Intelco Unlocks Operational Efficiency with Wrike
Here’s a story we’re sure you’ll like because it’s one that you can probably relate to or stirs up past memories. Intelco is a software house that provides services for large industrial groups such as the motorway, airport, engineering, retail, textile, and many others. Based in Gussago, Italy, they’re a true strategic partner for companies that outsource personnel administration. The company offers a wide range of services thanks to the "tailor-made" customization of the IRIS software, an Intelco-owned platform made up of about 42 modules to optimize, rationalize, and digitize human resource management processes. Back in 2019, the company faced an all-too-common scenario. Their teams worked out of disparate systems, needed more visibility, and couldn’t track work efficiently or see work in progress or a historical record of completed projects. They were determined to find ways to optimize their processes and work smarter. Change management was needed. Although change seemed intimidating, they knew it had to be done to reach their end goal — improving collaboration and streamlining processes. We talked with Mattia Ronchi and Paolo Baiamonte, Project Managers at Intelco, to learn more about their workflows, major pain points, and what led them to choose Wrike. How did Intelco manage and track work before? MR & PB: We used to manage all our work via spreadsheets and handwritten notes. Our service team, in particular, relied on email and phone calls because clients couldn’t initiate new requests without first emailing or calling the service team. So any time a bug needed fixing or a change request was sent, the service team was inundated with inbound inquiries. It wasn’t ideal, and we knew there had to be a better way. What motivated your team to look for a better solution? MR & PB: It all started with upgrading our ticketing system and fielding new requests. The glaring problem was with multiple channels to accept requests. There needed to be a consolidated, easy-to-track system to handle everything. But we also wanted to streamline processes, enable more teams to have visibility into the work being done by all departments and collaborate. And here’s the big thing — we wanted to achieve everything in one place. What was your evaluation process, and what sold you on Wrike? MR & PB: Implementing organizational change isn’t easy, but we knew change management was in order, so we sought a work management solution. We sat through multiple product demos to determine which solution best fit our needs. After all the demos, we weren’t impressed because every provider was too niche, the software was too clunky, or it was not customizable to what we needed. Once we saw Wrike, it was clear how robust the platform was and how we could customize it to how we preferred to work. The other platforms were not as flexible as Wrike, which made all the difference. For instance, the request form is everything we hoped for and more because it simplifies the process and auto-assigns the right teammate instantly. Our request forms help us to prioritize work so that every morning when our teams arrive, they can easily see a prioritized task list in Wrike of what they have to do, so they’re not guessing what needs to be done. Which Intelco teams use Wrike to manage work and collaborate? MR & PB: Along with the service team, our project management team was the first group into Wrike because I helped spearhead the change management process. Once we saw immediate success, word traveled fast to other departments like marketing, legal, finance, and IT. Fast forward to today, and the entire company works inside Wrike. That’s another wonderful aspect of the product — each department at Intelco has its own dedicated Space where we set up projects and can track activities. It’s great because all our work can be kept separate yet still housed in Wrike. What Wrike features do you recommend most? MR & PB: With request forms, we can tie them to Blueprints and launch full-fledged projects in a few clicks, so that’s great! And before using Wrike, we didn’t track time spent on work, but now we do with timesheets — we couldn’t live without them! We can monitor the time spent per task in real-time. We can better plan and forecast easier because there’s more visibility and a record of time spent. Speaking of visibility, other features we love include the ability to create custom dashboards via Wrike Analyze. Everyone, including managers, can see which projects are being released and their respective statuses. No more digging through emails, spreadsheets, or handwritten notes because it’s all in Wrike. Not only is all our work and collaboration in the platform, but these features specifically have helped us quickly understand which teams are performing the most compared to others and where we need to improve. What’s next for Intelco using Wrike? MR & PB: Every new employee gets onboarded into Wrike from day one, and we plan to use Wrike Integrate to sync our Salesforce account and others from our tech stack. Check out the full case study There’s more to the Intelco story; you can get the complete details here. You’ll see how, with Wrike, they deal with 90% fewer emails, can complete bug fixes 50% faster, and save 30% time in progress meetings. Read the full case study here.
