The Total Economic ImpacT of Smartsheet (A summary)

​The Total Economic Impact of Smartsheet (A summary)

Forrester conducted interviews with nine customers who have used Smartsheet for various purposes, ranging from essential project management to large-scale digital transformation initiatives. The purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of the benefits, costs, and risks associated with investing in Smartsheet. Forrester aggregated the interviewees' experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization.

The organizations that were interviewed saw significant benefits from investing in Smartsheet. They experienced increased visibility into project, program, and organizational transformation initiatives, resulting in productivity gains for teams and leadership, more efficient resource allocation, and increased revenue delivery. Additionally, they were able to achieve software cost savings and reduced development costs.

Key findings:
Quantified benefits

• Smartsheet provides several benefits for organizations, including reduced time spent on project set-up, portfolio management, and program set-up by 80%, reduced work management-related emails by 75%, reduced time spent on review cycles by 50%, improved managed resource utilization by saving more than 40 hours per employee annually, reduced reporting time by 75%, freed up time employees previously used staffing projects, enabled software cost savings resulting in over $1.1M of savings over three years, increased revenue delivery by more than $1.5 million in professional services growth, and reduced development costs, resulting in savings of nearly $996,000 over the three years.

Unquantified benefits

• Increased customer satisfaction due to a more consistent experience, faster engagement, and increased visibility through automated forms, reports, and customer fact dashboards.
• Increased employee satisfaction due to the ability to automate repetitive tasks, decrease time spent on emails/meetings/status updates, and empower employees to problem-solve with an easy-to-use platform.
• Improved time to market by reducing project set-up time, and project review time, and improving staffing decisions.
• Improved decision-making by granting leadership and project managers unprecedented visibility into engagements, enabling them to make better decisions in less time with improved access to necessary information.

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Analysis of benefits with detail
Productivity gains for project managers

• The largest benefit gain came in the form of productivity gains due to the visibility increase.
• By utilizing Smartsheet, project managers were able to rapidly template project setup, resulting in a quicker, more reliable, and expandable process.
• Smartsheet enables organizations to easily share detailed project status updates with customers, saving project managers time previously spent sending project status emails. Customers can access the sheet to see the project's progress, reducing the need for detailed email updates.
• Smartsheet allows project managers to templatize the process of starting a new project, allowing them to automate many of the formerly manual tasks required to get a new project started. This reduces the time spent on these tasks by 80%.

Productivity gains for leadership

• Managers can easily access the desired information through Smartsheet's report or dashboard builder, eliminating the need for manual data collection and review.
• Enables faster-informed decision-making by leaders, while driving more efficient workflows for managing projects and employees.
  Resource allocation time saving
• With Smartsheet, staffing employees can gain better insights into the utilization of the project management team, reducing the time they spend on reviewing staff allocation and enabling more accurate decisions about project resources.
• Reduce staffing allocation activities by 75%.

 
Improve utilization for end-users/managed resources

• By automating common tasks across project teams, Smartsheet can significantly reduce the amount of time end-users spend on these tasks.
• By creating efficiencies, Smartsheet empowers extended project teams to enhance their resource utilization rates and minimize the time spent on low-level tasks, resulting in a 2% increase in overall bandwidth productivity.

 
Software cost saving

• Organizations that rely on input from third-party vendors, external stakeholders, or additional project collaborators can benefit from Smartsheet's collaboration capabilities, which make it a valuable resource.
• The decision-makers who were interviewed reported that following their transition to Smartsheet, they were able to swiftly decrease their investment in conventional CRM solutions.

 
Increased revenue delivery

• Improving project efficiency plays a vital role in augmenting the revenue potential of a customer.
• With the aid of Smartsheet, the project managers leading these initiatives were able to shorten the average project delivery timeline, which in turn enabled them to undertake more projects each year, eliminate the need for additional project managers, and concentrate on propelling revenue growth.

 
Reduced development costs

• During interviews, decision-makers pointed out that utilizing the WorkApps solution integrated into the Smartsheet platform empowered their line of business employees to build valuable applications without requiring formal coding skills.

Analysis of costs with detail
Licenses and services costs

• The organization represented by the initials 'Composite Organization' currently invests $268,800 on user licenses. As Smartsheet becomes more widely used across various teams, this investment expands to $374,400 in the second year and eventually reaches $460,000 by the third year.
• The Composite Organization also engages Smartsheet's professional services team to tailor the solution to their requirements, with the cost of these services amounting to 15% of the annual license fees paid to Smartsheet.​

Evaluation, planning, implementation, and training costs

• The interviewees conducted research and planned, and executed the implementation of Smartsheet. They would usually start by deploying it to a few teams and gradually expand its use to new groups and initiatives.
  
• According to the interviewed organizations, users usually need some training to learn how to use Smartsheet effectively and adapt their existing workflows to make the most of its features.

​Platform management costs

• The organizations interviewed allocated some of their employees' time to internally manage the platform.
  ​

Financial summary

Based on the table above, showed that the net benefits increased year by year from $4,269,361 in year 1 to $20,292,080 in year 3.

For more information may refer to:
www.smartsheet.com/sites/default/files/2022-01/TEI_of_Smartsheet_January_2022.pdf


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