NextWave

Summary

How NextWave found a system that scaled with their consultancy.

Situation

NextWave is a digital acceleration consultancy providing advisory and delivery capabilities to clients in the financial services sector. The firm applies next-generation transformational technologies such as low-code platforms, contextual data platforms, artificial intelligence, and automation to help its clients build future facing businesses.

CEO Tony Clark was well aware of how to make a business like NextWave thrive. He’d previously founded and sold two consultancies and scaled a third successful firm and in each case used some form of professional services automation (PSA) platform. After starting with a home-grown PSA tool, he gradually shifted to a series of vendor-provided platforms, searching for the best possible solution.

“When you’re building a scalable consultancy, you can't get very far on spreadsheets,” said Tony. “A firm can very quickly get into a place where it loses track of projects, billing, timesheets, invoices, and utilization, and you’ve got no way of measuring your key performance metrics for the business.”

During his search for the right platform, Tony struggled with the lack of visibility over project profitability. He also experienced problems with resource management, cash flow reporting, time tracking, and generating custom KPI reports and dashboards. The need for a simple but scalable PSA became more pressing as the consultancy grew beyond the first 10 employees.

“With our initial PSA solution we realized we had a sledgehammer to crack a nut,” said Tony. “We had lots of complex processes and reporting capabilities that we didn't really understand and didn't need.”

When NextWave then switched PSA solutions they moved to a fast and modern user interface which the team loved, however fairly quickly discovered that there was little business logic built into their new platform. They could see the data but couldn’t apply business workflows and reporting in a useful way because the platform wasn’t designed to fit the particular needs of a consultancy.

As NextWave grew beyond 20 heads, Tony resumed the search for the PSA platform he’d wanted all along, complete with all the necessary capabilities and was referred to CMap.

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Solution

NextWave selected the CMap Pro Plan with Microsoft Teams integration, and it turned out to be the solution he had been searching for all those years.

“CMap is ahead of other PSA platforms that I have used, regarding simplicity of use, business logic and reporting capabilities,” said Tony. “It’s been an invaluable tool that has helped us scale from one to thirty five employees in our first two years.”

The primary reason why Tony is happy with CMap is that it provides “pipeline to project” configuration and insightful reports for consultancies right out of the box, and he can view revenue forecasts, staff utilization reports, and other key performance indicators.

“With CMap, we have more control over NextWave’s key business workflows and I can see and analyze so many more things than I could with our previous PSA platforms,” said Tony.

In fact, NextWave have seen an increase in project margins by 14% since adopting CMap:

Results

• Greater project visibility - “I've now got this dynamic view of the firm's revenue growth, combining both live projects that we're delivering and potential projects,” said Tony. “I couldn't do that using my prior systems.”
• Powerful capabilities - “CMap makes it easy for consultancies to view key data such as fee estimates, budgets, timelines, resources, invoices, and contract documents—all in one place,” said Tony. “CMap covers the full project & finance lifecycle in an accessible and intuitive interface."

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All content in this case study has been approved by the client. The views and opinions expressed are the client's alone.