In this case study, you will learn:
- Why using the actual data to make decisions in the delivery department was critical for PeakData’s success,
- How Primetric combined project, people and finance management to provide the company with a complete overview of its operations,
- What actions have been taken thanks to the insights from Primetric.
Introduction
Founded in 2018, PeakData is a young but rapidly growing company specializing in providing analytical services for the world’s top pharmaceutical companies. It helps them learn more about their customers through our agile targeting and segmentation SaaS platform. PeakData is used by more than half of the top 20 Pharmaceuticals and engages 50+ staff in our offices in the USA, Germany, UK, Poland, Netherlands, and Switzerland. As a result, PeakData is one of the leading providers of digital and AI services for pharmaceutical enterprises.
Greg’s role in PeakData
Greg Gembara is currently a Head of Delivery at PeakData. He has been working with the company for over two years, providing it with expertise in project, delivery, and people management.
However, when Greg joined PeakData, it was still a startup. Despite its size, it was already very successful in attracting many customers. However, its operational processes still needed some improvement.
Challenges in PeakData
Thanks to Greg’s expertise, experience, and enormous knowledge, PeakData quickly created its own operational processes and pipelines based on basic tools. However, it quickly became apparent that the company was going to outgrow the spreadsheet-based system, too, causing problems with:
Good processes being held back by basic tooling
The number of spreasheets in PeakData was growing expotentially with the number of projects, employees and operations. bigger the company, the larger needs. Therefore, while enjoying the benefits of quick growth, PeakData was also stuck in a vicious circle of making its documents bigger, less readable, and intuitive, making decisionmaking processes burdensome and time-consuming.
Being an experienced manager, Greg quickly realized there was a better way to go. He and his colleagues needed updated information to make informed decisions about projects and their finances and manage specialists without the risk of using outdated information. Instead, PeakData's team needed a tool combining project, people, and finance management that could be used to share a large amount of information with other employees and managers in real time.
Optimizing the employee workflow
Every hour counts and generates costs - this was obvious for Greg and PeakData. However, with Excel spreadsheets (and, later on, Jira), the operations calling for improvement were rarely on the managers' radar, as they remained hidden in overgrown documents.
Therefore, Greg needed a tool that could help him with an in-depth analysis of existing processes and operations and accelerate them, minimizing the workload and maximizing the profits in the process.
Monitoring the financial performance of the projects
Of course, Greg’s analyses were not limited to optimizing the workload of his employees. While he immensely valued their comfort, he also needed to improve the company’s and projects’ finances and delivery excellence as much as possible.
However, this was not an easy task, as he had to consider:
- Different types of one-off costs
- Recurring costs
- Monitoring project budget and the costs of work in a project
Managing such dynamically changing data constantly altered by the time tracking reports from employees simply cannot be reflected in Excel. As a result, Greg was often forced to perform numerous calculations or updates manually, spending hours in the process - and, in the end, he could never be sure that the input data was still correct. Therefore, he was determined to remedy that situation.
Solution: quick access to data in a single tool
From Greg’s perspective, the solution to all of the above problems was simple: a tool that could gather all the data on the projects, as well as the data for of all the critical KPIs he was responsible for improving. Primetric was a direct and comprehensive response to this need.
"Primetric is one of the next steps we wanted to take in our organization, starting with a blank page. We simply knew that we needed to control spendings, workload, projects, and more"
Greg Gembara, Head of Delivery in PeakData
Soon, Greg began to see the positive results of his decisions. These included:
Improved control, monitoring and data-driven decisionmaking processes
Hours spent on updating the documents, constant changes that weren’t accounted for, and endless scrolling disappeared from Greg’s schedule after he introduced Primetric to PeakData.
Now, despite the amount of information needed to be processed, he uses a single process in one framework to manage all the crucial information, people allocations, and projects. He also does not have to verify the data repeatedly, as the system brings all the employees and managers together, allowing them to work for the success of their operations.
Having one source of truth for all the managers
"I do not have to run around and ask people who reported what. Everything simply appears in Jira and then in Primetric; I do not have to take additional actions to take care of it."
Greg Gembara, Head of Delivery in PeakData
Excellent and seamless communication - that is one of Primetric’s benefits that drastically improved Greg’s work. Now, everyone with the right access level can add the necessary data to the system (i.e., costs of work, overheads, and more), compiles the data, and share them to Greg in the form of an intuitive report.
"Primetric allows me to aggregate information and share them with others automatically. This allowed me to build PMO and centralize all the delivery data in a single tool. Now, whenever I’m headed to a meeting, I can take a look at this tool and tell others exactly where the problem is."
Greg Gembara, Head of Delivery in PeakData
As a result, Greg can save time on creating summaries and other documents. Instead, he has all the information he needs to make informed decisions at all times, with nearly no effort whatsoever. Additionally, he also organized his company's project portfolio, structurizing key information and gaining a better overlook of all the critical information.
Flexible budgeting, regardless of the types of costs
Due to the variety of costs and incomes, managing them in a spreadsheet was not a piece of cake. Fortunately, that has changed.
Currently, Primetric gathers and transforms all the financial data into budgets, creating a comprehensive overview of all the funds. It also shows information about vital financial KPIs, such as profit margin or overheads. As a result, Greg can monitor, plan and alter his budgets quickly and based on reliable data.
"I can now track the financial data in projects and determine whether there is something I can improve. I can confirm the realistic budget and check if it makes sense. When managing a project budget, having this information is critical for a given operation and for similar ones in the future. [...] Primetric shows me all I need to know about spendings: what we paid for, when we have spend too much money."
Greg Gembara, Head of Delivery in PeakData
Transparent feedback loop improving strategy
For Greg, data was just a beginning of a long series of improvements accelerating processes and improving income.
"It was a natural need for me [to gather this data]. I simply cannot perform my work and make decisions without the data. It’s oxygen for my responsibilities."
Greg Gembara, Head of Delivery in PeakData
Based on the information provided by Primetric, he determined which processes could be improved with automation or other one-time actions and accelerated them. Consequently, PeakData achieved the same results with less cost and a smaller workload for its employees.
Benefits of Primetric
- Organizing the processes in a small but dynamically growing IT services company catering to specialized, demanding customers,
- Allowing the company to scale regardless of the number of operations and employees at hand,
- Days of work saved by automatization of creating reports,
- Improved basic operations and processes that now take less time and generate more income,
- Easy access to data that is automatically updated whenever a user makes a change in the system,
- Improved decision-making processes based on precise data from the entire company,
- Full and detailed overview of every type of cost impacting the project budget.
Summary
Greg and PeakData have come a long way with Primetric, aiming to achieve operational excellence. However, just like any professional relationship, ours also needs to grow to be viable in a competitive IT market - which is what we aim to do.
Currently, we are working on improving our integration with Jira to allow Greg to tie the two environments even more. We will also provide him - and our other customers - with more innovative features for reporting in analysis, setting them on a path to success.
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