director at Taylors.
“People around the world expect a more flexible work schedule today, including our team. In Melbourne, some employees’ commute time has doubled over the last seven years and we want to give people a better work-life balance via more flexible working arrangements.”
Managing Director, Taylors
Benefits
- Improved international collaboration
- In-depth insights into project targets and utilization
- More consistent company-wide timesheet entry
- Improved utilization company-wide
Improvement in overall utilization rates
More consistent company-wide timesheet entry
The Results
Critical Project Visibility
With Kantata, the team at Taylors has improved its visibility into individual team member utilization rates, as well as daily performance for each employee. In addition, Taylors has increased its visibility regarding how each project is progressing in regards to schedules and other targets that are critical for success. The result is that Taylors has been able to increase company-wide utilization rates by 15% through the use of Kantata.
Improved Project Insights
Taylors’ civil engineering projects are billed on a flat fee, which requires the company to estimate the total cost of work before beginning. However, there are many factors that the business cannot predict due to changes in clients’ desires and the complications that often come from working with government organizations. Kantata has helped Taylors analyze workflows at a granular level to better understand the actual hours of a project and create greater efficiencies in the business.
Customized Reports for Unique Demands
Today, Taylors uses a mix of Kantata’s pre-built reports and customized reports to create valuable insights regarding critical business processes. These pre-built reports include project health, utilization, and execution reports, while custom-built reports provide Taylors with exact data regarding the performance of its uniquely-structured teams, which are spread across multiple countries. These reports have helped the business make the most of its highly-collaborative process.
Company-Wide Adoption
Kantata has been adopted by multiple departments across Taylors to support a wide variety of needs, including the finance department to make the most of each resource’s billable hours and the human resources department to better prepare and manage each person’s role within the company. The improved insights into each resource and project combined with stronger billing made possible by Kantata will ensure long-term success for Taylors.
“The ability to consolidate multiple Excel sheets, Word documents, and other time-consuming manual processes within Kantata has been a crucial improvement. The more Excel sheets I can eliminate, the better for me.”
Senior Project Administrator, Taylors