At Skuid, we really love helping our customers solve complex problems. When we first met Tina,* the digital projects coordinator at a major energy company, she was trying to streamline a very complex business process.
Facing frustration
Tina’s team is responsible for creating the company’s promotional materials. When the company’s employees need a brochure or a poster, Tina’s team makes it happen. But the process to request marketing materials was time-consuming and frustrating.
Whenever a client needed materials, they filled out a simple spreadsheet called “the project initiation form (PIF)”. To initiate a marketing project, an employee would download the PIF from the company’s intranet, fill it out, and email it to the creative team.
Sometimes employees sent projects to the wrong person. Sometimes employees sent urgent projects to inactive email addresses, and because the spreadsheet didn’t have the capabilities to capture nearly enough project information, there were still huge gaps in the information required to begin a project even when the PIF was routed properly.
With her team’s workload growing daily, it was nearly impossible for Tina to balance resources, track statuses, and execute projects successfully. Deadlines snuck up on the team, resulting in unexpected costs for rushed printing and shipping, re-work and even employee overtime.
The whole process frustrated those requesting marketing resources, and the team struggled to manage it properly. Tina and her boss knew it was time to make a change when an analyst reported the department lost up to $800,000 each year because of inefficient project management.
The team was tasked with finding an efficient solution to their complex problem.“The goal was for us to be spending less time in email and tracking these projects down so we could spend more time doing what we’re good at, which is being creative,” Tina says.
Glimpsing hope
Tina decided to build an app with Salesforce1 that would log project data, but she hit a roadblock when the project needed more customization than she anticipated.
“We saw what we’d built with Salesforce, and we realized it was too complex. And we became worried that the complexity would only make matters worse,” Tina says.
“It really scared me when we realized Salesforce couldn’t do what we needed to do. But because of the investment we’d already made, I didn’t have a choice but to figure out a way to make it work.”
Tina imagined a world where employees could easily walk through the request process online in minutes. She searched the Salesforce AppExchange for a solution, and she loved the reviews for Skuid’s user-experience platform.
After talking to one of Skuid’s solution consultants, Tina couldn’t wait to get started with Skuid. Within three months of choosing Salesforce, she and one of her colleagues created a custom PIF app using Skuid’s code-free platform.
The part that we thought would be hard, building the technology, was incredibly easy with Skuid.
“We’re not developers, but we were able to develop this app, which is pretty impressive,” Tina says. “The part that we thought would be hard, building the technology, was incredibly easy with Skuid.”
Reaping rewards
With Skuid and Salesforce, Tina’s team expects to recover up to $800,000 per year in efficiencies. She will also be able to make smarter business decisions based on more comprehensive project data.
Tina has been so pleased with the results that now she’s dreaming of using Skuid to create a comprehensive project management platform. “I would never recommend building a Salesforce1 app without Skuid,” Tina says.
“I can’t imagine being able to make a project like ours work without both.”The new process has also given Tina’s boss, the company’s creative services manager, immediate access to reporting on his department’s project load in real time.
In the past, he spent days exporting information and making assumptions about workload to prepare for quarterly reviews. Now, he can easily analyze his team’s performance on a single dynamic dashboard.
“There wasn’t one thing on our wish list that Skuid wasn’t able to help us solve,” Tina says. “They have been a joy to interact with, communicative, sharp, and absolutely intent on giving us the tools we need to be successful.
We couldn’t have dreamed of a better experience.” Want to take your own UX to the next level? Download our free eBook and learn how!
*Name changed to protect confidentiality of brand and personnel at the customer's request
