House of Design Masters Visibility and Drives Efficiency With Wrike

Establish a single knowledge base to keep teams aligned and streamline onboarding

Svedin explains, “We’ve really started to push the use of Wrike and use it to organize ourselves. For example, our onboarding process is done through Wrike. I mean, we even provide tasks to understand how we use Wrike through Wrike. We have an onboarding checklist for new hires that ensures our onboarding is streamlined and everyone understands our best practices. Even as we grow, we want our team to be able to do more, in less time, and have a great work-life balance.”

Okelberry adds, “With templates, we’ve been able to map out our projects with best practices so that we can scale at the rate of our businesses without sacrificing quality. That brings us to our engineering journal. Our engineers document the history and reasons why we make certain decisions on projects.” This ensures no learning is lost.

“The success and efficiency our teams see with Wrike is now giving them new ideas. Because of that, Wrike is gaining momentum within our organization. For example, the safety committee recently created a request for a process in Wrike for safety observations. If a team member sees a hazardous situation on the shop floor, they can simply snap a picture and fill out the form and it goes right to the safety committee. All in one place and so efficient!”

Request forms streamline the intake process to strategically manage and prioritize work

Svedin explains, “Before Wrike, our machine shop manager struggled with all the requests for needed parts. Mike tried to intake work through an Excel spreadsheet, with more than a dozen people providing information in a myriad of ways. It was messy, overwhelming, and inconsistent. On the other hand, trying to enter the data himself manually was time consuming and hard to maintain.”

Today, HoD uses Wrike request forms to manage parts and their flow through the entire fabrication process. Svedin says, “The manager has one funnel for requests that’s easy to manage. For example, he has 270 requests right now. With all the information he needs in one, orderly form, he can easily determine if we’ll make the part in our shop or work with an outside vendor. He can also use custom fields to track location, the quotes, rate, purchase order number, and dates. On parts we make on a consistent basis, having price and turnaround information in Wrike is very valuable to prioritization and negotiating.”

Okelberry says, “Before Wrike, when up against the clock and determining which of his tasks to tackle, we’d speak to each engineer individually to understand which parts requests were critical. Spending hours of time and getting a dozen different opinions wasn’t up to our standards of efficiency.

Today, with our requests and tasks in Wrike, we have the data to make decisions quicker and more confidently. We look at the workflow statuses and drill down information. We take that overwhelming list of 270 tasks and pare those down to the top 8-10 critical ones. Before, it would have taken hours to discern all this information, and now it takes 10 minutes and our strategic decisions are backed by empirical data. Our machine shop manager alone has been able to save 20+ hours of work a week, which averages out to saving over 1,100 hours annually.”

Drive efficiency when collaborating with external vendors

Okelberry says, “As a small business, we’re really trying to push the limit on how we can create efficiency in our workflows and predict workloads. Being able to forecast when engineers will complete tasks and then be able to take on more helps us know when to accept more work. We can also identify where there might be a lull in workloads to strategically fit in smaller projects. Without Wrike, we would have to be more reactive and address projects chronologically rather than strategically.”

As House of Design has grown, they’ve added contractors. For example, an outside IT agency helps resolve technical issues 20-30 hours a month. When the team has an IT issue, they use a Wrike request form to put in a service request. Those go to one person internally who manages requests and decides if it will be handled internally or externally. If it’s external, the manager will create a task in Wrike with a list of action items. As Wrike Collaborators, the IT team has access to everything they need to get the jobs done efficiently Okelberry continues, “In order to build our systems, we need parts. We fabricate some parts in house, and the rest are outsourced. We manage all external machine shop orders through Wrike tasks. Even though some orders go out to contractors, and because everything is done through Wrike, we’re able to track machine time, setup time, and programming time. We get live feedback as to how many hours and how many parts this one machine shop individual is producing for us.”

Sharing project timelines visually in a way that delights clients and drives repeat business is key. Like many businesses, HoD serves many different types of clients. Some want to know all the details, while others can get quickly overwhelmed by them. Svedin says, “Having the ability to be flexible to the client’s needs is critical. We love the ‘Snapshots’ feature of the Wrike Gantt chart. When we have weekly client meetings, we are able to take a snapshot of the Gantt chart that’s functional, scrollable, and zoomable. When clients want to see more, they can simply click and get all the information they need in a single glance. Clients love knowing that they can drill down into details or stay high level. The flexibility Wrike provides is a competitive advantage. Clients are pleased with how transparently we operate and manage their projects.”

Okelberry adds, “We’ll hear from customers things like ‘Wow. You guys have communicated your project better to us than anybody else,’ and the best part is that it’s no extra work on our side. Wrike is how we manage our projects internally, and clients simply get the benefits of it. Without Wrike, mapping out a timeline would be an extra step that an engineer would need to draw up and input manually. But with Wrike, it’s all a part of our routine and everything we need is there — automatically.”

Managing capacity and scheduling resources

Okelberry reflects on how Wrike has changed the way they think about tasks. “Out of the box, a task merely needs an assignee and start/end duration. With resource management, we are now asking that a role type (e.g., engineer, programmer, etc.) be assigned so that the appropriate manager can distribute the task to their team from a team backlog by role type.”

HoD uses the ‘Effort’ field to gain a better understanding of how much time the task will take over how long a time period. “Something might be needed in two weeks, but if the effort is only 20 hours, the manager could have deeper insight into the person’s task loading rather than just counting the number of tasks.”

They are currently testing their setup of Wrike workload and effort tracking. Okelberry elaborates, “The initial benefit we are seeing is that we have been assigning team tasks to the team managers for distribution and grouping those tasks by needed role helps the distribution of tasks. We look forward to doing even more with resource management for enhanced visibility of resource capacity and availability, as it’s central to our business.”

Conclusion

Okelberry and Svedin are excited for a future of efficiency and automation powered by Wrike — and they’re excited to do more.

Svedin states, “Wrike has saved us thousands of hours. Between streamlining workflows, requests, our knowledge base, and collaborating externally, we really push Wrike to the limit. The commitment to grow with us and help us grow as a company is one thing that makes Wrike stand out.

We estimate that Wrike has saved us about 2 hours per week per employee for a total of approximately 16,600 hours over the past 3 years of implementation. Off an average hourly rate per employee, we estimate this to be over $830,000 in cost savings/increased productivity.”

Okelberry concludes, “Many of the processes we’ve implemented were learnings from Wrike’s user event Collaborate. We value how Wrike takes the time to help us better use templates and request forms. Request forms are the critical kickoff point to our successful projects. They put a task in the right spot and predefined with the right information. Wrike inspires us to think outside the box, which aligns perfectly with what we do every day — bringing the power of automation to help make work a better place.

We are in the business of automating manufacturing processes, some of which have never been done before. We would be doing ourselves a disservice if we weren’t trying to automate and streamline our own internal operations as we are doing so. Wrike is helping us to do this by automating our workflows the same way we help automate our client’s operations.”