Kantata

Vorteile

The best feature of Kantata is that is provides a combination of Professional Services Automation (the ability to track time, assignments, tasks, project margins, etc.) along with an end-customer collaboration capability to jointly track project task progress, shared documents, and shared task progress.

Nachteile

The more challenging part of Kantata is the custom reporting aspects. During implementation, we have several custom reports built by the Kantata team. These are working acceptably, but if you want to modify or change those reports it takes a pretty high level of knowledge and experience.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Kantata

Vorteile

Ease of use and implementation. Knowledgebase is extensive.

Nachteile

Some basic features lack customisation and could use with better enhancements.

Vorteile

Single Dashboard to review all submitted, resubmitted and pending timesheets which makes weekly timesheet review a simple task. It is much better than Tempo timesheets that I have used in past.

Nachteile

Nothing in particular but more filter and sorting options on project page would have been more helpful as it takes a while to find what you are looking for in it's current view.

Vorteile

Billable & Non-Billable Hours: The ability to quickly tab through the hours field is great, along with ability to prepare future timesheets without submitting them.

Expense Tracking: Submitting expense reports is fairly quick, once expenses themselves are created.

Nachteile

Billable & Non-Billable Hours: Would like to be able to bypass entering Location as needed. It is not always needed for time tracking, but it is globally-required by the system.

Expense Tracking: The ability to copy like expenses would be a great added feature. Expense details and amounts are almost always the same for recurring monthly employee reimbursements, and so being able to just copy those and attach the new receipts would be really helpful.

Vorteile

I like that my staffing projections are easy to access, view and share across digital teams.

Nachteile

Forecasting hours by the week/month needs to be automated - this is too manual and time consuming at the time. Need to be able to drag and drop hours, or somehow more speedily be able to populate staff allocations. Also finance reporting / utilization reporting is incredibly difficult of not impossible due to my current access level. I have to rely on the finance and resourcing department for all reporting - this is not sustainable for project management.

Vorteile

Great master planning for resources and allocations.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

The project tracking, in terms of the timesheet collection and revenue management this works great for our business and is absolutely essential.

Nachteile

From an overall user perspective, the system can be quite clunky to use without adequate training which has caused some hiccups.

Vorteile

Great tool for maintaining client communications and managing timelines effectively!

Nachteile

It would be great for the Project Plan to have more configurations options and editing capabilities like in Excel.

Vorteile

It was relatively easy to use and teach others how to use

Nachteile

Overall it felt a bit fussy. There were more options than we needed and it sometimes felt overwhelming.

Vorteile

Best in project management and data analysis

Nachteile

It's hard to say there's anything I don't like about kantata

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

We are new to having a PSA and PM tool. So it was great to go from each department having their own spreadsheets to one point of truth and full visibility across the project. But as well - all the in built finance management and integrations we setup has streamlined so many additional administrative elements of managing our work. And the real time visibility to project performance (timelines and finances) is great.

Nachteile

Navigating some of the integrations has been a little longer than I would have hoped for the roll-out. The support to get things implemented was not as timely as we would have hoped.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Kantata

Vorteile

Resource planning was made 1000% better by using the Mavenlink product. It is an intuitive modern UI that is feature rich across the board.

Nachteile

There are some gaps in the product and areas where I wish it had been more configurable. For instance, invoicing could use more flexibility in terms of how you build out an invoice (and how you display things on the invoice). Also, time tracking is easy but notes aren't required nor is there a config to make them required which has been a big pain for us.

Vorteile

We like the ability to share a work space with clients

Nachteile

It is cumbersome and tough to get reporting out of. Also just the general space used for reporting leads to scroll bars inside of scroll bars.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Warum Kantata gewählt wurde

Zuvor genutzte Software

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Kantata

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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

Vorteile

Scheduling, capaccity, status tracking, project health tracking, budget, etc all in one place. Tons of data available and a pretty robust API to expand on the capability.

Nachteile

It is slow and seems clunky at times. Viewing master planner is the biggest place I notice this.

Vorteile

Creating task lists is easy in Mavenlink. Once the list is created, you can move the items around to rearrange the order or turn some of them into sub-tasks.

Nachteile

The expense report tool doesn't work for our organization because Mavenlink only calculates expenses in a single currency. Our company has employees all over the world and we travel to clients in many countries. Therefore, having the ability to convert currencies is key for our group.
I would also like the ability to copy a timesheet completely from one week to another (both the billing categories and the time spent on projects).

