How a digital service provider transforms its digital processes

Impact Networking has evolved from a copier dealer to a full-service business solution provider that guides organizations through every step of their digital transformation. The result is a diverse set of offerings—and an organization that sometimes struggles to work smoothly across silos.

Smartsheet has helped Impact transform its own digital business operations to break through internal barriers and more effectively serve its customers.

“Our go-to-market proposition was one voice, one hand to shake,” says Alex Park, director of service delivery at Impact Networking. “But we separate project managers if you had copiers and IT, or Software and Marketing with us. It wasn’t the customer experience we wanted to deliver. So our overarching goal was to streamline that.”

"You can’t manage what you can’t measure"

Since its founding in 1999, Impact has used organic growth, acquisitions, and geographical expansion to develop service offerings including managed information technology (IT), managed print services, strategic business software and process optimization, branding and marketing (ES99), and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

This expansion of services yielded 27% year-over-year growth, but Impact was missing a unified, accurate view of all service-delivery parts of its business and the dependencies between them. Not only did it need a single source for up-to-date information on projects, but that information also had to be quantifiable so leaders could analyze operations and shape strategy for the future.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Park says. “You’ve got to be able to measure the data to be able to manage all the processes and people around it, and silos make that pretty difficult.”

Unifying teams with one platform

Impact Networking started by asking employees what they were currently using to manage their work. The answer: Virtually everything, from emails and spreadsheets to enterprise project management solutions that employees had acquired on their own initiative, without central IT oversight or support.

The next step was to find out what features and functionality employees needed and wanted in order to do their best work. Park says that Smartsheet was the only solution that accommodated all the need-to-have and most of the nice-to-have capabilities, while allowing different teams to fit it to their own working styles.

Since adopting Smartsheet enterprise-wide in spring 2019, Impact has implemented the platform to fully automate project intake, setup, and tracking in two of its five business divisions, and has partially replaced manual processes in the other three units, with full departmental adoption targeted for Q1 2020.

An API connects Smartsheet with Impact’s custom-developed ticketing system; Smartsheet automatically feeds captured information to the right sheets and data stores to eliminate manual or duplicate data entry. New projects are created with templates in Smartsheet Control Center, customized to the appropriate division. Dashboards give project managers and customers a real-time view into the status of deliverables, without the need to compile reports and search across email and notes for status updates.

“Smartsheet is providing information that customers expect nowadays,” Park says. “Customers are more involved and more informed and have become conditioned to getting the information they want on demand in their everyday lives. Extending that same expectation to engaging with a professional company, you don’t have to pick up the phone; you’re able to get that information at your fingertips, interact with it, or get it pinged via email. That cuts down unnecessary customer interactions, which allows the interactions that do need to happen to be more focused.”

More accurate resource planning and service pricing

As Impact extends its automated Smartsheet processes to its other business divisions, the company expects to see a 30% gain in project efficiency—freeing up time that can be invested in customer engagement and strategic planning.

The richer data captured in Smartsheet is giving Impact a more accurate picture of what resources are required to execute projects, and what employee roles are optimal for every part of the service offering. This, in turn, will enable leaders to more accurately scope and price both current services and those it will develop in the future.

The implementation process is going smoothly, because employees can see the results in faster, easier project setups and streamlined communication. Leadership has gained a clearer view of the sales pipeline, enabling more accurate business planning.

Customers are seeing a difference too, especially in multi-tier projects that span Impact’s business divisions. Park describes the rapid progress his teams are making for a new customer with four distinct business initiatives underway.

Speed strengthens customer relationships

“We’ve gone from zero knowledge with the platform to fully onboarding three of the four  divisions within 90 days, and will be rounding out the marketing team onboarding in the coming months,” Park says.

“That’s allowed us to re-engage with the customer, get through all the initial projects, keep everything on schedule, and enable our IT team to identify additional opportunities for our marketing team. And because we executed so seamlessly during the onboarding phase, the customer is wowed and ready to deepen that relationship.”

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