Consulting Resource Management Software

The capacity planning problem in consulting firms

A consulting firm sells time. Every consultant has a billable rate, a target utilization, and a finite number of weeks per year. Engagements come in with scope, duration, and price. Partners commit to delivery dates based on a mental model of who is available. The model is often wrong. Engagements overlap, partners overcommit favorite consultants, and the firm's actual utilization drifts from its target without anyone seeing the drift until quarter-end.

Three pains repeat at every consultancy past about fifty consultants:

1. Utilization targets are tracked after the fact. The firm sets a 75 percent target. Partners commit consultants ad hoc. At quarter-end, finance reports actual utilization. Nobody saw the drift until it was too late to fix.
2. Practice-level demand cannot be reconciled with cross-practice supply. A practice lead bids a project that needs three senior consultants. Two of them are already overcommitted on another practice's engagements. The bid wins anyway. The conflict surfaces at staffing time.
3. Rate-card variance erodes margin invisibly. Senior partners get assigned to junior-rate work because they were available. The firm bills less than it could and pays more than it should.

How Kewbed addresses each

Live utilization against targets

Kewbed shows actual utilization next to target utilization per consultant, per practice, per period. The drift becomes visible as it happens. Partners staff with current data instead of mental models.

Cross-practice visibility for partners

A partner bidding a new engagement sees who is available across all practices, not just their own. Bid commitments line up with real supply. The conflict surfaces before the bid, not after the win.

Rate-aware staffing

Each consultant's billing rate (and the snapshot of rates effective at the engagement's signing) feeds into the demand view. Senior partners assigned to junior-rate work surface as a margin signal. Staffing decisions stop being rate-blind.

Features that matter most for consulting firms

• Allocation — who is on which engagement when, with billing rates surfaced.
• Workforce — active consultant headcount by practice and seniority over time.
• Availability — available consultant weeks per practice per period.
• Horizon — executive view of allocated, available, needed, and gap per practice, including tentative pipeline engagements.

If you run a consulting firm past fifty consultants and your utilization tracking is a quarter-end retro, book a demo. We will walk you through the imports, the live utilization view, and how it changes the conversation in your next partner staffing meeting.