Client Case: Ardis Group

How Ardis Group enhanced the project management with Asana Business

About the client:

Ardis Group is a Ukrainian structured group of companies operating on the market for more than 24 years. It is engaged in importing and producing cheeses and implements cheese services. Thanks to this company, Ukrainians are discovering new cheese tastes and connections.

Project start date: January 2022

Project completion date: February 2022

Challenge:

The Ardis Group comprises more than 200 people who have joined departments and cross-functional teams involved in various structural objects. Such several employees require effective interaction between all departments and the team. It became a priority task for the project department of the company.

For Ardis Group, such points well essential:

1. Structure the maintenance of project documentation.
2. Automate project management processes.
3. Create a single joint “hub” to store all critical information.
4. Simplify team interaction.
5. Decrease communication channels.
6. Speed up the work of the team.

Solution:

While seeking the right platform for project management, which will cover the team’s most significant requests, Ardis Group met with Сloudfresh and involved the project department of the company.

Specialists from Cloudfresh advised the team on the capabilities of the Asana platform. The most relevant turned out to be the Business plan, one of the most functional among the available editions.

Ardis Group’s transition to work at Asana was passing gradually. They started with a few licenses for testing and practical familiarization with the functionality, involving individual teams and their managers. Over time, the number of licenses increased due to additional requests from employees to work in Asana on their local objects.

Now, the leaders of each team create their own projects in Asana and connect their employees to them, and all work is done in one convenient place for everyone. The transition of more company employees to work with Asana became the next step of building effective project interaction when each team uses an advanced solution in their business processes.

Importance of Asana functionality for Ardis Group:

When choosing the Business plan, the project department of Ardis Group relied on the desired functional features, such as Timelines, Portfolios, Dashboards, Goals, and integration of Asana with other systems. The team notes that this edition is the most successful for building long-term projects.

The main advantages were the availability of the following tools:

Timelines — a particular scale that helps the Ardis Group team create project plans with realistic timelines, identify time conflicts, and make adjustments as they go. All this is done based on a powerful Gantt chart that is updated in real-time. This solution allows the team to see the planning within the framework of one project and the lots of them in the Portfolio.

Portfolio combines all the team’s projects in one place with easy real-time access. The company uses a tool for grouping projects, and once the project is resolved, it allows for achieving the planned goals or grouping projects by the joint type of activity.

For the marketing team, the functionality of Asana is indispensable within the scope of work with the release of new products, the success of which is tracked in one place. With Portfolio, it’s easier to track deadlines and product launches. Besides the company’s teams, the functionality of Portfolio has also become an effective solution for the management, who can now easily access the key projects and monitor all necessary processes.

Dashboards — company departments started using a unique tool to create custom dashboards that could collect analytics from a few projects and explore them within a single report. Dashboards allow Ardis Group to get a general idea of how the work is going, instantly identify potential problems in the team’s work and eliminate them before they start to affect the implementation of the project.

Results:

What role has Asana played for Ardis Group?

1. Asana integration has positively impacted teams, improving productivity, synchronization, and collaboration.
2. After the implementation of Asana in the company’s work, the project department received positive feedback regarding employees’ work with this platform. The main advantage for the team was the simple and intuitive understanding of the platform. Currently, 80% of the office workers and major divisions of the company are involved in Asana and actively use it daily. The other 20% of employees are connected to the necessary processes within a specific project.
3. With the help of Asana, most of Ardis Group’s processes were automated, and thanks to the numerous integrations with third-party systems, the team spends less time communicating through other channels and searching for information from several sources.
4. Teams managed to synchronize all projects in one workspace using a simple API connection.
5. The project department continues to conduct basic training for new company employees and provide materials from Asana and Cloudfresh, which is very important, especially for employees less experienced in working with this or other software.

The company’s plans for working with Asana:

The next goal for Ardis Group is to adapt the Goals functionality within the framework of updating all the company’s strategic goals. That will help build a transparent hierarchy of goals and tasks and allow employees to understand what the company is working on globally and their contributions. Also, Ardis Group plans to create a separate training program for Asana within Microsoft to facilitate their entry into the system and gradually improve their personal software skills.

Cloudfresh Role:

Since the beginning of cooperation, Asana experts from Cloudfresh have provided consultations for the Ardis Group and familiarized them with the platform’s full functionality. The team chose the most relevant plan, and Cloudfresh specialists helped implement Asana in the company workflows, connecting the necessary APIs and configuring custom functionality to build further workflows effectively.

The Cloudfresh team quickly resolves any company queries regarding Asana functionality and is always available.