One Place for All Your Work

‍Why a Work Management Platform?

The pace of change in today’s business environment is staggering, requiring organizations of all sizes to recognize trends, quickly adapt and continue to succeed in turbulent and unpredictable times. Agility is essential to meet new demands, and the ability to reimagine how business gets done is essential. The way we work is shifting, now faster than ever. To be competitive, businesses need to adapt and find ways to succeed and change the way they work. Add in the move to near-ubiquitous remote work and its constant stream of online meetings and instant messages to further complicate the situation. Without a unified way to handle task assignments and to-do lists, these calls to action get buried in a maze of Slack channels and threads, email messages and spreadsheets.

Technology is critical to solving these problems, and businesses have adopted a wide variety of specialized tools to address the needs of different functions. 

Work Challenges for Big and Small

Smaller organizations are generally limited to off-the-shelf applications that do not accommodate the specific needs of their business, often leading to a spreadsheet and email-driven set of processes that becomes increasingly inefficient over time. If we’re truly honest about the situation, it’s fair to say that the bulk of business is still accomplished with email, spreadsheets and shared drives.

Larger organizations have deployed a spectrum of software and cloud technologies to tackle these challenges. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms organize sales efforts, HR software that manages employee needs and hiring, ERP systems for finance and accounting, and innumerable point solutions that underpin business operations. Unfortunately these systems are usually expensive, hard to change and become islands of data that make sharing information difficult.

The rise of software as a service has added to this mix, with teams looking to organize their projects or consolidate sales leads have turned to SaaS providers as an alternative to waiting on slow or overloaded IT departments, who themselves are often overwhelmed with requests and competing priorities. It’s not uncommon for larger organizations to have hundreds of cloud-based service accounts that address departmental problems but serve to further fragment data and processes.

Information is scattered everywhere, and consolidating it is painful

Combining data from these silos has always been a challenge - one that grows with the size and complexity of the organization - a challenge that is now amplified by the dramatic increase in remote work. Where in-person conversations and live interactions could bridge these gaps in the past, now virtual interactions are another barrier. Agility is hard to come by when there is little consistency across processes, data is siloed, and ownership is fragmented.

With departments often having separate budgets and differing, unaligned goals it is no wonder that workflows and information sharing is inefficient. Teams do not know what other teams are doing, what data they have, or share systems and processes to increase efficiency for the entire organization. Without supporting tools and automation, many organizations become “hero powered,” with individuals or small teams - often operating semi-autonomously - doing whatever it takes to make things work. These heroes often burn out and leave, and also are not necessarily aligned with corporate goals or priorities.

What is the SmartSuite Work Management Platform for?

SmartSuite Work Management provides the building blocks to support all of your business processes and data within one unified interface. The platform is designed to be used by virtually everyone in an organization, not just select groups or functions.

With SmartSuite you have the ability to build robust workflows and custom applications without writing a line of code, all through a visual interface that takes just minutes to learn. The result is higher quality, consistent and inter-connected work processes that make sharing, working with and understanding data easy. External data and communications channels are made available as needed through integrations, allowing SmartSuite users to efficiently view and analyze information, track their tasks and complete their work through a single interface.

SmartSuite Work Management Platform Goals

It is our belief that we can make business run more efficiently and with increased agility, putting all of your data into context and providing a powerful, unified user experience:

• Business runs smarter on SmartSuite
• Visibility
• Consistency 

An intuitive interface provides users with powerful features that are still easy to use, with reports, filters and more available at the click of a button. Access controls allow sharing of data while maintaining control over updates, ensuring consistency and data integrity.

• Business runs better on SmartSuite
• Consolidated data
• Context-driven collaboration

SmartSuite creates links between elements of data, providing vital business context for decision-making. Easily run reports or reference records you have been given permission to see in other departments’ applications.

• Business runs faster on SmartSuite
• Automations
• Quickly adapt solutions to meet new needs

Automations take repetitive tasks off of users’ plates while integrated collaboration tools bring work context directly into team conversations. SmartSuite’s powerful application builder lets you rapidly adapt any solution to the changing needs of customers and markets.

Examples

Let’s consider a few examples of how SmartSuite makes an organization’s work better, smarter and faster:

Service Organizations

A service delivery company uses SmartSuite to track potential prospects, keeping tabs on interactions leading up to signing contracts and statements of work. Once a project kicks off, they use SmartSuite’s timeline view to manage staffing, create and assign tasks to project team members, and monitor the progress for all service deliverables. Along the way hours tracking, status reporting, and team discussions are all done in the same environment, supporting efficient communication and instant visibility into project health. Finally, after project sign-off the company examines project data, performing profitability analysis, assessing team performance, and scheduling customer follow-ups.