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

* Resource Allocation features
* Billing/non-billing time tracking and monitoring
* Timesheet management features
* Workflow management
* Report and Analytics features
* Customer support

Nachteile

Not much of a con, but ease of use is something that could be improved. In our organization also, we give a small session to any new mavenlink user before onboarding them on the software

Vorteile

I like the ease of use and the simple layout of mavenlink

Nachteile

I wish there was a way to put non-billable time into projects such as accountants time on invoicing, marketing, and finance. These items are the bleed on a project if you don't factor them into the profitability margin.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Kantata

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

Our team loves the amount of perspectives Mavenlink affords us when we need to gauge our incoming work and available resource capacities. The easy to operate Task Lists give our Creatives clear information when it comes time every morning to quickly get to work and know what is important and what can wait. The drag-and-drop gantt charts make scheduling and adjusting projects quick work for our Production team.

Nachteile

Given how powerful the suite is, it might come across at first to the unseasoned Creative as slightly overwhelming. Though, this feeling is quickly surpassed by empowerment once they understand how intuitive the UI/UX is.

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

We needed a unified system that did: task tracking, budget tracking, project schedules, time entry and resource management. MavenLink nails it in those arenas! Finally we have a tool that doesn't require another 15 tools!

Nachteile

There are a lot of features and options for how to do things, and not enough "how to" videos that their competitors have.

Vorteile

As a PMS, MVL works really well. Task tracking and communication in a team is handled well. Resource metrics and time tracking also works well in my experience.

Nachteile

Reporting isn't on demand but rather on a 30-min schedule. In general, reporting is the only aspect of MVL that requires upgrading, in my opinion.

There are some performance issues with MVL also that hinder efficiency. Significant lag in big projects with many tasks makes it difficult to edit any entries.

Vorteile

I've used Mavenlink with a team of more than 50 members and it was useful to see the project tracking by client and tha gantt chart.

Nachteile

It is a bit cumbersome to update all the project dates. We have hundreds of projects in Mavenlink and the features are a bit hard to grasp sometimes.

Vorteile

The product is easy to use, and it provides capabilities that with the right onboarder, can implement the tool strategically into the company, to meet the companies needs.

Nachteile

With a tool this sophicasticated I think the integration team could provide more support, without a cost attached to it. With the price tag, the team is forced to learn it and integrate it themselves which in turn results in improper use of the tool.

Project management function, it's tedious and doesn't provide the support needed. There is room for improvement here.

Vorteile

For the record, I'm writing from the perspective of a copywriter, rather than a project manager. Mavenlink acted as a hub for all of our projects. All of our assignments, assets, and time management lived there. Every time I asked my project manager for an asset, she would always tell me it's "somewhere" in Mavenlink. I knew our documents were safe with Mavenlink, but finding them could be a bit tricky.

Nachteile

I found this software to be more confusing as a non-project manager. The user experience was less-than-great and I often wasted time looking for documents that were hidden somewhere deep in the Mavenlink database. The design of the software is also not very appealing to me. It feels very stale.

Vorteile

It integrates really well with Jira and makes time tracking/project burn tracking really easy across functional teams.

Nachteile

The gantt chart is a little complicated and takes a little time to get use to as opposed to other software i've used in the past.

Vorteile

Easy to use and has useful features. Efficient to use.

Nachteile

It's not completely accessible to people with disabilities and they need some help in accessing some of the features such as adding or removing values from the timesheet.

Vorteile

Staff Resourcing - Mavenlink is the only product we found that realizes how important resource planning is to a service company. With Master Planning and scheduled hrs we have added visibility and granularity into our resourcing plans that wasn't possible with our old MS Project based process. Mavenlink is also focused on improving this area even more in 2016, which I am very excited about.

Project Planning - By introducing Mavenlink Templates into our Project Management processes, we've been able to standardize project plans and also make them easier to create.

Partnership - Throughout my engagement with Mavenlink I have felt connected to their team and like my company was a partner rather than just another sale. They are always available to answer questions and ask for feedback about upcoming features that will benefit us.

Nachteile

We would really benefit from the addition of a view only user role for senior management, so we didn't need to manually add them to all projects.

I would also really value some more search filter options on many pages and including search parameters into the URL so a specific search can be shared.

Vorteile

Certain tasks including time keeping and overall project organization are assisted by Mavenlink. Document uploads are easy and conversation threads are intuitive for the most part. The search feature works well.

