How Primetric’s API Helped goodylabs Achieve More Quicker?

About goodylabs

Goodylabs is a software development company specializing in UX/UI, e-commerce and mobile development. It employs over 70 people, and it plans to grow even further.  

Goodylabs also creates mobile and web applications integrating with 3rd-party APIs, as well as custom-made APIs specifically for particular applications. They are capable of covering different back-office systems and provide customers with a unified login experience. 

Even though the company has been operating in its current shape for just over a year, it has over 10 years of experience in the market, as the business originated from two other entities: a creative agency and a software development company. After years of successful and fruitful cooperation, these two organizations have decided to join forces to create goodylabs - and since then they have benefited from the arrangement, providing its customers with comprehensive services. 

Goodylabs and Primetric: how did the journey start? 

Goodylabs became Primetric’s customer to: 

• calculate the profitability of people, projects, and the company as a whole, 
• unify its processes from two different mother companies, 
• combat schedule conflicts, faulty allocations and improve its resource planning, 
• efficiently delegate responsibilities and manage information flow. 

The company has achieved these objectives and many others - read full case study here. 

Why has goodylabs decided to create its custom web application based on Primetric’s API?

As a mature software house, goodylabs, one of Primetric’s customers, began using its features more and more as the company expanded and its managers became more and more proficient with the tool. At the same time, the number of Primetric’s features incorporated into daily processes grew and acquired new customers on a regular basis. 

As a result of those changes, goodylabs began to become experts in using Primetric. As such, they became aware of the potential of the features included in the tool and decided to expand its capabilities even further to match the company-specific use cases they encountered during their day-to-day operations. 

For example, they needed to manually generate regular (daily, weekly, monthly) time reports for users and projects, gathering all the workflows from a given period. They also encountered numerous edge cases not included in Primetric - for example, they wanted to exclude some project phases from the time tracking to increase their accuracy. 

As a result, goodylabs decided to improve such processes with Primetric even more and automate them further, solving the most pressing problems among their managers. 

Main challenges

The main challenge in goodylabs was simple: to accelerate the data analysis on the part of managers who were overwhelmed by the number of reports that needed to be created regularly. The main motto at goodylabs is: “If you can automate a process within 2 weeks and it is more efficient than the manual version, let’s do it!”

At the time, their efforts were particularly focused on: 

1. Enforcing the time tracking among employees to assess the costs of their work and improve the accuracy of timesheets. Even with the best efforts of the management staff, there were still some employees that forgot or were openly avoiding time tracking. Therefore, the system needed to remind them about their duties and make sure all the information was added to the system to avoid errors in critical documents that were to be presented to customers. 
2. Automated reports periodically sent to customers to show them the costs of the project for a given period to improve their awareness of their budgets and give them the tools to make alterations. As every hour of work affected the final price of the project, the customers were determined to know what they paid for. However, creating such complex reports was very time-consuming and required dozens of hours of work, taking up the managers’ precious time. 
3. Automated controlling KPIs for people, projects and the company as a whole. A company can only grow when its managers make data-driven decisions. However, to get them all, they needed to browse through Primetric for hours. Consequently, there was a need for an automated aggregation of such information that could spare the managers the effort that would take them days of work. 

Solution? Powerful and comprehensive API for all the custom features

To solve all of the problems described above, goodylabs have decided to use Primetric Open API to create custom Ruby scripts for their use-cases. Soon, it appeared that these scripts worked so well, that they built the entire web app for managing it.

As a result of this project, goodylabs came up with three features supporting the managers in their daily work. 

How did goodylabs create its app? 

The solution was created in just 10 days, using the skills of one developer and one project manager overseeing the operation. Importantly, the created solution was able to cover all of the use cases faced by the managers on a daily basis. 

What is more, the users could also easily be added to the app. The estimated configuration time for all its modules was just under 5 minutes, making it easy for managers to start working with the solution right away. Then, the only thing they needed to do was to set up the reports they wished to receive. 

What products were created by goodylabs and how they impacted its business? 

