Kimble Announces New Workflow for Iterative Project Planning in Winter 20 Release
Leading provider of professional services automation software introduces assignment modeling and assignment profiling processes that align sales and delivery teams
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS – OCTOBER 22, 2019 – Kimble Applications, a global leader in professional services automation, today announced another update to its Intelligent PSA. The latest release introduces multiple enhancements that support the needs of Kimble’s growing base of global, enterprise customers, including a new iterative planning workflow that makes planning projects with teams of any size much easier, encouraging more accurate forecasts as well as more proactive resourcing.
Kimble unveils its Winter 20 release – the company’s largest release yet, with over 100 enhancements coming directly from customer input – at the Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas this week. There, visitors can attend “How to smash the bottlenecks that prevent services success”, a presentation by Kimble Managing Director Sarah Edwards, and Marc Lacroix of Kimble partner RTM Consulting.
“We want to help businesses answer a crucial question: ‘How do we become more efficient and scalable in decision making?’” says Edwards. “What we want to call out, is that businesses can use technology like Kimble to predict and to prevent bottlenecks, and make decisions closer to the customer. Our mission is to help our customers drive success with services, and we think the new features in Winter 20 certainly further that mission.”
Kimble’s iterative planning enhancements in Winter 20 help break through a bottleneck that plagues many services organizations – how do we arrive at a realistic plan for a project without worrying too much about the small details too far out, and then how do we keep that plan up-to-date and achievable based on what’s actually happening? Kimble has built out its suite of project planning workflows based on an understanding that planning is not something that’s undertaken in one sitting; instead planning starts from the moment an opportunity first comes into view, and it evolves continually as that deal gets closer.
“I think of project scoping as similar to tackling a golf course – you’re not going to use one club the whole time,” says Kimble product marketing manager Charles Gustine. “What approach you use depends on how far you are from a hole or how difficult the terrain is. Sometimes you need the power of a driver and sometimes you need the finesse of a putter. And with Winter 20, Kimble PSA completes its set of clubs.”
Model assignments, introduced to Kimble PSA in Winter 20, provide salespeople and project managers a scoping tool with unprecedented power. Kimble users can leverage one easy-to-manage Model Assignment to represent the need for multiple assignments that meet a common requirement, such as a team of developers that will need to contribute to a project. In this way, a large group of resources can be added to the scope early with minimal detail required and minimal effort; more detail can be added when the user is ready to apply the model assignment and generate the underlying resource demand.
Users can also shape the requirements for the team – this means that they can quickly specify the number of resources that will be required in each month or each week, refining their requirements with one simple change to the model assignment. Kimble’s new iterative planning workflow applies this aspect of assignment profiling throughout the project lifecycle, because planning not only continually evolves as a deal takes shape; planning also never stops until work on a project is done. Project managers constantly replan throughout delivery, and Kimble’s enhancements to assignment profiling make it easier than ever for project managers to take the reins and adjust usage in a spreadsheet-like interface at the daily, weekly, or monthly level.
“Kimble is working with larger and larger businesses,” says Sean Hoban, co-founder and CEO of Kimble, “and those large businesses typically deploy very large project teams. We’re working diligently with our customers to innovate new ways to streamline their planning processes, reflecting the ways they work while also developing market-leading functionality that might very well change and improve the way they work.”
Many of the enhancements in Winter 20 help users at large companies maintain alignment across their global enterprises. In Winter 20, Kimble introduces support for consolidated enterprise currency reporting, as well as intercompany invoicing which allows legal entities within an organization to transfer revenue when sharing resources. In support of its global reach, Kimble has now translated its application into four languages – French, Spanish, Portuguese, and German – with plans to undertake further languages.
New features and new partnerships also underscore Kimble’s success across a wide spectrum of businesses. New micro-scheduling functionality supports the planning needs of businesses deploying field service teams. Kimble’s Supplier Portal API allows customers to build and integrate a portal where suppliers can view and maintain their resource records and skills. The Kimble Avalara Connector, created in partnership with automated tax compliance software vendor Avalara, uses Avalara AvaTax to generate accurate tax code information when generating invoices in Kimble. Kimble will be announcing connectors to other industry-leading third party applications later in the year.
About Kimble Applications
Kimble Applications helps professional service organizations run their project-based businesses better. Global leaders in consulting, software and hi-tech such as NTT Data, TCS, Sage, and Canon use Kimble to optimize resource utilization, profitability and business scalability. Kimble is the only leading software vendor that focuses exclusively on professional services automation (PSA), putting all its energy into innovating features and easy-to-use functionality that improve team collaboration and efficiency around the key services processes. Built to work seamlessly with CRM, Kimble drives a forward-looking focus and more timely decision making with intelligent insights and guidance.