Professional services powerhouse FGMK had a problem: Dated processes and legacy tools were distracting the team from the work they do best— first-class client service.

With over 1,000 audit and financial statement reporting engagements in a year, and tens of thousands of information requests, FGMK was looking for a better way to handle communications and manage administrative requests related to these often manual processes done in a spreadsheet, word document, or an email thread. After running into accountability issues and versioning headaches, the team at FGMK knew there had to be a better way.

“We found that teams were spending a lot of time on the administrative part of an audit versus doing the actual client service, doing the actual value-added component that is why they're in the field,” says Michael Fernandez, Director of Quality Control at FGMK.

They needed a solution to help free up their employees from this manual, administrative burden by helping to streamline document intake and decrease the back and forth of email conversations. "We just needed to improve our data flow. We needed to improve our collaboration. We needed to improve our communication; internally and externally," says Fernandez.
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Creating IT Futures — a Chicago-based nonprofit and the workforce charity of respected IT trade association CompTIA — prepares people from underrepresented communities for IT careers. Despite the successes of their training programs, inefficient, error-prone processes with their online training and certification exam voucher programs created a significant administrative burden for staff, students, and education partners.

Without a solution, manual tasks and data issues would continue to divert staff time and attention away from what was most important—supporting CITF’s students and alumni.
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by Guest Author
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Editor’s Note: Here at Smartsheet, our customers inspire us every day. Today’s post comes from Oscar Gonzalez, Senior Program Planning Manager at Karyopharm Therapeutics.

In late 2016, after only five months as a lab manager for Karyopharm Therapeutics, I was promoted to the role of program manager in clinical operations. With no prior experience in clinical operations, I was in for quite a ride.

I couldn’t have imagined that after a year I’d be promoted to senior program planning manager and be the team lead of the program planning, analytics, and innovation group — in large part thanks to the effect I had in the implementation of Smartsheet across the organization.

The scientists, lab technicians, and project managers at Karyopharm Therapeutics Inc. have an ambitious goal: to create drugs to more effectively treat cancer, autoimmune disorders, and other major diseases. Making a big difference in the lives of patients means carefully managing the smallest details — everything from efficiently setting up and certifying a clinical trial to updating records when a researcher’s office gets a new phone number.

“We have active studies that encompass over 350 different centers such as hospitals, small clinics, and medical schools across more than 20 countries,” says Oscar Gonzalez, program planning manager at Karyopharm. “A lot of organization has to happen to achieve our goals, and it’s truly a labor of love. The people here have a passion for what they’re doing and for what, ultimately, we’re trying to do for patients.”
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by Renee Hunter on August 22, 2017
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As any retailer knows, if a chain wants to survive - let alone thrive - it needs to simultaneously keep growing and set itself apart from the competition. MOD Pizza is one such company - a fast casual pizza chain that is rapidly expanding it’s reach. 

MOD Pizza has recently gone from opening a couple of stores a year to opening 100 stores in a year. But sustaining that growth isn’t easy. As MOD Pizza CEO Scott Svenson shared in a recent interview, “It’s easy to open one store and send out a press release that you’re going to be the ‘Chipotle of pizza.’ It’s much harder to open the second, and the fifth, and the tenth, and then start to scale.” As MOD Pizza’s growth accelerated, their team needed a way to quickly scale their retail operations to stay on track with all of their store openings. 
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