Productive Is Key to Akcelo’s Decision-Making

Yeah, we had a set of tools that weren’t really able to scale with us as a business. I suppose a bunch of tools that were kind of good for us, but didn’t really scale with and across different offices. 

We wanted to make sure that we could find something that still enabled us to work fast. We didn’t want to get into a situation where we would have to buy a really expensive system and to customize it for our needs. We wanted something that was easy to onboard people to and that was able to do a number of jobs.

I would say the onboarding experience is unparalleled—it was sensational. It was probably the best SaaS platform onboarding I’ve ever seen, and Gabrijela did an absolutely amazing job.

I think the things that were most impressive were Productive understanding what our needs were, really deeply understanding our business and what we wanted. That was incredibly comforting, to know that someone was taking notice. The onboarding sessions were relevant, designed for us and extremely well prepared.

We were talking to a couple of platforms at the time, including a professional services firm that specialized in agency management, and they didn’t even pay as much attention. The onboarding experience was like a 15 out of 10 for me, really.

The biggest game changer for us was being able to link scheduling with estimates and budgets. That was the big missing link that we had. We had scheduling in one tool, budgets in another, and our sales pipeline in a third tool. 

We were finally able to marry data on our future scheduled work with things like finance, expected revenue, looking at where things are particularly unprofitable or where there’s particular issues with a project. Being able to forecast where projects might be going off the rails and might become unprofitable. Productive has enabled us to pick things up and get ahead of the game. 

Now we can also have meaningful conversations with our teams about how we can put strategies in place to work with our clients and get things back on track.

Correct, definitely. The reporting in Productive isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen in any other system. It’s extremely powerful. I think it would be underselling the tool to talk about one particular report because I think that what it unlocks is exceptional—the amount of filtering you can do and the amount of different ways you can cut data, the amount of different reports you can create. 

You can set up templates and you can create reports for people as well. I’ve got reports that are set up for particular account teams so they can see how their team’s performing on jobs. I’ve got capacity reports that each of our department leads can easily go into. The ability to be able to save and be able to cut data in different ways is amazing. It’s the best feature of the tool, for sure.

It’s always hard to get time sheets filled out, but it’s been a really good experience in Productive. I think people have loved the calendar integration feature where you can time track in calendars. It’s pretty straightforward to do so I think that’s made our lives a bit easier.

Productive is central to every decision we make financially and on hiring. So we do a weekly leadership team meeting every Tuesday morning. I pull up a screenshot of a report which shows everyone’s capacity utilization across the business. It shows how much they’re booked, every department, and then it’s every department’s responsibility to make sure people are filled up.

I think one of the biggest time savers that I probably didn’t fully appreciate was the onboarding. Having new teammates come in, they’re able to pick the tool up really quickly and use it pretty much from the get-go because it’s fairly self-explanatory. It doesn’t take long for someone to learn it.

Also, the time it takes to create estimates and budgets, the time it takes to pull report up—all that is so easy. But I think the biggest impact for us is just getting those insights quicker and making decisions quicker than we ever could.