Fed up with the order scavenger hunt? Here's how Tony McNally and his team at Vanguard use commonsku as a single source of truth.

Managing orders can be overwhelming. It often feels like you need a full-time staff member to handle rekeying and administrative tasks, and catching up on paperwork seems impossible without a shutdown. Your team struggles to access client information, and when a rep is absent, orders become a mystery, leaving everyone stuck. Does this sound familiar?

It did to Tony.

Tune in to hear how Tony and his team use commonsku to streamline their order management, enhance team collaboration, and boost client (and team) happiness!

No time to watch the whole thing? Here are the key takeaways: 

#1: Adopting software = team harmony and real growth 

Tony said, before commonsku, they were "creating estimates and quotes within Excel, saving those down to PDF's. There was a lot of printing of files, printing Sage pages and creating manual folders to be a job jacket."

After adopting? A happier and more productive team! 

“I think when you don't have those efficiencies, it tends to bog your team down, and it makes a team stress and not be able to feel like they can get their job executed the way they want.”

#2: Transparency on all projects and “next action” magic!

We asked Tony, how does commonsku help you as a leader and your team stay on top of the craziness in this industry with multiple projects for multiple clients?

“The dashboards are amazing,” said Tony, “both the sales dashboard and the production dashboard. On the sales dashboard side, we look a lot at projections as far as where we are sales-wise and where we're trying to get to. We look a lot at what projects are open. We look a lot at what projects are past due because we use those to kind of gauge where the business is going and where the business is going to be in the next three to six months.”

“On the production side, the production dashboard we use to get a quick glimpse and a quick snapshot of what stages your projects are in, the enhanced date for your projects, and allows my team to prioritize their day to get the most done in the shortest amount of time. Also, within that production dashboard, we tend to use the next action a lot. We've created some manual next actions that allow us to look at a project, see what has to happen next, and then sort our reporting by what actions need to do, because they could do multiple actions at one time.”

#3: Tech improves client relationships which drives sales

Tony emphasized the role of technology in not just improving internal workflows but also in enhancing client relations and project management. He shared examples of how they utilize commonsku’s shops feature to deliver better service to their clients: 

“We were able to use a pop-up shop to reactivate a client that we were kind of failing on.” Through this, they were able to capture data, get feedback from the client's staff, and deliver a high-quality, personalized pop-up shop experience.

#4: Speed, visibility, and collaboration = efficient workflow

We asked Tony, “What kind of impact on your team did you see at Vanguard after initially adopting commonsku?”

“You want to create the most efficiency possible with your team … commonsku was able to do that for us. It was having my team work faster, it was having my team get the products that they needed on POs faster. The integration with some of the suppliers that we have allows us to get the orders to [our suppliers] faster, as well as the information back from the suppliers as far as tracking and order status, it’s way faster than us picking up the phone and constantly saying, hey, what's the status on my purchase order?”

Tony added, “I think the biggest point is visibility. I think you'll see within the CRM, within the program, you can look at a project and really understand where something started to where it grew and how it got to its end result."

Bottom line?

- commonsku improves team communication and efficiency 

- commonsku manages complex client projects easily 

- commonsku's dashboards and newsfeed are a game-changer in terms of transparency, and  instrumental to team management and staying on top of projects

Tony's strongest advice? 

Don't wait. Do it now.