Gongo Labs consultoría tecnológica

By Shafie Abla, Senior Manager, Gongo Labs

Genea is a consulting company specialized in natural environments and forests, with headquarters in Tenerife. This young and innovative company is covering a niche that is acquiring the relevance it deserves nowadays.
Its General Manager knew they needed a modern and flexible management system, allowing them to access the often large volume of documentation of the projects from any place with a secure Internet connection. They also needed to be able to supervise the activity of the, constantly growing; external collaborators network and minimize the system use learning period. "We need them to be capable of using Tasks, Timesheet and Forum after a single training session, with the assurance that they will only access the information we decide to allow them to".
After evaluating various systems, the final choice was between MS Dynamics, SAP SMEs and ]project-open[. Their conclusions was that Total Cost of Ownership (licences), flexibility concerning customization and implantation costs would be much better with ]project-open[.
By using the custom reporting engine a number of tasks could be automated, such as issuing model contracts, which must include all the details of the project (previously available in the system), the required legal clauses, data of the parties, inclusion of third parties, scope, etc.
An important request by the Administration Dept was that the system would be able to provide to an external Financial Consulting collaborator a monthly data export with Accounting information, so we programmed the integration with Sage Contaplus. "This also allows us to have our "profit&loss" results updated on a monthly basis".
The excellent leadership of the project by the General Manager of Genea eased the communication and workflow with Gongo Labs team. This fact prevented distance being an added difficulty to the project. Telephone meetings, remote demos and email allowed positive communication. Only towards the end of the implantation we scheduled a few presential training days in Genea´s main offices.
"Currently we are focused on our business and ]project-open[ covers our needs, but we are aware of the improvements and new features that arise. Gongo Labs keeps us up to date and we have chosen some of these new ones for Genea".

• Projects with "closed" stages that have start and end milestones
• "Open" projects with periodic milestones evaluation
• Services that require a number of hours of dedication a month as per contract

With the previous management system we could not state the amount of time dedicated to a project, deviations nor final profit & loss balance. Information related to a project was always dispersed somewhere between members email inboxes, external files stored in a server and the scarce financial information provided by the system, basically quotes and invoices. Besides, only MS Windows users could access the system, and uniquely from the office.
So we had to change the system for a modular one, cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux), easy to use by the technical staff and Senior Management, Administration and Sales/Marketing, and above all flexible enough to adapt to different operating scenarios.
We also took into account desirable requirements such as: to lower Total Cost of Ownership as much as possible, minimize implantation costs, Open Source, fast learning curve and easy integration with other systems.
Among other software solutions we considered the ones with software aimed to Project Management with resource assigning, timesheet management and an integrated financial module. After evaluating more than 80 systems from the main sources of information and software, we kept 5 main options and finally we choose ]project-open[ as the best option fitting all the selection criteria previously exposed.
As an initial stage we determined the manner to proceed in the works to be done. The compilation of these tasks helped us to describe internal procedures based upon best practices, mainly for Operations, Sales and Administration.
We detected a number of lacks in the available reports of the system, and we developed more reports in the second stage. We also elaborated a list of suggestions for the improvement of some of the interfaces:

• Interface enhancements for logged hours in Timesheet Tasks
• Optimization of the use of events on the Calendar
• Wizard Improvement of the Financial Module to create Delivery Notes from Timesheet Tasks and Invoices from Timesheet Tasks or Delivery Notes
• Customized Financial Reporting

As the internal procedures have been developing, the adaptation of the system has been easy to implant, keeping costs of implantation very low. The system is actually very flexible, and at the same time, the more features we use, the easier it becomes to access the information and so improve and control the company's activity.

If I were asked to summarize the benefits of the system in a single phrase, it would be: "Our main goal is the continuous improvement in competitiveness, and the way to achieve this is to maximize the efficiency in the management of our projects."