by Staff Writer
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A recent study by Deloitte Digital found that nearly half of business leaders say they are currently unable to generate insights from data to help inform real-time decision making. But in today’s competitive business climate, difficulties leveraging data to make faster, better decisions can put organizations at a significant disadvantage, affecting their ability to respond to customer needs, meet regulatory requirements, deliver products to market and a host of other mission-critical objectives.
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While the Deloitte study found that 88 percent of businesses report using productivity tools to assist in decision making, many work execution platforms don’t offer the features that best empower the swift, sophisticated decisions enterprise leaders must make on a daily basis. For faster, better decisions, look for a platform with these three key offerings.
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by Katy Beloof
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by Kit Unger

Update: Our redesigned navigation experience is now live in the web app for all Smartsheet customers!

Earlier this year, we redesigned the Smartsheet interface to make sure you can easily locate and access the features you rely on most. As part of our continuous effort to improve the user experience, we’re now preparing to release navigation enhancements to our web application that will help teams access, organize, and share their work more efficiently.
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When you log in for the first time following the update, you’ll quickly notice a couple of big changes; there will be an open navigation menu listing your recently viewed work and the Smartsheet tabs will no longer be present.
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Today, I’m pleased to walk you through the forthcoming updates and their benefits.
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by Katy Beloof
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To compete in today’s marketplace, organizations can no longer rely solely on the old standbys of growing revenue and reducing costs. Increasingly, the success of enterprise organizations depends their ability to engage customers, accelerate product development, and attract world-class talent ahead of the competition.
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These new business needs are fundamentally changing the nature of work. According to an October 2018 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Smartsheet, Deliver On Top Business Objectives With Collaborative Work Management, businesses are seeing:

• An increase in the number and scale of projects (77 percent of organizations)
• The onus of project management skills disseminating across the organization, rather than staying with a dedicated management function (70 percent of organizations)
• Unstructured project work (unanticipated or unaccounted for tasks that are required to complete projects) are on the rise (70 percent of organizations)

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by Renee Coulombe
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We're committed to helping businesses all around the world work better — including our own. Smartsheet uses Smartsheet every day to improve collaboration, manage work in real time, and make better decisions, faster.  
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With rapid company growth, the Smartsheet Sales and Product Development teams needed to rethink various workflows in order to scale efficiently and effectively.

See how they developed solutions using the Smartsheet work execution platform to plan, track, and manage complex processes.
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by Renee Coulombe
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In order to create and maintain a successful and productive organization, you must place a significant amount of focus on employee experience and the tools and technology they use.  

Alan Lepofsky, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, studies how recent advances in productivity technology are creating significant workplace challenges for employees. When workers are bombarded with too much information, too many disconnected tools, and too many points of contact, the software applications that are supposed to be helping them be more productive may actually be slowing them down.
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by Stephen Danos
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Construction professionals need ways to eliminate process friction and unify everyone, from owner to architects to subcontractors, throughout the entire construction project life cycle. After all, delays often mean a construction project will go over budget, which is typically unacceptable.

Also, according to a recent McKinsey analysis of construction technology, cost-cutting technologies have gained significant momentum over the last five years.
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The Smartsheet platform helps construction teams save money and time, and stay connected, empowering them to improve collaboration, plan better, and maintain control over repeatable processes, audit trails, and document versioning.

Below are many ways Smartsheet empowers construction professionals throughout the seven phases of construction project management by increasing visibility, centralizing key information, and rapid data collection through mobile-accessible forms.
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by Brendan Reed
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Today, teams across industries use a variety of ways to view, visualize, and act on information to get work done. Whether they’re creating and managing a portfolio of projects, tracking expenses, or servicing requests, they need to be able to work from anywhere, anytime, on any device — and be able to quickly visualize work in progress.

Inspired by Kanban boards and the Agile Methodology, Smartsheet card view is a highly visual way to prioritize, communicate, and collaborate on work. It makes information and data more approachable so that you always see the big picture, make sure your projects are on track, and identify potential gaps in your plan.
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by Renee Coulombe
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Keeping clinical trials and research on track and in compliance, managing employee training and certification processes, and providing seamless records handoffs between on-duty staff members are just a few of the challenges that healthcare workers face every day.  

Yet using dated, manual processes and disconnected software systems to manage this work can lead to wasted time, data entry errors, a slower process —  and ultimately lead to a bad patient experience.
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Here’s how three healthcare industry leaders are tackling these complex issues to create better patient experiences using Smartsheet:

by Stephen Danos
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Companies and teams that embrace the Smartsheet mobile app see many benefits, including some that aren’t so obvious at first glance. During the ENGAGE’18 session “Increase Productivity on the Go With Smartsheet Mobile”, we demoed some of the newer capabilities you can find in the Smartsheet mobile app for iOS and Android devices.

After fielding a few impromptu questions from session attendees, we shared some examples of how customers innovate using Smartsheet mobile. Read on to learn how customers in real estate property management, the fashion industry, and county park services have augmented their essential workflows with the Smartsheet mobile app.
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