3 Reasons Why You Should Integrate Miro With Wrike (And How)
Wrike is one of the best work hubs out there. It has features all teams love, a smooth learning curve, and is a powerhouse in managing projects. But even the star players need a little backup, and that’s where tools like Miro come in. While Miro’s a great place to conduct brainstorming sessions, your roadmap planning, and your retrospectives, going from planning to execution isn’t always as easy. And it almost always involves a ton of copying and pasting. But it shouldn’t be that way. By integrating your Miro boards with Wrike, you can go from planning to execution faster with less work. Here’s why that matters — and how you can do it. Reason #1: You should always be using the best tool for the job Miro is not a project management tool, and trying to run a project in Miro is like trying to put furniture together using a turkey baster. Sure, it’s the perfect tool for a very specific job, but it doesn’t make sense anywhere else. Your team is using Wrike for a reason — because it’s a best-in-class project management solution. But in the same way that Miro isn’t built to manage projects, Wrike doesn’t have all the brainstorming features that Miro does. It’s best to use each respective app for its intended purpose. With the right integration solution, you can make sure that’s the case for every team. So, instead of trying to make your tools do everything, help them stay in their lane. Everyone will be happier for it. Reason #2: No one should have to copy-paste a brainstorm You’ve just finished the brainstorm session. Everything makes sense, you’ve got some great ideas, and you’re excited about what comes next. But have you ever gone back to look at a brainstorming board after the session’s over? It’s a mess with post-its everywhere, half-scrawled notes you meant to clean up, and sections that don’t even make sense anymore. And it’s going to be someone’s job to make sense of all this, so they can copy and paste it into Wrike — where the work is actually going to get done. Wouldn’t you rather get the project started than spend time copying and pasting data over? You could try and make brainstorming sessions follow a more rigid structure, but then you’d probably lose out on some of the best ideas. So what do you do? You integrate Miro with Wrike. That way, the ideas you select for future work automatically get synced to your Wrike projects. From there, you can flesh them out, build out your task hierarchy, scope out your projects, and get things done. No more copying and pasting necessary. Reason #3: Saving on licenses How tight is your app budget right now? Are you already being asked to find places to cut spending? Whether it’s your teams that are both in Wrike and Miro or you’re working with consultants, you might be overpaying for your licenses. After all, not everyone who needs Wrike to execute work needs a Miro license, especially if all they do is check in on a brainstorm from time to time. Same thing with contractors who help you brainstorm. Do they need a Wrike license? Do you even want to give them access to your Wrike projects? When you have an integration solution, you can make sure that every contributor only has access to the tools they absolutely need without missing the context they need to do their work. That means everyone can do their best work from their favorite tool. So, you need an integration. Where do you look? How to use Wrike Sync by Unito to integrate You don’t need to get a new tool to sync Miro cards with Wrike tasks. The Wrike Sync add-on by Unito can sync Wrike tasks with Miro seamlessly. You get access to this add-on as long as you have a Wrike Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, or Enterprise Pinnacle plan. Wrike Sync by Unito is a no-code workflow management solution that lets you connect tools like Wrike, Miro, Jira, BitBucket, Salesforce, and more with your Wrike projects. As long as you’re an account owner, enabling Wrike Sync is easy: Visit the Subscription panel of your Wrike settings and enable the Wrike Syncs trial. Click Create flow to start linking your Wrike projects with Miro and get more out of both tools. Here’s more information on doing that. Miro Miro on the wall Your brainstorm sessions shouldn’t require a bunch of extra manual work or copying and pasting post-it notes into Wrike. By connecting Wrike to your Miro boards using Wrike Sync, you can accomplish more faster, by moving from the brainstorming stage to your project automatically, without switching tools. To get started, request a free trial of Wrike Sync and follow the two-step instructions above. You’ll be glad you did.
Wrike UI Is Now Available in Traditional Chinese
Great news — the Wrike Workspace is now available in Traditional Chinese! For the past several years, each time we ran a survey about localization and Wrike interface translations, we got a lot of requests to add Traditional Chinese to the list of our ten officially supported languages. This winter, we released Wrike UI in Traditional Chinese so that the experience of our customers, who are doing the best work of their lives all across the globe, would be even more convenient and smooth. If you were waiting for Wrike to be available in Traditional Chinese, thank you for being patient! If you’re part of an international team, hopefully, this release will make working in Wrike even more enjoyable for some of your team members. Localizing Wrike to Traditional Chinese “This is a very special release for us and a great new milestone as we have been discussing the possibility of adding a new locale for a long time,” says Irina Arutyunova, Product Localization Manager at Wrike. “When we made our plan to add Traditional Chinese, it was clear right from the start that this would be a challenge for all of us, but we did it! It was a truly collaborative effort with our Sales team, Engineering, Product, and Marketing — thanks to everyone involved for making this happen!” What made this really fun is that we used Wrike to plan and execute this initiative. We created a “Wrike UI in Traditional Chinese” project in Wrike, coordinated translation and review tasks, checked our timeline on a Gantt Chart, and shared calendars with stakeholders. We just love that we could use Wrike as a platform to make the journey for our Wrike customers better!” In addition to Traditional Chinese, Wrike is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Korean. How do I switch the language in my workspace? Go to your profile, select Traditional Chinese from the drop-down menu in Workspace Settings, and click "Save changes." How can I try Wrike in Traditional Chinese if I don’t have an account yet? You can start a Wrike trial in Traditional Chinese here. Want to share some feedback about translations? Send us an email with comments and ideas about translations to [email protected]. We’d love to hear what you think!
