Kimble Introduces New Workflow Engine and Enhanced Project Planning Capabilities in Winter 21 Release
Boston, MA – October 28, 2020 – Kimble Applications, a global leader in professional services automation, today announced its Winter 21 release, which features enhancements that support the project management needs of Kimble’s growing base of global, enterprise customers.
Winter 21, which will be deployed to a large number of customer sandboxes next weekend, builds on Kimble’s established strengths in resource management and project planning, providing new capabilities that give businesses further control over their project delivery mechanism. These include a new resource staffing workflow, the ability to set target skills and skills plans for resources, and the introduction of earned value project metrics to Kimble.
Earned value management dashboards headline a multitude of new project planning capabilities that come packaged with Enhanced Plans, Kimble’s re-built project planning experience, which also features a new task management user interface as well as transformational improvements to system architecture. Based on the needs of a growing base of enterprise customers, Kimble has optimized its project delivery data model, enabling real-time tracking of task level revenue, cost, timing profile, and resource assignments while reducing the application footprint of task plans.
”Kimble supports an increasingly large number of enterprise organizations, like National Instruments, Hitachi Vantara, Finastra, NTT and FDM all of whom have come onboard in the last year alone,” said Sean Hoban, Kimble’s Chief Executive Officer. “As a result, the profile of the customers we support has grown significantly in terms of size and complexity. Our goal with Enhanced Plans is to make our planning functionality as flexible as possible so that the businesses that use it can be as flexible as possible as they adapt to changing circumstances.”
Supporting the vision of helping businesses be more adaptable when planning and delivering projects, Winter 21 provides more flexibility around re-baselining specified tasks, more options for snipping tasks from a date and determining who will pick up the remaining work, and the ability to profile task assignment effort day-by-day in a new task usage view. This task usage view shows the number of hours each resource is committing to each task in an editable spreadsheet-like view. When the number of hours for a day is changed, Kimble automatically recalculates task assignment effort on remaining days based on rules set for the assignment.
“By optimizing the architecture that sits under Kimble’s project planning experience, and by completely rethinking the way users drive that experience, we are giving users a solution with the power of the best project management tools on the market,” said David Scott, Kimble’s Chief Technical Officer. “The difference is our project management features are embedded within Kimble, which, thanks to reviews from our customers on G2, was already a leader in not just the project management space, but also the resource management and PSA space as well.”
“That’s because Kimble keeps project plans connected with the reality of what’s happening across the business — in the field, in the sales pipeline, in upcoming financial periods. Now Kimble will be able to do that at any scale so no matter how many projects are running, how many tasks and dependencies there are, you are able to see the impacts in changes to your plan in real-time across the business.”
Those hoping to better understand the business challenges and industry trends driving the new project planning experience will be able to see Kimble’s Enhanced Plans in action on The Only Accurate Plan is a Current Plan: 3 Keys to Predictable PS Performance, a November 17th webinar hosted by Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA). The webinar will feature speakers from Salesforce, Kimble, and Esri, one of the many enterprise customers whose inputs are driving innovation in the Kimble solution.
“Obviously, we’ve been thinking a lot about predictability this year, as have all the businesses we serve who are wondering how they can operate predictably in unpredictable times,” said Product Marketing Manager Charles Gustine, who will be presenting on the November 17th webinar alongside Salesforce, TSIA, and Esri. “Our customers have said that Kimble has been a godsend because it has allowed them to easily re-plan and re-budget, see the impacts of changes in real-time, and find paths to success. More than merely being a single source of truth, Kimble PSA has proven to be a predictability engine for project-based businesses of all sizes, and with the Winter 21 release, we’ve fine-tuned that engine.”
On the topic of engines, Winter 21 also introduces Kimble’s new enterprise-scale, event driven resource workflow engine. Designed to support complex, collaborative resource staffing processes, the workflow engine enables customers to determine entry and exit criteria for all possible states in a workflow, as well as which resources or groups should be assigned when transitioning to a new state. This means resourcing teams can more efficiently and effectively find the right resources for the right projects, with clarity on when open assignments have reached important milestones and need attention.
“For enterprise scale organizations, resource management is a time sensitive process involving multiple stakeholders, both inside and outside of the business,” Kimble’s CTO David Scott said. “Before you can eliminate bottlenecks in this process you need metrics to identify where those bottlenecks are occurring. Our workflow engine will provide customers important information about where exactly resourcing decisions are getting stuck so they can iterate and improve their processes and make better decisions sooner.”
“And a resource staffing workflow is just one example of what’s possible now that customers have the ability to create and advance workflows in Kimble. Kimble’s workflow engine is versatile enough that it opens up exciting possibilities for Kimble customers looking to formalize their processes, in resourcing and beyond.”
In Winter 21, Kimble has also formalized the process by which users review and update their skills, bringing the concept of skills plans to the solution. Through skills plans, users are able to set target skills based on upcoming project work, as well as dynamically determine when skills plans should be reviewed relative to the end of an assignment. By driving accuracy in resource skills data, Kimble is making sure businesses can see skills gaps more clearly and that they can more effectively find the resources that best match the skills required for an assignment.