Project Management
5 min read
Wrike and Crescent Sock Company
Learn how Wrike helped Crescent Sock Company double their efficiency by replacing as many as five other apps that they previously used for project management.
Customer
Crescent Sock Company is the oldest operating hosiery mill in the United States with over a century of expertise in knitting socks. It’s a family-owned business, and some of its employees are following in the footsteps of their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Today, the company produces socks under its own FITSTM brand which is designed to be the world’s best-fitting sock, using materials, processes, and quality controls that far exceed industry standards.
Vendor
Wrike is a full-featured app for work management and project collaboration which features an interface that is extremely intuitive and fast. Thousands of teams choose Wrike for its seamless integration with Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Calendar, as well as its real-time updates and interactive Gantt charts. With Wrike, you can keep all data organized in one place and selectively share it with co-workers, contractors and partners.
Challenge
Prior to discovering Wrike, Crescent faced a situation that is all too familiar with many small and midsize companies. Their project management “system” consisted of disconnected spreadsheets, countless paper notes, impromptu meetings and several clusters of employees working as patchwork groups to solve problems. The team spread news and updates via e-mail or word of mouth, shared documentation via DropBox or OneNote, and occasionally communicated through Google Chat or conference calls. This method of organizing projects and work often resulted in confusion, so the team desperately needed a tool that could help them collaborate more efficiently while being easy-to-use for all team members.
“We considered other project management tools, but the learning curve and complex functionality of those programs turned out to be rather frustrating!” complains George Ervin, Business & Tech Consultant at Crescent.
Solution
“Wrike was clearly a simple, yet welcomed, answer to our broken attempt at project collaboration,” says Ervin. By adopting Wrike, the team now has an efficient project management system that helps them synchronize all of the team’s efforts so that they achieve their project goals. The team previously had to switch between numerous tabs and windows to find the required files and tasks; now they just open Wrike to find all the tasks, documents, discussions, and schedules in one place.
The team does still continue working with some of their other favorite tools, as Wrike is integrated with Gmail and Google Docs. Apart from the obvious convenience and significant time savings, being integrated with Gmail and Google Docs has practically eliminated the previous hassle of e-mailing dozens of attachments to other team members just to stay updated on document changes. Now they just attach the Google Doc to the task, and Wrike automatically creates sharing rights for everyone who follows that task, allowing the whole team to stay on the same page. All of the task updates and file changes instantly appear in Wrike’s real-time newsfeed, so everyone on the team can contribute to task discussions and make their opinion count. “We’ve had many opportunities to collectively create project plans in a few short hours with Wrike when it previously took several e-mails and days waiting for responses to accomplish similar tasks,” says Ervin.
Along with real-time updates, Wrike provides the team with an excellent means to respond and update project tasks from their favorite gadgets, making remote collaboration even more efficient. “A few of our employees utilize smart phones, and the added convenience of simply answering an e-mail to apprise other team members of new developments is priceless,” says Ervin.
Results
Being a pioneer in adopting Wrike, Ervin is definitely the best person to tell you about the results his team has achieved, so let’s see what he says about his experience with Wrike:
“We’ve halved our time spent on project administration. We now conduct work in one (cool!) application as opposed to previously switching between 5 different programs to accomplish the same result.”
And what is the main time-saving effect of adopting Wrike, according to Ervin?
“Overall time savings connected with getting rid of multiple e-mail attachments is considered the biggest productivity improvement for our group. Thanks to Wrike and Google Docs, we’ve seen a 60% reduction in e-mail traffic involving attachments! Even beyond the numbers, it allowed us to change the way we collaborate and create a solid project management system almost effortlessly,” concludes Ervin.
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