Wrike Ranked as a Leader by Forrester
If there’s one thing we know, it’s collaborative work management. This week, we were recognized as a Leader in collaborative work management tools by an industry-respected independent research firm. We believe our status as one of the foremost collaborative work management platforms has been cemented, as we have been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Collaborative Work Management Tools, Q4 2022 report. Wrike received this industry recognition with the highest possible marks of 5.0 in nine criteria total across the categories of current offering, strategy, and market presence. Wrike received the highest possible scores in the criteria of ability to create work types, ability to support asset creation, ability to manage complex projects, and ability to connect disparate teams, along with work analytics, collaboration capabilities, planned enhancements, innovation roadmap, and number of live installations. We have consistently shown our ability to understand what workers need to succeed in workplaces that grow ever more complex with each passing month. As we have continually pushed to better understand the challenges facing executives, managers, and workers, we undertook a ground-breaking study earlier this year that helped us see just how we could improve our platform for today’s workplace management struggles. Our study on the Dark Matter of Work illuminated the need for more streamlined project management tools, more clear communication and collaboration options, and streamlined asset creation. We dug deep into workplace struggles and learned that workers are wasting time and resources that are, in turn, costing companies millions every year. But we immediately knew that was an opportunity for our collaborative work management software to help organizations around the world recoup those losses. With that incredible learning as our foundation, we designed and launched our greatly revamped Wrike Lightspeed platform with the goal of addressing and eliminating the Dark Matter of Work. Wrike Lightspeed has made waves in the industry — and we believe it has contributed to our status as a leader — because we think it delivers above and beyond what top analyst firms recommend for work management software. “We believe our position as a Leader underscores the strength of our newly launched platform, Wrike Lightspeed,” says Andrew Filev, Founder and CEO of Wrike. “The Forrester Wave™ notes three key areas that CWM customers should look for in a provider, all of which we think our platform addresses. Those include supporting a wide range of work types for activity management, managing work at scale in terms of capacity and complexity, and improving analytics and work visualization.” We’re proud to be included as a top provider and named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ report, and we look forward to continuing to improve our platform to suit our ever-growing slate of customers. If you’re interested in joining our incredible customer roster, which includes the likes of Sony Pictures, L’Oréal, Mindbody, Lyft, BigCommerce, Radial, eClinicalWorks, and Sitecore, we’d love to show you what Wrike has to offer. Try Wrike for yourself today and start empowering your team to do their best work in just minutes.
How Wrike Lightspeed Will Cut Out Wasted Time and Save Your Organization’s Bottom Line
Do you ever feel like work is flying at your team at the speed of light? The rate at which teams are expected to complete projects and tasks is higher than ever — and employees as well as employers are feeling that pressure. That’s why we designed Wrike Lightspeed. In this day and age, you need a platform that enables your team to thrive and excel at lightspeed. Wrike Lightspeed is also designed to bring tasks into the light, increasing visibility so every team member has the information they need to complete their best work — and so managers, executives, and stakeholders can quickly understand project progress in a blink. We recently published a study that really shocked us — and as a result, pushed us to design Wrike Lightspeed, the most powerful work management platform on the market. Our study on the Dark Matter of Work underlined just how much employees and organizations are suffering from inefficient processes, the daily juggle of too many windows, apps, and passwords, and a disconnect between individual work and what it means for the organization. What the Dark Matter of Work really means to your organization The Dark Matter of Work is what gets lost in the gaps between systems and solutions that aren't integrated. It’s the time that’s wasted when you have to duplicate work in one app that you’ve already done in another. It’s the resources that could be better used elsewhere, but are instead poured into updating your stakeholders about project progress or sending email after email to a coworker asking for information. The Dark Matter of Work doesn’t just bog down your employees’ productivity; it can crush the soul of your company. Picture this: You’re an employee who has to switch between an average of 14 apps throughout your day. In several platforms, you have to update the same tasks to reflect work you’ve done between fielding email requests for more tasks. When you finally get a chance to get into deep work, you realize the information you need is buried in email threads and Slack messages. You leave work late, exhausted from struggling with systems that just don’t work. And you question what all those disjointed tasks are really doing to move your company forward. At 2 a.m., you wake up with a start, realizing you forgot to update your manager ahead of an important meeting you have first thing tomorrow. The Dark Matter of Work wastes your employees’ time and leaves employees feeling discouraged — even when they’re putting in maximum effort. The cost of letting the Dark Matter of Work continue We also know that the Dark Matter of Work doesn’t just impact your employees’ daily work, their productivity, their sense of purpose, and their career fulfillment — it affects a company’s bottom line. The wasted time from the Dark Matter of Work costs a single employee at a knowledge organization up to $16K per year. Multiply that by the number of employees in your organization, and you’ve got a serious problem — and a major opportunity to make up lost revenue. The Dark Matter of Work