Swisscom Event Solutions provides technical logistics for corporate clients across the world, so juggling multiple projects is critical. After struggling to track tasks, timelines, and deadlines, Swisscom implemented a project management solution on Quickbase. The result was a huge increase in team productivity, more efficient tracking and reporting, and improved customer satisfaction.
The group, which is part of Swisscom Hospitality Services, a division of global telecommunications leader Swisscom AG, provides temporary integrated communication networks at meetings, conventions, and special events, throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.
Event Solutions, headquartered in New York City, provides its services to corporations and production agencies throughout the world. Regardless of location, each project has the same requirements: getting complicated temporary network and communication infrastructures installed within very tight deadlines to satisfy exacting customer demands.
Until Quickbase, Event Solutions used the company's central servers to
store, retrieve, and share project information between team members.
Employees found that tasks and timelines were difficult to track, looking for information was time consuming, and maintaining SOX data
compliance was tedious and time consuming. Additionally, company security policies didn't allow server access to
non-employees. This presented a challenge in efficiently managing and
communicating information to some project team members and prevented
them from gaining access to critical documents.
Kathy Herrmann, director of project management, began searching for a better way to manage project information. She noted that Event Solutions had very specific requirements for a solution designed to increase productivity through better information organization and access. The team found that Quickbase met all their needs.
"One of our prime requirements was to have a web-based solution that
would connect our globally dispersed employees as well as
project-related partners and suppliers," Herrmann said.
Only Quickbase was able to easily and seamlessly connect every project member, regardless of location.
Finding a solution that would make employees more productive quickly
without a steep learning curve was also important.
"We were able to use Quickbase almost immediately with very little training," Herrmann said. "An average project team consists of 15-25 people with 10-12 projects operating at any one time."
Quickbase required very little customization to make Event Solutions more efficient, according to Herrmann. "Our people simply enter information in fields that appear similar to spreadsheets and word-processing documents," she said. "But the difference is that now all this critical information is instantly available from New York to Paris to Beijing."
After adopting Quickbase as a solution, Swisscom was able to use custom project management applications to streamline project process. Since the entire team could instantly access the information they needed in one place, issue tracking became much easier, driving accountability and improving resolution times.
Quickbase allows all of our team members to enter and find information rapidly in one centralized place that is simple to access.
Event Solutions purchased a subscription to Quickbase and proceeded to leverage the platform's project management application to substantially increase overall team productivity.
A typical project now begins with the sales team entering critical information about project scope and budget into the intuitive on-screen fields built into Quickbase. Information about past engagements can be immediately found and used for new statements of work. Once a salesperson has described the parameters of a new engagement, the project management team uses this information as the foundation for other vital details, such as tasks and related timelines while also using the Quickbase calendar functions to assign projects to the appropriate network engineers.
With Quickbase, Swisscom more efficiently manages project tasks and timelines, leading to increased productivity with faster information access and improved customer satisfaction with flawless project delivery.
As the Swisscom engineers install networking and communications infrastructure, they follow the project framework that salespeople and project managers create, and use Quickbase to inform project managers of their progress. Should the engineers encounter unexpected problems, they note the issues in Quickbase, which allows tracking of the issues from initial discovery to final resolution.
