Nectar Communications Increases Efficiency with ClickTime's Resource Planning Tool

Industry: PR

Nectar Communications

Customer Challenges:

  • Lack of insight into employee capacity
  • Difficult to compare actuals to estimates
  • Version and data control issues with Excel
  • Inaccurate, static data

ClickTime Benefits:

  • Insight into team and employee capacity
  • More accountable and engaged managers and employees
  • Improved project and budget management
  • More effectively plan for new business

Nectar Communications is a fast-growing PR agency that's taking over the tech community. With high-profile clients like Salesforce, Workday, and LinkedIn, it's critical that Nectar is able to deliver exceptional service at a moment's notice. Using ClickTime's Resource Planning tool, Nectar is able to gain real-time visibility into project staffing, track employee time, and ultimately, increase profitability.

Capacity Management

One of the key challenges for a PR firm is to understand which employees have bandwidth to work on projects that suit their particular skill set and role. Nectar, like many PR firms, originally used an Excel spreadsheet to track employee time and capacity. This approach was difficult to manage and maintain, as spreadsheets lacked version controls, and more importantly, failed to provide high-level insight and analysis into employee availability.

Before ClickTime, it was challenging for Nectar to understand how the client teams were performing against forecasts or have proactive conversations with budget managers about the health of projects and teams.

Resource Planning fundamentally changed how Nectar managed and optimized employee capacity. It gave the executive team, and budget and account managers unprecedented insight into company operations.

"Resource Planning enables me to keep our many projects on track and on budget," said McGeary. "We're able to understand employee capacity and utilization, and armed with actionable data, make better decisions about how we run our business."

Sarah McGeary headshot

“We run our business through ClickTime. It empowers us to better manage budgets and more effectively allocate staff to projects.”

— Sarah McGeary, Vice President of Strategy and Operations

More Accountable and Engaged Employees

With ClickTime, employees and managers are empowered with real-time data on actual hours worked as compared to forecast or budget. It allows teams to have more effective conversations — both internally and externally — and make strategic decisions about servicing highly active accounts.

"ClickTime shows us exactly how much time our employees have to dedicate to any project," said McGeary. "It's significantly improved how we manage client budgets and staff allocations — and we're able to be proactive and get ahead of any issue that may arise."

More Effectively Plan for New Business

When Nectar wins new business, it's never a scramble to put together the right team. Using Resource Planning, McGeary is able to spec out possible teams whose skills and availability best match customer needs — all before an account is won.

"It's not just our current customers that benefit from ClickTime. I'm able to quickly and easily plan out teams for new business we're trying to win," said McGeary. "When we take on new customers, we're now able to hit the ground running and start serving them much quicker — and with the right teams."

"In our business, the little things matter. ClickTime helps us operate more efficiently and sets us up for success," said McGeary.

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