leads to delayed and canceled projects, missed deadlines, low productivity, and even employee churn. That costs companies in the knowledge industry millions every year. And that’s where Wrike Lightspeed comes in. How Wrike Lightspeed will help you eliminate the Dark Matter of Work We designed Wrike Lightspeed to help companies eliminate the Dark Matter of Work and recover those lost profits that are slipping through the cracks. Wrike Lightspeed is the platform where your employees can plan, manage, track, and complete all of their daily work. It’s fully configurable to your team’s processes — no more trying to shoehorn your ways of working into a pre-built cookie cutter platform. Instead, we give you the features you need and help you customize them so they fit your team. Wrike Lightspeed helps companies cut out those daily struggles like switching platforms and duplicating work, and enables employees to achieve new levels of productivity. It enables an unprecedented velocity of work — and it brings the work your team does to light with 360-degree visibility. That means managers can see how employees are progressing with tasks — and catch bottlenecks before they delay projects. Teams can emerge from their silos without leaving their desks — Wrike Lightspeed offers cross-tagging, which increases visibility and decreases duplication. Do the work once, tag teams who need to stay in the know, and move on to work that matters. What’s more? Wrike Lightspeed is powerful for a team of five — or for a team of 500. It can scale as you grow without losing any of the collaborative benefits, automation capabilities, integrations with your most-used apps, intuitive work intelligence, or security features. That’s major savings for your company with every team that’s added to Wrike. Are you ready to see for yourself just how Wrike Lightspeed can transform the way you work? Start a trial and begin eliminating the Dark Matter of Work from your workflows today.
New Chapter for Wrike Under Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital
Today marks a new chapter for Wrike as we complete our separation from Citrix Systems. We are also excited to announce that we have the financial backing of Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital, following the close of their acquisition of Citrix and its combination with TIBCO Software. Vista and Evergreen are investors with deep experience working with successful SaaS companies like ours. They understand Wrike's mission and values, including the keener edge we bring to the highly competitive work management space. We will leverage our newfound position as a private, autonomous company to continue pursuing innovation focused on solving dynamic workplace challenges and meeting the needs of the modern workforce. The market opportunity Over the last three years, digital transformation has dramatically accelerated, and our workplace has changed significantly. This created new opportunities to improve productivity. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity in the non-farm business sector decreased 4.1% in the second quarter of 2022, with output decreasing 1.4%, while hours worked increased 2.7%. This is the largest decline in quarterly productivity since the third quarter of 1948. Many of us feel it in employee burnout, which drove the “Great Resignation” trend last year and the “Quiet Quitting” trend this year. In order to get actionable insights into these trends, we surveyed approximately 3,000 business leaders and workers and published the “Dark Matter of Work” report that shows 55% of the work that takes place within an organization is not visible to key stakeholders, costing organizations of 3,200 employees up to $60 million a year in wasted time, delayed or canceled projects, and employee churn. Companies have a unique opportunity to reverse this trend by taking the productivity and visibility benefits that workflow automation and work management offer, and unlocking the same benefits in the hundreds of workflows that live in the dark matter of spreadsheets and unstructured messages today. The bottom line: demand has never been greater for a work management platform that can meet the needs and job styles of individuals, while also giving an entire organization the collaboration, measurement, and visibility it needs to drive the business forward. Ushering in a new era of work management Over the last decade, we have created a collaborative work management category and brought several cornerstone innovations to it. In the process, we have rapidly evolved as a product and as an organization. We continue this evolution with more than 200 new releases and updates in the past year alone. Among these advancements is Custom Item Types, a unique core platform capability that enables users to create their own work item types tailored to their team’s specific culture and style. This has expanded our promise around versatility, opening our platform up to an infinite amount of use cases across departments and organizations. Other recent platform releases include: AI Subtask Creation, a feature that utilizes artificial intelligence to extract key action items from user-selected text and turn them into subtasks that can be assigned and distributed into a team’s workflow. Resource Planning, a feature that helps department and team leaders, along with program and project managers, simplify and accelerate resource planning, especially for cross-team and cross-department projects. Cloud Connector, a universal API that enables Wrike to integrate with any Digital Asset Management system of a customer’s choice. With all of the progress we’ve made, we still see these as the early days for our company, with tremendous potential ahead of us. Our team keeps growing with the needs of our customers and our business. As we become an independent business again, we have hired two world-class executives: Thomas Scott as Chief Financial Officer and Brian Clark as Chief Revenue Officer. As Wrike moves forward, our focus remains the same. We have the most intuitive, versatile, and scalable work management platform on the market and a collaborative, driven team dedicated to freeing our customers to focus on their most purposeful work. There’s never been greater demand for a solution like ours and a better time to deliver it. Join us at Wrike Collaborate on October 25-27, 2022, for major upcoming announcements.
