Sodexo Effectively Manages Workflows With Smartsheet Control Center

Latonia Lewis had her work cut out for her when she started in April 2017 as senior director of Program Management at Sodexo, the world leader in Quality of Life Services, including a variety of on-site benefits and rewards, personal and home services, and more. “There were multiple platforms used to manage key priority projects, resulting in manual input and linking of data to drive meaningful reports and dashboards,” she recalled. “The lack of standardization resulted in inconsistencies in reporting and quality across the company’s North American project portfolio.”

With no Smartsheet experience, Lewis began what she calls her “warp speed” progression to power user over the course of just one year at the large, multinational company.

“Upon my first encounter, I found Smartsheet to be easy and had a ‘eureka moment’ when I found it operated very similarly to (spreadsheet) applications,” Lewis said. “I was sold from that moment.”

Lewis explained that Sodexo’s North American operations faced a key challenge that Smartsheet addressed: varying levels of project management expertise. “The Project Management Office identified a way to swiftly and effectively bridge the project management divide with a strong collaboration tool— Smartsheet,” she said. After a year of using Smartsheet, Lewis has been able to transform her division’s portfolio management practices by leveraging the Smartsheet collaboration and reporting capabilities. The initial Smartsheet pilot resulted in a strategic view of project status that could be broadly shared in monthly updates, fostering enhanced collaboration with other company functions and organizations that support external clients and drive sales opportunities.

With the positive Smartsheet results and a goal of scaling project management and standardization efforts, Lewis and her team have implemented Smartsheet Control Center, which “has enhanced our ability to create and share dimensional reporting for transparency, more effectively manage resources, improved the quality of our project execution process, and reduced administrative efforts,” she said. Another benefit: Thanks to the time savings afforded by Smartsheet, the organization is making significant progress on its three-year project management maturity roadmap.