Why are services organizations choosing Mavenlink? Read on to discover how Mavenlink works—what problems it can help you solve and who uses it, along with a tour of its features, pricing and integrations. I’ll also explain how Mavenlink compares to similar PM tools.
What Is Mavenlink?
The Mavenlink Industry Cloud for Professional Services™ is a modern collaborative software as a service platform designed to support services businesses through resource management, project management, collaboration, project accounting, and Business Intelligence solutions. Together, these capabilities are designed to elevate team performance, project success, and resource utilization.
Mavenlink was founded in 2008 to serve the entire lifecycle of project-based businesses, from proposal to revenue collection, by bridging the traditional project management, resource planning, and professional service automation (PSA) software categories. Mavenlink is based in Irvine, CA, and has grown to reach more than half a million users since its founding, with consulting firms, creative agencies, and professional services teams in more than 100 countries running their businesses with Mavenlink.
Related Read: 10 Best Professional Services Automation Software For 2023
Who is Mavenlink for?
Mavenlink is designed to support a wide variety of services businesses throughout the industry, including marketing agencies, consulting firms, and IT organizations, including both internal departments and external firms.
What challenges does Mavenlink help solve?
- Poor Utilization Rates: Capacity planning provides resource managers with robust insights into workforce dynamics that leads to better, faster decisions, and stronger utilization.
- Late and Over-Budget Projects: Mavenlink Gantt charts, task lists, and threaded communications help businesses better understand projects to finish on budget and on time.
- Market Demand Insights: Mavenlink’s forecasting capabilities help businesses forecast revenue, margins, and resource capacity with views that include demands past, current, and future for improved planning and decision-making.
What’s On The Mavenlink Roadmap?
Since Mavenlink was launched in 2008, the product has continued to evolve. In 2018, Mavenlink rolled out several new features, such as Project Permissions Defaults, Master Planning, and more. And the product roadmap for the year 2019 includes some exciting updates, namely:
- Resource Request History: After submitting a resource request in Master Planning, you can now see the history behind the request, including when the request was submitted, canceled, rejected, or approved. This way, you can ensure that the requests are being fulfilled in a timely manner.
Mavenlink Features Overview
To get an idea of how Mavenlink works, here’s a tour of the main features and how they can help you better manage both projects and teams.
1. Resource Management
Mavenlink enables full-cycle resource management with insights and granular control through Master Planning capabilities, insightful dashboards, and capacity details that break down utilization and forecast pipeline. Resource managers can also use resource requests to create replicable resourcing processes, skill lists for staffing needs, and the ability to respond rapidly to unplanned resource issues to stay on target.
2. Operations Management
Mavenlink’s operations management features consist of project management, team collaboration, and project accounting.
Project Management
Mavenlink’s project management solution works to equip teams by providing a complete view of project portfolios and quick assessments of the status and health of a given project or a portfolio of projects, at a glance or down to the task level. Real-time visibility is made possible through Gantt charts, process automation is supported through reusable templates, Project Pulse reveals the real-time health of a project, and Mavenlink Insights reports give actionable data for improving financial performance.
Team Collaboration
Mavenlink’s team collaboration features help unify and align teams with tightly integrated communication and collaboration among all team members, including distributed team members and subcontractors. Users are able to set workflows, communicate with teams to improve operations, create role-based permissions, control assignments through task management, add context to tasks for informed collaboration, integrate communication channels through Mavenlink M-Bridge, and scale with growth through Mavenlink.
Improve project execution, increase productivity, and improve team satisfaction with collaboration that keeps teams plugged in through the entire lifecycle via a dynamic project workspace.
Project Accounting
Mavenlink’s project accounting solution links a team’s time, expenses, and invoices to its tasks and projects in real time. Mavenlink project accounting is deeply integrated in the foundation of every project, providing immediate visibility into budgets, burn rates, and forecasted costs and margins, as well as greater control over timesheet processes and workflows to improve time collection, utilization, and billing.
3. Business Intelligence
Mavenlink provides enterprise-grade BI and powerful reporting to eliminate silos, bringing together all critical operational data in one place. Mavenlink Insights provides 70+ thoughtfully-crafted, services-centric reports, and dashboards out of the box, which can forecast revenue, margins, and resource capacity with views that include demands past, current, and future. There are a variety of reports possible with Mavenlink, including Release Health, Portfolio & Project Financial Health, and Client Profitability.
With Mavenlink’s extensive forecasting capabilities, your business can look into the future confidently for improved planning and decision-making.
Mavenlink vs Clarizen Clarizen offers a great Project Management solution. But if you need more than simple timesheets and task management, Mavenlink is the best alternative to Clarizen. With built-in BI, customizable templates, and user-friendly resource management capabilities, Mavenlink stands out more than any other solution. Mavenlink is built for your services business lifecycle.
Client quote:
The reports are incredibly accurate and insightful. You’ve got access to all the key metrics right there, unlike Clarizen, which is all over the shop.
Tim Pullen
CEO, Cloudtech
Mavenlink Integrations
Mavenlink M-Bridge is the services industry’s only OpenAPI-based, services-centric integration platform, enabling businesses to connect and extend their tech stack to the extent of their imagination. With users often integrating Mavenlink with Salesforce, G Suite, Jira, Hubspot, Slack, and Microsoft Dynamics 365. This is made possible through M-Bridge’s Management Console, a single, dynamic web interface for users to administer all aspects of Mavenlink M-Bridge in the cloud, including underlying integration flows, and more.
Mavenlink Pricing
Enterprise – For organizations that need additional, enterprise-specific tools for business intelligence, integrations, and security.
Premier – For teams that need to track billable hours, projects, and clients, while managing resources across projects.
Professional – For teams that need to create project plans and track time with confidence.
Teams – For teams getting started with task management and team collaboration.
Related Read: 10 Best Professional Service Software Of 2023