How Interactive Systems Needs Just 30 Minutes To Plan The Entire Work

About Interactive Systems

Founded in 2007, Interactive Systems is a Polish company specializing in software for sales support and loyalty programs. 

With so many years of experience, the company develops, maintains, and expands a wide range of programs and applications for different industries and purposes, from motivational programs to loyalty systems, from web and mobile applications to data processing modules. As a result, Interactive Systems is able to cater to the needs of leaders of their respective industries on the Polish market, including Unilever, CIECH Sarzyna, Kompania Piwowarska, Brown-Forman, and VOX, and create long-lasting relationships spanning over 15 years of successful projects. 

Overview

Being a software development company with a range of innovative and specialized products, Interactive Systems was quickly gaining traction. With its growth came more advanced planning and reporting processes. Soon they proved unmanageable in simple Excel spreadsheets, no matter how advanced they would become. 

Such circumstances prevented the company from achieving operational excellence. As the business expanded, it was left with close to no overview of its plans, projects, people, and budgets, leaving the managers with no overview of key processes that could be used to improve the company’s productivity and profitability. Therefore, Interactive Systems decided to look for a better solution. 

Challenges

Joanna Kozłowska, Project Manager, and Małogrzata Jędrzejczak, Managing Director, were among the most affected by unscalable processes; the growing number of projects, as well as data, made the continued use of spreadsheets unachievable. 

As a project manager, Joanna was overburdened with Excel spreadsheets containing various information: from plans to project progress and timesheets to work costs. As a result, generating data needed for decision-making processes was time-consuming and prone to critical mistakes contributing to the increasing number of schedule conflicts. 

Being the Managing Director responsible for planning critical operations and assignments, Małgorzata Jędrzejczak experienced firsthand how quickly manual resource planning processes were stretched beyond capacity due to business expansion. She explained, “When we had just a few people on board, we could prepare plans by word of mouth. When we got bigger, planning the work even 2 or 3 times a week was simply not enough, as everything changed overnight.." 

While overseeing project workloads and absences, she started to encounter difficulties with the flow of information due to time-off requests being submitted in PDF files. Determined to improve this, she sought a more flexible tool, recognizing that Excel spreadsheets couldn't offer the solution she needed.

Challenges Interactive Systems faced included:

• Fragmented data: With numerous Excel spreadsheets in place, the managers struggled to collect, update, and process the essential data on projects and resources with no unified formulas, causing numerous inconsistencies and schedule conflicts and leading to loss of both time and money. 

• Time-consuming planning processes: Due to the lack of automatic updates in Excel, existing and future plans required constant adjustments, forcing the managers to attend weekly 2-3 planning sessions. To make things worse, the process was also prone to errors and often resulted in schedule conflicts on top of the wasted time. 

• Error-prone time off management. Employees reported their leaves in PDF documents sent to their managers and HR. Such a basic information flow was counterintuitive and often faulty, leaving some parties unaware of the absences and leading to plans being made for people who would not be present at a given time. 

• Inefficient time tracking. Assignments, projects, and work costs were difficult to contain in files for individual employees and to analyze collectively to assess their costs. Consequently, project progress and budget could not be monitored to the fullest extent, as the managers were always left with gaps in their data. 

Primetric's Solutions

For Interactive Systems, the solution to these problems was obvious: the company needed more advanced tools for resource, project, and budget management. Fortunately, Primetric has a wide range of features that helped the company achieve new heights. 

With Primetric in place, Interactive System gained a complete overview of all its data, which is now automatically updated after a change is made, giving the managers full visibility of people, their assignments, and projects. Consequently, the planning process was also shortened to the bare minimum of just 30 minutes. 

"We can see right away who works on which project and when - and we don’t need any meetings for it. It makes a real difference when it comes to planning or making changes to the existing plans."

Małgorzata Jędrzejczak, Managing Director in Interactive Systems

The reporting and time tracking in the company were also drastically improved. With time tracking and reporting in one tool, managers just need seconds to extract and compare necessary data. As stated by Joanna Kozłowska, “Now, whenever someone asks me a question, I do not need an analyst to get that information; I just need a few clicks.”. 

By combining all of the above features together, Interactive Systems gained: 

• A single source of truth for plans and reports. With plans, their execution, budgeting, and time tracking in a single tool, managers in Interactive Systems can access all the necessary information in reports whenever they need to - and without looking for the right Excel spreadsheet. Consequently, they can make the right decisions whenever a change is made. 

• Optimization of the planning process. Time-consuming meetings are a thing of the past. With just a 30-minute planning session, Interactive Systems can summarize the work for the entire week regardless of the changes or absences - they are all accounted for in the system. 

• Time tracking in a single tool. With Primetric in place, Joanna can monitor tracked time, react to any gaps, and see the impact of every working hour on the budget, getting a complete overview of all the key changes in the company’s operations.  

• Time off management in seconds. With PDF files gone, the time off reporting process became more transparent. Every party involved receives a time off request simultaneously, and the assigned manager can accept or deny it in seconds to see any absences in the calendar right away. 

Results

The implementation of Primetric at Interactive Systems was beneficial for every employee. 

Right now, managers such as Małgorzata and Joanna use the system to create plans, monitor them, and assess their impact on the finances. They do not have to spend hours on each of those processes.

“Primetric allows us to meticulously monitor projects, time spent, and profitability. This helps us collect materials for reports to easily analyze,  interpret, and draw conclusions”. 

At the same time, they can use the information to check for inconsistencies, problems and schedule conflicts, improving the daily operational processes in the business and avoiding unnecessarily long meetings on a daily basis. By doing so, the company also improved its scalability and began to expand using its newly acquired operational excellence to improve its productivity, profits, and overall performance. 

Thanks to all those changes, Interactive Systems now enjoy a wide range of benefits, including: 

• Optimized planning processes - from 2-3 weekly meetings to just a single, 30-minute-long planning session. 
• Close to no schedule conflicts are guaranteed by seamless data flow and automatically updated information in the system. 
• 100% transparent time offs with no managers or HR specialists being out of the loop. 
• Every working minute is accounted for thanks to time tracking and live monitoring. 
• Advanced and customizable reports are ready in seconds - all the necessary information is collected automatically from every corner of the system to facilitate quick report generation. 
• Improved awareness of KPIs and key numerical values shapes Interactive Systems’ bright future.