Clarity Quest cuts their Project Quoting time by 50% with Forecast
Clarity Quest is an American-based marketing agency that provides healthcare, biotech, and IT companies with a wide range of marketing services. The company was found in 2001 and has experienced rather significant growth, both regarding the size of the company and their projects. This company transformation encouraged Clarity Quest to explore other tools so they could improve their efficiency and gain insights into their different projects. First and foremost, they needed a tool that would allow them to manage the work of their agency, while also running their business more efficiently.
Eliminating time-consuming tasks
A typical day at Clarity Quest would consist of ultimately multitasking the several different tasks for their clients. When quoting new projects, the agency experienced a lot of time-consuming tasks. The project managers and executive would create the quoting in spreadsheets, but when and if they won the project they would have to add the tasks to another tool manually.
Needless to say, that manual work was slowing down their productivity and efficiency. Christine, CEO of Clarity Quest explained how that process could take managers up to two days out of their busy schedule to manually add the task. Therefore, she started looking for another tool that would fit the agency’s need for a more sophisticated process.
Clarity Quest found that Forecast stood out from the other tools as the platform “...had just what we needed and it wasn’t overly complex,” says Christine. She chose Forecast because it was easy for her team to use, and it gave them new business possibilities for which they were searching. Coming from Basecamp, they found it straightforward to export all of their projects and import them into Forecast during the winter holiday. After only 2-3 weeks the whole team was up and running.
The new way of working - twice as efficient
Now Clarity Quest facilitates all their work in Forecast from quoting, planning, to running every project. Clarity Quest cut their project quoting by 50%, and it’s no longer a time-consuming process for their agency.
I would say that our projects are twice as efficient in doing just the quoting process.
- Christine, CEO
I love the visual aspect, and the dashboard experience... It’s almost like a business intelligence dashboard to me; it's not just a timekeeping system or project keeping system, it has an intelligence angle. Running an agency and having these insights at hand is critical.
- Christine, CEO
They became especially fond of the Scheduling and Budget features because it allows them to follow their projects more comprehensively. These features added more transparency from executives to collaborators that they had sought after within their agency. Christine explains that her team has a complete understanding of their work process as they can see the life-cycle and success of each project. Additionally, due to profitability and efficiency, project managers are able to determine if it’s of their interest to take on similar projects in the future.
I like that everything is all in one place in terms of looking at which project is more profitable than the others. We can make decisions on the types of project and clients we want to pursue. That is a game changer.
- Christine, CEO
Adding Business Intelligence to their everyday work
For Clarity Quest, the most substantial improvement to their daily work was the efficiency Forecast added to their projects. They’re now able to review their projects and see them scale from quote to final deliverable. Their new found transparency for resources, concerning time and availability, was an excellent addition for their work process. As Christine puts it:
I love the visual aspect, and again it is a dashboard kind of experience... It’s almost like a business intelligence dashboard to me; it's not just a timekeeping system or project keeping system it has an intelligence angle. Running an agency and having these insights at hand is really useful.
- Christine, CEO
Forecast has helped Clarity Quest to improve their efficiency and speed up their processes by linking the project planning stage with project execution. Moreover, with the added value of rich insights, reporting, and budgeting, Clarity Quest can execute more profitable projects. Switching from tool to tool and manually inserting data is now replaced by an efficient tool. Removing the manual work from their process has allowed the company to shift its focus towards analysis of projects portfolio and their business value.
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