M2.

Situation

M2 oversees an incredibly diverse landscape of projects in terms of time, scope, & budgeting. It services both public & private sector clients, each with radically different needs & complexities. Projects can last anywhere from a few days up to 800, 900, or even 2400 project days. With such a variety & intensity of projects that need to be managed effectively, the ability to prepare & control projects in a transparent, efficient, & streamlined manner is paramount.

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Challenge

Before adopting CoffeeCup, M2 explored several tools in an attempt to streamline their project controlling processes. Unfortunately, these alternatives necessitated multiple tools for resource planning and time tracking, and some were expensive, requiring Salesforce licenses for each member solely for things like basic time-booking. Despite employing various tools, manual tasks such as project creation, data handovers, and team reminders for time tracking persisted, consuming 2 to 5 hours weekly for project managers.

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Compounding these challenges was the inability to access billing information, difficulties in managing permission roles and activities, a lack of automation of the project workflow across departments such as sales, delivery, & accounting, as well as an overall absence of data transparency. This lack of transparency led to inefficiencies across the company, with improvements hampered by the inability to target or benchmark issues hidden by "invisible" problems.

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Moreover, the legacy tools in use at the time showed no signs of active development, intensifying the persistence of these issues without any resolution in sight.

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Impact

M2 observed an immediate and substantial impact on their business across various fronts, including transparency, time savings, cost analysis, and internal communication after switching to CoffeeCup. With our product, gaining a comprehensive overview of the entire history of time tracking and entries has become effortless, presenting a clear, visible record.

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The added benefit from day one is the streamlined analysis process, as time sheets can now be exported modularly, simplifying accounting and billing procedures. This enhanced transparency has fostered a cultural shift within the organization within 2 weeks, promoting increased self-responsibility among employees who are now intrinsically motivated to track and submit time on a daily basis, as highlighted by Pablo.

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Furthermore, CoffeeCup has empowered M2 with a deeper understanding of the costs and profitability analysis of their internal projects. For project managers, they can now assess costs versus profits for any given project, a significant improvement from the past when they would simply allocate a certain number of hours without a clear overview.

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This visibility extends to project managers' awareness of the true costs and margins associated with external resources, facilitating more informed, data-driven decisions on whether to opt for external support or leverage internal resources. Notably, CoffeeCups new "skill-based capacity planning feature" update, detailed in our blog post, plays a pivotal role in this decision-making process.

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The integration and automation of the entire M2 workflow emerges as the most significant win for our project manager friends. Automating internal communication between departments alone saves 2 to 3 hours per week. The integration of their existing tool-stack within CoffeeCup, coupled with trigger messaging automation, provides immediate and transparent oversight to all departments for every project.