Kantata Ranks as the Top Provider of Professional Services Automation Solutions in SPI’s 2023 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark

SPI holds up Kantata’s customers as ‘High-Performers’ and models that all professional services organizations can emulate as they focus on performance improvement

Kantata, a leading global supplier of purpose-built technology for professional services, announced it is ranked the number one provider in Service Performance Insight’s (SPI) Professional Service Automation (PSA) category in the 2023 edition of the Professional Services Maturity™ Benchmark. In its first year, Kantata significantly outpaced all other providers with 30% of participants using Kantata as their preferred solution. Additionally, Kantata customers comprise the majority of companies SPI categorizes as “High-Performance Professional Services Organizations (HPPs).”

In this year’s benchmark, SPI Research analyzed the performance of 709 professional services organizations (PSOs) businesses, scoring them across all five service performance pillars to determine an individual score as well as overall maturity ranking.

The report identifies the top 141 (20%) High-Performance firms according to their aggregate PS Maturity Model™ scores, analyzes the reasons for their superlative performance, and compares their results with the rest of the survey participants. 41 of the 141 of the HPPs are Kantata customers, the largest percentage among all PSA vendors.

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“PSOs that have implemented the Kantata Cloud for Professional Services™ vertical SaaS platform demonstrate the positive impact a solution in the PSA category can have on driving transformational outcomes,” said Dave Hofferberth, Managing Director, Service Performance Insight. “It wasn’t too many years ago that PSOs invested very little in information technology for internal use, but now the market clearly recognizes the benefits of information, especially in real-time, and PSOs must continue working in new ways to leverage that data.”

This year’s benchmark tells a story of an industry that has found ways to protect and enhance financial performance, profitability increased from 2021 to 2022, while also struggling to fully come to grips with lingering impacts from the pandemic, changing work norms that create productivity risks, and an ongoing talent war that can threaten the core of a PSO. These overarching challenges have resulted in the degradation of certain Key Performance Indicators, with average employee billable utilization and project margins below five-year averages, the number of projects delivered on time dipping by 5%, and project overruns increasing by 21%.

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The HPPs firms outperformed the majority of firms across the board primarily because they have better information visibility than lower performing firms. SPI Research credits their implementations of PSA solutions like the Kantata Cloud for Professional Services for their ability to achieve better visibility, with over 83% of HPP firms using PSA to drive operational results.

“The SPI results highlight the urgency for PSOs to adopt purpose-built solutions,” said Chris Scalia, Kantata’s Chief Customer Officer. “Organizations with over 50 employees that have adopted a PS-specific solution, like the Kantata Cloud for Professional Services, perform significantly better than those that have not and enjoy a 5% higher average billable utilization and a 16% higher average project margin. There is a clear business case that cannot be ignored and firms should have a strategy to replace outdated solutions.”