Nachteile

In the face of so many more streamlined solutions, it feels like Mavenlink hasn't kept up. It's a little clunky in that there are so many places to put information, and too many ways to do it that make things more disorganized than not.

Vorteile

The software makes timesheet tracking easy and has decent reporting capabilities.

Nachteile

There are two types of reports with one being customizable, but it only refreshes once every few hours. This means you have to use canned reports to see real-time data. The expense report experience is much less than ideal.

Vorteile

I used Mavenlink for 2 years for my timesheets and project management. It was great for inputting time,
managing project due dates and milestones, storing calendars and more. It also stores pdfs for storyboards and other image sharing.

Nachteile

It could be a little cleaner interface for navigating to different categories. But it was mostly pretty user friendly for my needs.

Vorteile

- Ability to compare scheduled hours to actual hours
- Robust reporting, both custom and out of the box options
- Interactive Gantt
- Easy to link conversation to project tasks
- Flexible project templates for team re-use
- Custom fields
- Amazingly supportive Mavenlink team!!

Nachteile

While these are my biggest cons, I also know there's improvements on the way:
- Building a project plan takes a little getting used to if you're a diehard Microsoft Project person.
- Timer doesn't allow you to switch between tasks very easily.
- Can't easily export project plan or Gantt in a nice view.

Vorteile

Good time keeping. Accessible from mobile phone in a pinch

Nachteile

entering expenses takes 2 steps.. It's cumbersome. and if you need to change it, it won't change, it requires you to create new as the resubmit doesn't always work how you'd like.

Vorteile

Mavenlink enables us to know the workload of our teams and Ike projects on schedule and within budget.

Nachteile

I wish the reporting was easier so that more users could work in it.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Warum Kantata gewählt wurde

Zuvor genutzte Software

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Kantata

Vorteile

Nice interface and design. Easy to track time

Nachteile

Difficult to track time off, not easy to remove time

Vorteile

- Time Entry
- Management of individual projects
- Integrations w/ Jira
- Forecasting/Planning
- Happy to have approvals, but they could be more flexible.
- Managing budgets against project timelines.

Nachteile

- Invoicing
- Reporting
- Happy to have approvals, but they could be more flexible.
- Granularity of permissions

Vorteile

Budget tracking is easy and effective, although depending on configuration, it can differ between the finances and budget tabs within a project. Gantt view is super helpful for changing timelines and communicating with client.

Nachteile

The task tracker sometimes is really slow to load when moving tasks around within a given project. There is often a huge number of notifications, but you can configure those to limit them significantly if necessary.

Vorteile

The ease of use from a PS Coordinator role

Nachteile

The collaboration capabilities could use improvement, I dont like having to scroll to find info

Vorteile

I log my time here for purposes of client billing and have had no issues so far

Nachteile

I think there are features around Gantt charts and stuff that nobody in my company knows how to use, it isn't the most intuitive. I log my hours here and nothing else, but I think there is a lot more we could take advantage of if we knew how.

Vorteile

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.

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

simple to you use, assigning tasks, creating templates, mobile friendly, integration with google apps.

Nachteile

not much we can think of.

Vorteile

How simple it is. Our company used to use Salesforce fro its Project Management and recently we switched to Mavenlink. Its so much quicker and lighter to find things, love the Task Tracker view of a project and all the sub projects within them. VEry nice at a glance viewing things. Also, the communication activity feed is nice to communicate with clients

Nachteile

Only real negative that we've experienced or noticed is how reliant things are for views on the dates things are due. Some seem to cascade from a previous stage but doesn't seem like all are, so seems like unnecessary updating of dates in multiple places.

Vorteile

-Data it collects and represents
-Complete PM package
-Communications abilities
-Scalability and repeatability

Nachteile

-Speed is an issue
-In some cases, usability is an issue
-Could be more visually appealing
-Role management is too complex

Vorteile

easy to use, nice user experience, easy to learn

Nachteile

load time for data, sometimes find little bugs in software

Vorteile

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

Nachteile

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.

Vorteile

The feature I like most is the ability to track my time spent on each project each day. I use this feature to plan my day and to ensure I am reaching my total hours. It also helps me to plan projects: if the time I actually spend on each project differs from what I planned or allocated, I know to adjust my forecasted time in the future.

Nachteile

The resource management feature can be confusing. Viewing the difference between forecasted time and actual allocated time for each person is difficult, and having to click on the down arrow to input the time seems unnecessary.