Borja Gramage is responsible for organizational development at Arisnova. Since 1989, I am the second generation of a Spanish company that has been developing control systems, automation and custom software. Our applications are unique and intuitive, and can be used by many roles within the company. It is possible to adapt their use to suit the most basic or challenging jobs. GAS PLANT, SMARTPORT are two examples of our innovations. Arisnova is a family-owned company with 45 employees. We are currently in the evolution and growth phase. We have several initiatives internally to digitize our processes, and professionalize our operations. We decided to use ActiveCollab in one of our digitalization initiatives.
We didn’t have a common work method. In a company with 30-35 employees, organizing was easy. Small teams had their own management methods on different platforms (Trello Excel, Excel, etc.). We didn’t measure the workload of our coworkers. With a staff of 30-35 employees, it is clear that the workload is not your primary concern. Because communication is fluid, it’s easy for the team to identify which tasks they are working on. We failed to record information. We live in the generation and sharing of data. We create applications that monitor and control in real-time over 12 million variables. That’s insane at an industrial level. We had been developing projects for more than 30 years, but we didn’t consider measuring in-depth concepts like profitability, hours tracked, and lags. We were able to see the significant numbers, but not enough detail. This was a company that is constantly developing cutting-edge technology. There was a lot of paper in the office. Everything was done in person and used different methods. We needed to make sure we had a great 30 years of enjoyment.
We needed a tool that would standardize our work process. Validating work and working by iterations is essential in today’s software development industry. ActiveCollab facilitates this method by allowing you to create task lists that allow you to identify if the tasks have been completed, in CYCLE, DOING or DONE. It is easy to assign and distribute tasks.
Establishing priorities.
Description of the scope of a task.
Allocate hours to the appropriate tasks
The Stopwatch improvement has made it possible to record hours spent on projects. ActiveCollab has allowed us to record three years worth of hours and attribute them to projects. We also find it very useful to have a retrospective view of how you spent your time. Knowing your workload
This new feature is being used by our team. It has been difficult to use ActiveCollab since we have multiple projects in progress. The scopes (dates, estimates) change almost every week. The team is trying to keep track of the workload and avoid any potential peaks/attrition among our colleagues.
We needed an API to integrate with other tools such as ERP, budgeting, Power BI, and more. ActiveCollab is more than a tool. It is a part of our daily improvement.
ActiveCollab has made a significant improvement in our day-today operations. We have seen a significant improvement in our budgeting, as I mentioned earlier. There is less intuition, and more information. The teams are more cross-functional. A common tool and one project management method can be used.
