Pain points
- Hours a week wasted on manually coordinating projects: "assessing due dates, stages, blocking relationships, and manually planning around them - we wasted a lot of time," Joel shares.
- Updating an entire project was painful whenever one thing changed: "Let's say an internet installation is supposed to happen for a location, and client calls us to reschedule. We'd have to manually calculate the new timeline of the project given this change - will we still be able to meet project deadline if the installation doesn't get done next week? You don't just update one task - you need to update hundreds of subsequent tasks. That was painful."
- Bad resource allocation and capacity planning were detrimental to Ally's business - Joel needed to know if he had enough manpower to get clients' jobs done: "Zoho, which we used previously, had a resource allocation feature that didn't work - it doesn't take into account of employees' time."
- Not knowing when a project will actually finish: "one of my biggest frustrations is: if one of our clients called and asked me where a project was, it was very difficult getting up to speed on the project and giving a timeline to the client. I hated that," Joel shares that he'd often give an overly-aggressive estimate, only to find out later that it won't be possible.
- "I felt frustrated and hopeless - there was nothing we could do. We tried to do automations and workflows - but we were just in a dead end with it," Joel told us.
Challenges
Ally previously used Zoho for project management but they wasted too much time manually planning projects and coordinating capacity planning.
They tried everything:
"We looked at Monday, Trello, ClickUp, and Asana. I thought they were a bit better, but the changes wouldn't be significant enough to offset the investment in changing platforms. Until we found Motion - it does resource allocation so well. That's the most important part of our business,"—Joel Peeples, CEO of Ally
The Solution
Motion's AI project manager saves hours on each project
Motion automatically updates the rest of project when a single thing changes, such as one task getting delayed:
"It used to be that: if we changed one task, we'd have to update 50 more. With Motion - we can just make the change, and tell Motion to handle the rest."
And when tasks get done, the project automatically progresses itself to the next stage, without any human intervention needed.
"When Motion's AI project generator was launched - it feels like I have a team of 50 developers working for Ally full-time. That's crazy."
The AI project workflow generator reduces the amount of time it takes to create a workflow from hours to minutes.
Automated resource allocation and capacity planning: reports and alerts
"Motion takes the step out of compiling the resource report and analyzing it - Motion can just automatically tell me if something will fit, and it'll also tell me when it'll fit. It just really helps with resource allocation."
Motion does this by automatically planning and coordinating across thousands of tasks across the entire company - by looking at their deadlines, stages, dependencies, priorities, and plans them against employees' time.
And that helps a ton with predicting when a project will actually finish:
"To me, what's critical with Motion - i can go into a project, within 15 seconds, while talking to a customer on the phone, I can tell them exactly where we are and the ETA. When we tried other project management tools, none of them had resource allocation figured out - that's the biggest thing in project management. You'd waste a ton of money if you don't have good resource allocation; it impacts everything - how your cycles are, if you'll finish deliverables - everything will suffer. Motion ensures we have the best cycle times and shortest deliverable timeline. So in the case of Motion, the investment in a new project management tool would produce a much higher ROI (return on investment) than other tools."
Stages help flesh out projects better
Motion helps Joel's team plan out a project more clearly and completely:
"For example, when something comes in through the CRM, we had to create a project. We need to look at certain conditions on the quote, and create tasks inside stages accordingly. Not having stages in Zoho was a killer - we weren't able to flesh out projects better."
Easy onboarding and intuitive interface for employees
"My staff initially thought the change would take a lot of effort. But it didn't take long - the platform is very intuitive and responsive. My staff was very quick to learn, and Motion became a quick favorite on our team. I was stressed about transitioning into Motion, but after looking at the platform, I couldn't see anything that'd cause an issue: everything we were doing in Zoho, Motion does better.Bug-free. It's so rare to have a bug in Motion - and when there is, it gets fixed in a day. That's just crazy. In Zoho I couldn't get them to do the most basic - there is stuff that's just broken. And Motion is so fast as an interface"
The Impact
- Motion helps Ally stays ahead of its competition as a business: "Motion helps us be state of art - be cutting edge - so our business can stay ahead of others. By using Motion, Ally's customers will say the same thing about Ally - that we are leveraging the best tech to help us."
- Motion improves Ally's bottom line by 6-figures by tripling the project coordinator's productivity: "the 1 project coordinator can now do the work of 3 project coordinators, thanks to Motion"
- Instead of feeling "frustrated and helpless," Joel now "feels relieved." With Motion, Joel knows projects will be done on-time - and if Motion predicts there's not enough capacity, it'd let Joel know immediately, often weeks or months in advance of the deadline, giving Joel plenty of time to react and plan accordingly.
