Something quite unusual happened yesterday - a customer walked into our offices!

It's not that we are located in a remote outpost in Timbuktu but as a SaaS company catering to SMBs, customer interactions are seldom conducted face-to-face. The web as a platform for marketing and selling has virtualized the entire sales cycle removing any need for in-person interactions and even voice communications, leaving it all in the hands of ecommerce. Meeting a customer in person was an exciting, refreshing and enlightening experience.

Jay Irvine, VP of Marketing for Monterey AgResources and a Clarizen customer for a few months now, was in the vicinity of our San Mateo, CA offices and thought he would pay us a visit to get to know the team behind his project collaboration solutions.

Jay with Clarizen CEO Avi, and Account Mgr. Eric

AgResources is not in a ‘simple' line of business and their products are far from being simple, however, being a medium-size business with multi-million dollar sales and 80 employees they had quite a simple problem, how can they improve their bottom line without taking on new employees or endeavors. For Jay there was a straightforward answer - increase efficiency as stated in his words:

"I am a small company (up against the big giants such as Monsanto) and can only increase my business by being more efficient. Clarizen allows this."

AgResources produces and markets agricultural chemicals and nutrients, each of which entails creating projects that take the product from the early phases of R&D, through field trials, compliance, registration, production of marketing materials, packaging and finally selling to resellers. Each phase may involve both internal and external stakeholders all of which are dependent on each other to reach the final goal of adding a new line of products to the company. Chemists, marketers, compliance specialists, suppliers and management are constantly moving projects through the value chain until a project is marked ‘complete'.

Before using Clarizen, as typical in many businesses of this size, Excel spreadsheets were used to capture and disseminate all project information coupled with endless emails and hard-copy reports. Errors and delays were taken for granted in a system that lacked any ability to truly track and collaborate, as had occurred just a week earlier when they mistakenly double-paid a supplier $6500!

Once a month project team members get together in the Fresno headquarters to review each and every one of the approximately 50 ongoing projects. Papers are handed out and over the course of the day all projects are reviewed one by one in a painstakingly process. Decisions are eventually taken but only after a very long day of sharing all the information as it relates to each project. Jay knew there was something wrong and even more so once getting back to his desk after one of his frequent business trips. Projects were behind schedule due to emails sitting in members' inboxes (and even papers sitting on desks), miscommunications and costly errors (as the one mentioned above) all of which impacted the company's bottom line.

Just to clarify, Jay did not walk into our offices with iPod earplugs hanging over his shoulders. Jay is a farmer in heart and soul and still carries around mounds of paperwork and has never used any Project Management solution. Jay knew he was in a bind and was fortunate (for us too!) to be at the right time and place when Clarizen's Inside Sales person, Eric Pangilinan, introduced him to Clarizen via email. Eric helped Jay get the ball rolling, quickly setting-up his Clarizen account and adding some project templates which are recurring in nature in this business.

After spending a few hours on the Clarizen application, Jay shared the application with other members at AgResources and soon enough they were all sold onto it. His main concern was not about securing certain data from being viewed by specific team members but about the overwhelming time and effort that members were spending on locating and digesting the unstructured out-of-context data that was piling on their desks, emails and spreadsheets.

"It's not about keeping secrets from one another but about keeping people focused on the tasks at hand."

No one had proposed to Jay to use a ‘Project Management' solution nor was he seeking one out. Jay knew the ‘system' was broken and was determined to spearhead a radical change and phase out dated processes, including those monthly project sessions. With Clarizen all team members now have access anytime, anywhere to project data. Members of his team, who are not very web-savvy, can complete their progress reports on assigned tasks directly from their inboxes using Clarizen's fully integrated email features. The monthly meetings focus more on strategic decision making than sharing project data. More than anything else, Jay is excited about the flexibility of the Clarizen system which allows him to start projects from R&D or anywhere else in the value chain as opposed to other solutions that require of him to comply with very rigid guidelines.

Hiding the power of the system from the end user while putting a simple façade and emphasis on the usability has allowed him to secure internal team adoption. He is confident that accelerated team adoption will, in turn, translate to an increase in efficiencies and eventually the bottom line.

AgResources is just one of millions of small businesses worldwide weighed down by multi-member and inter-dependent business processes that are still not leveraging the tremendous value that ‘Web 2.0' attributes have to offer.

Clarizen is Jay's foot in the door on this new journey and, speaking of feet in the door, please come by our offices next time you're in town!