Software As A Service (SaaS) Company

A software as a service (SaaS) provider uses SmartSuite to coordinate all of the teams, plans and schedules involved in the ongoing development of their service. SmartSuite facilitates collaboration between product owners, the support team, and developers to ensure that everyone understands customer needs and feature priority. Information from external tools such as GitHub, Zendesk and Google Drive is made available via SmartSuite automations. With each team tracking their activities within the platform, it becomes easy to see which features make the biggest positive impact, where the system’s problems are, and which enhancements are most desired by their growing customer base.

‍Marketing Agency

A marketing agency coordinates their campaign activities with SmartSuite, pulling together all of the designers, content creators, producers and sales staff in a collaborative environment. These teams need to be coordinated and have visibility into the entire campaign workflow - which may contain social media, SEO, email marketing, brand advertising and more - so that resources are properly allocated and deadlines are met. The unification of these processes in a common system makes it easier to determine how efficiently the process is running, what the campaign ROI is, and where adjustments need to be made as client needs evolve and change.

And yes - SmartSuite runs on SmartSuite

We’ve said repeatedly that the most efficient way to work is to use a single software platform for everything you do in your business to work more efficiently, smarter, faster. We know this because we live it. We run every part of the company (ok, with the exception of accounting - for now!) on SmartSuite. Product development? Check. Task lists and prioritization - You know it. Partner management? Absolutely. Bug tracking? Heads are nodding.

What that means for you is that we live, breathe and truly experience every bit of SmartSuite every day. We know what you need to get things up and running quickly. We understand where you need more flexibility and where ease of use and simplicity reign. We let you work the way you want to work, on your terms - and we won’t stop innovating and finding more barriers to knock down, more efficient ways to get the things done that matter.

SmartSuite Provides

Our mission is to change how people think about getting work done. We do this by providing customers with all of the capabilities they need to manage projects, organize and analyze data, and efficiently navigate all of their workflows. SmartSuite does this for any size business from startup to large enterprise. The platform’s core features include:

Data Visualization & Interaction

Put your data to work with powerful reports, dashboards, charts and views. Interact with those records, tracking your progress, interactions with customers and more.

Team Collaboration

Collaborate with your team seamlessly with comments, messaging and through integrations with technologies like Slack. With these functions built directly into SmartSuite interfaces your interactions are made in the context of your work, 

Roles and Permissions

Protect sensitive data while allowing teams access to the information they need with multiple permissions options. Share data across the organization while limiting edits to specific teams or assigned users.

Security and Privacy

SmartSuite ensures the privacy and security of your data throughout its lifecycle. With data secured from the user’s browser or mobile device all the way through encryption at rest, your information is safe with SmartSuite. SmartSuite is also GDPR compliant and supports all of your regulatory obligations to maintain privacy.

Task Management

Plan, manage and assign tasks to make sure that you're on time, every time. Tasks are integrated into every part of SmartSuite, allowing you to assign work items, specify due dates and ensure that everyone is accountable.

Workflow Automations

Streamline your workflow with point-and-click automations to eliminate busy work. An easy to configure rules engine reacts to events in the system or external events, triggering actions that you define as part of your workflow. Update records, send Slack notifications, change a Google Sheet document and much more.

Real Time Notifications

Bring important details to your attention through online notifications, email or Slack. Users can configure how they are notified, and notifications can be configured as SmartSuite automations actions to bring attention to important events.

Integrations

Seamlessly link to your existing applications and data to centralize all your work. SmartSuite supports a number of technologies through native integrations, providing seamless interaction with: 

• GSuite applications (Gmail, Google Sheets, Google Docs)
• Gmail
• Microsoft 365
• Jira
• Confluence
• GitHub
• GitLab
• Slack
• And many more...

Solution Templates

Instantly install industry best-practices solution templates get you up and running fast. These pre-configured sets of SmartSuite applications allow you to create the structure to track all of your work and processes in minutes. From there you can tweak and adjust any component of those templates to make it a perfect fit for your organization.

Work Management Evolves the Way You Work

We believe that companies must be more agile and adaptable than ever before to survive in today’s business environment. Disconnected, manual and inefficient ways of doing your work weigh an organization down, and stitching together a patchwork of digital tools creates a fragile structure easily broken by the inevitable need to change.

SmartSuite is designed to solve this problem. We have more experience than anyone running a company on our own stuff - eating our own dogfood, as the saying goes - and truly understand what is needed, what is important to make this a possibility. SmartSuite is the easiest and most intuitive workspace for all of your work, empowering teams with the information, interfaces and collaboration they need to get things done.

The best way to really explain SmartSuite to you is for you to try it. Give us five minutes of your time and we think you’ll be convinced. Click [here] to create a free trial account and start working better.

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