“I think there’s at least 5% to 10% gain in efficiency across the organization just by having Kanban boards and cards set up.
“We’ve gone from having multiple Kanban board templates to using one.”
Joel Liller
Solution Architect
OpenGate helps clients scale their businesses while leveraging the Salesforce platform. OpenGate engages with business executives to transform their organizations digitally with the Salesforce.com platform.
Industry: Salesforce Consulting
Employees: 30
Achievements
5% to 10% gain in efficiency with Cloud Coach Kanban boards
Four to six hours a week saved with new resource planning process
PMs can spend more time working on high value add tasks within projects
Challenges
Solutions
OpenGate was using a mixture of Salesforce and off-platform solutions to manage projects.
Actuals were captured in a tool called Paychex, where team members would manually enter hours and notes against individual projects.
By removing disparate, siloed systems, Project Managers at OpenGate can now spend more time working on value add items within a project, instead of spending time on administration tasks.
Resource planning was being conducted in Salesforce using a custom-build solution.
This meant hours for resourcing were recorded in Salesforce but actuals were recorded in Paychex – which then had to be moved manually into Salesforce for comparison, which was a time-consuming process.
Now, using Cloud Coach, all information is in one place.
OpenGate estimates that resource planning with Cloud Coach is saving at least four to six hours a week compared to the old process.
Every week, hours were pulled in from Paychex against a project. OpenGate would then run a report, export it into Excel and then, looking at the notes, eventually identify ticket numbers and manually sum up those numbers by rows across all the different days that they were working on those tasks.
This information was then consolidated and sent to clients using an Excel template, alongside an Estimate to Complete, which was manually completed line-by-line.
With Cloud Coach, employees can to enter their actual time, and update their ETCs.
This saved OpenGate the internal discussion of, “Okay, now we have to go back and compare. Here’s the actuals. What are the ETCs row by row?” Now, this happens in real time as people enter their time.
When OpenGate exports the hours or reports on the hours every week, they now not only see the actuals, but also see the ETCs that the people have updated at the end of the week. This provides another efficiency gain by removing an additional layer of internal review.
Previously, project plans and assigned resources were managed from an Excel spreadsheet. This meant workloads were managed by others, giving employees little autonomy into their task management and little insight into the projects they were working on.
OpenGate has moved from multiple Kanban board templates to using just one. By leveraging one board template, users can go to My Day and see all of their assigned work from one place.
OpenGate estimates at least 5% to 10% gain in efficiency across the organization thanks to this setup, and the just by having those boards and those cards set up because now, as the need for internal status checks is vastly reduced.
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