Aruba uses Smartsheet to meet budget targets, drive awareness of events, and increase cross-team collaboration

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company, provides Mobility-Defined Networks for millions of people who rely on their mobile devices for work and personal communications every day. A leading provider of next-generation wireless networking solutions, Aruba gives the world’s largest companies a secure edge services platform spanning campus, branch, data center, and remote working environments.

The Aruba global marketing department relies on Smartsheet to centralize meetings and events calendars, manage projects, and track budget data for marketing campaigns. “Smartsheet gives us a seamless way to standardize all our events and budget information across 12 teams, each with their own calendars and budgets,” says Jody Robertson, global marketing operations manager for Aruba. “With Smartsheet, we have much better visibility, and that’s enabling us to hit much closer to our budget targets than before.”

As the budget operations manager for Aruba’s marketing organization, Robertson must ensure her teams’ combined spending comes within 1% of the allocated annual budget for advertising, marketing, and social media. “That’s one of our primary goals,” she says. “We also have to spend our marketing funds in a way that’s aligned with our business goals.” However, prior to Smartsheet, keeping track of updated budget figures was challenging because Aruba’s marketing teams relied on a combination of SharePoint and Excel spreadsheets. “All the data was located in disparate tools and locations, and there was limited visibility of the most current numbers, so it was challenging to track that information for each team,” says Robertson. “We also needed to give our executive leadership team better visibility of the data.”

Aruba also needed a better way to share calendar information between all 12 marketing teams. “Previously, there were two people that approved and published events in the calendar, and that created a bottleneck,” Robertson says. “We wanted all event owners to have the ability to make changes and updates to their events directly, without having to wait for that information to be published.” 

Better budget visibility for marketing teams and executives 

Robertson had used Smartsheet in a previous position, and she suggested Aruba switch from SharePoint to Smartsheet for project management, and their global event calendar.

“I had seen the benefits of Smartsheet before, and I knew it was a great way for everyone to access the same data and pull reports together easily,” she says. “We can manage everything in one location versus trying to pull the data out of separate tools.”

Aruba’s global marketing teams, both global and regional, use Smartsheet to track and manage their budgets, with each team using their own Smartsheet workspace to store reports and budget sheets in a centralized place. “Each team has a budget sheet to manage their budgets directly, while allowing me to manage the overall budget and track spending for the entire organization,” says Robertson. Each of the 12 teams can access a Smartsheet dashboard for an updated summary of all budget data, including campaign-related spending or how much money is being spent with specific vendors. 

Aruba now has much deeper visibility into marketing spend and ROI. “With Smartsheet, we can see the latest status of our budgets, and that means we can track closer to our 1% goal and not over spend,” says Robertson. “We can hit much closer to our budget target than previously.”

Standardized data across four global regions 

Aruba’s 12 marketing teams, spread across multiple regions, are using Smartsheet to view the same set of data. This centralization and standardization helps all teams reduce errors when updating projects and budgets.

“Previously, there were typos and other errors, and that often created data errors,” says Robertson. “Smartsheet gives us a single source of truth, which reduces errors. Also, we know that time is money. This is saving us time in updating and correcting data, which we know will save us money.”

Aruba also uses Smartsheet Control Center to quickly make project and budget updates in one location and push that information to different workspaces. “Control Center has been critical for us because it enables scalability as our workspaces continue to grow, and supports the agile nature of our business”, says Robertson. “Now, instead of manual updates, we can make universal updates in a single place, simplifying the process, and saving time and money.”

A global calendar view that drives better awareness of events

Using the Smartsheet Calendar App, Aruba can present a full view of hundreds of global sales and marketing events and activities to all marketing teams. Marketing employees use an embedded Calendar App link within SharePoint to visualize up-to-date calendar data, and they can update the calendar on their own without having to wait for a designated team member to perform the action.

“Any event owner can add or change an event in Calendar App,” says Robertson. “There’s no more waiting to publish that data. In addition, we can more easily categorize calendar data through the customized filtering layers available in the app.”

The Aruba executive leadership team uses Calendar App dashboards to gain better awareness of activities and events in real time. “Our leadership team needs to see everything in one place because they want to drive more awareness of regional or global events,” says Robertson. “They can do that now with Smartsheet.”

Integration that fosters collaboration 

By integrating Smartsheet with communication applications including Slack and Microsoft Teams, Aruba is increasing collaboration between different groups. “We can publish different reports, dashboards, and smart sheets into Teams so people can work directly within Teams,” says Robertson. “This is enabling us to better collaborate on projects.”

This integration has also led to increased collaboration between Aruba and HPE marketing teams. For example, Aruba and HPE teams previously used their own calendars to track marketing events.

“We didn’t have great visibility into each other’s events, but now that we’ve all adopted Smartsheet and created our own reports, we have better visibility and we’re closing that gap,” says Robertson. “Calendar App is helping us work smarter.”

Robertson anticipates using Smartsheet to collaborate further with HPE marketing teams, and she expects to use the tool to add new use cases and take advantage of advanced Smartsheet features going forward. “Smartsheet streamlines our processes and provides the real-time visibility we need, while allowing us to easily create dashboards for our leadership,” she says. “Our experience with Smartsheet has been extremely positive - people love it.”

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