Regular reminders for employee time tracking

This feature allows project managers to automatically monitor and notify employees who have not entered their worklog for a specified period with a certain number of fully customizable email reminders. 

Result? Every employee tracks their time spent working in the company without face-to-face or Slack reminders,  allowing the project managers to monitor the progress in real time. 

Automated weekly and daily timesheet email reports 

To relieve its managers from the burden of creating reports manually, they have decided to automatically generate such summaries and send them to the managers on a regular basis. As a result, weekly or daily reporting for their PM and a customer are sent as an Excel file directly to their inboxes, each one separately, so no information about the client’s email addresses is exposed to the developers. 

Consequently, project managers saved hours of their time every week. In the very first week after the implementation was completed and deployed into production, they spent 16 hours less on reporting and supporting processes. 

Regular financial reporting for customers and PMs 

Monthly incremental reporting for your PM and your customer with optional budget cap for hours and automatic calculation of remaining hours per month.

This feature adds more value to automated reporting. It gives managers a possibility to define a sum of hours to be spent in a project per month. Every time you get a report, it also has some additional lines in the Excel file to show how many hours you are left with this month. If it goes below 0, you get a red font color to see immediately that you are above the limit. Such simple things change the way you work with a client.

One API, zero problems: what benefits were seen after the app had been created? 

Using the newly established connection between Primetric and goodylabs’ app, the managers in the company have gained access to a more compiled source of information about their respective fields. As a result, they began to enjoy a wide range of benefits. 

Managers saved days of additional work 

Not dozens of hours, but just a few minutes spent on report analysis - that is the main result of implementing goodylabs’ API in Primetric. 

Thanks to the additional automated modules, gathering information from dozens of people and multiple projects became a piece of cake. Additionally, it was delivered regularly without any additional actions from the managers, leaving them to focus on decision-making processes. 

More data-driven decisions 

Speaking of the critical decisions - now they were simpler than ever. With a comprehensive yet compiled overview of people and projects, managers could quickly gather the information they needed to make the right call. 

What is more, the swiftness applied to both resource management and finances accelerating the planning processes in the business. As a result, the company can use the data that is max. 1 week old to react to any delays and renegotiate contracts before they become a burden.

Why was creating an app possible (and simple) using Primetric’s API?

"The API documentation is pretty straightforward. As a software house we read different API documentation almost every day, so the discovery phase of this API was a breeze. The more we tried it out, the more ideas we had on how to use it."

First, goodylabs fetched all the necessary data about employees and projects and listened to its Project Managers on how to help them with the most time-consuming tasks. After some time, they were not even aware that such a vast majority of the tasks can be automated and remain compliant with the privacy and security levels that some of our clients require. 

Then, goodylabs created its web application in Ruby on Rails and the implementation was super-quick, thanks to the similarities in the technologies of choice. 

What advantages does Primetric API gives to the customers? 

The decision to create a whole new addition to an already existing advanced tool is never an easy one. Fortunately for goodylabs, Primetric has provided it with everything it needed to complete the job quickly and with no complications. 

Specific and detailed documentation

The excellent documentation was the first thing that convinced the goodylabs’ team to begin such an undertaking. Primetric’s specialists did their best to include all the crucial details in their API and tool descriptions, covering all the necessary scenarios. As a result, they provided their counterparts in goodylabs with an excellent source of knowledge about API and its capabilities. 

More than 80% of all features are mapped to endpoints in the API

It is difficult to connect an API with other tools when there are no mapped endpoints to combine the two. With Primetric, that was not an issue. With over 80% of coverage, goodylabs could easily take advantage of the quick access to all necessary information to produce reports.

Additionally, the examples of use provided by Primetric were easy to understand, giving the developers even more information needed to create an additional app quickly and efficiently. 

Could you use a similar app for your Primetric? 

It might be within your reach! 

Simply contact your Account Guardian, get more information about such opportunities and improve project and people management in your company even more. 

Still wondering whether Primetric is the right choice for you? 

There’s no better way to find out than to see it yourself. 

Book a demo with one of our advisors, discuss your own use cases and see how our features can improve them right away. Just click here and get in touch with us!