Trimble Streamlines Project Management and Operations With Smartsheet
In order to align projects and internal operations, including financial reporting, Trimble turned to Smartsheet dashboards. The platform helped reduce the time they spent on billing by 75%, or four hours per week.
Industry
- Technology
Organization Size
- Enterprise (10,000+)
Region
- North America
Platform Capabilities
"Smartsheet dashboards have become the focus of our financial activities for data and managing by exception. We reduced our time spent on billing by 75 percent, which was a reduction of four hours per week."
Director of Professional Services
When your company is “synonymous with results,” it’s all the more important to have efficient internal operations, stellar project management, and exceptional organizational speed, agility, and collaboration. That’s why Trimble’s Tony Elliot and his team first turned to Smartsheet as a project management tool and, later, to support the department’s overall operations. Trimble’s Transportation vertical connects the entire transportation journey to help fleets and drivers reach new levels of safety, performance, and efficiency.
With extensive transportation and technology experience, Elliot took the lead within the large technology solutions company to leverage Smartsheet capabilities. He explained the need resulted from his “amazing team” of technology and project management resources growing from three operational employees doing about 20 projects per year to 20 employees and 200-plus projects a year. “We kept running into the functional limits of the tools we were using, especially in developing and managing metrics to gauge success”, said Elliot, Director of Professional Services. “The management of documents, information, and data were becoming more time consuming the larger we grew, and we knew we had to make a fundamental shift in how we managed the work. The team initially united the department’s financial reporting into Smartsheet to more efficiently track pipeline, backlog, and billing."
“Smartsheet dashboards have become the focus of our financial activities for data and managing by exception,” he said. “We reduced our time spent on billing by 75 percent, which was a reduction of 4 hours per week. Also, Smartsheet allows any member of our team to think of ways to slice the data easily in a report and validate a potential trend to bring problems to attention.”
With Smartsheet helping consolidate financial information into one area, identify new metrics, and ease reporting, the team’s next phase is to run all department operations in Smartsheet Control Center. “Our wildly important goal is to have 100 percent of projects started after May 1 be completely run in Smartsheet Control Center through completion,” Elliot said.
For more information about this story, please see our case study.
