Smartsheet – A Better Way to Collect Data, Manage Projects, Display Dashboards and SO Much More

by Tony Gonzalez, TAGITM Vice President

Smartsheet has been one of the best software investments I have ever made as an IT Director. Literally, I get a 100% ROI on almost any single use-case in the City of New Braunfels. Considering we are approaching 500 Smartsheets at this point, that is a quite a return on that small investment.

SmartSheet, at first glance, looks like just another on-line spreadsheet. It is SO much more than that. The automation capabilities, the easy form creation, the attachment and chat integrations…I could go on and on. I guess at this point I must admit to being a “Fan Boy” of this product. Let’s look into why, in just a few small examples…

Example 1 is the electronic forms function in SmartSheet. Like many of you, we are a Civic Plus customer and we use the online forms capabilities it offers. But, all those forms really do is create yet another email for you to handle. You can’t really DO anything with the info in the form. With SmartSheet, that changes. Create the form and embed the code on your website. Now, all the form entries go straight into a SmartSheet and your possibilities are almost endless. We use these forms to track inspection requests for Fire, as an example. Yes, it will be moving to CityWorks at some point down the road, but this stop gap implementation took less than an hour from start to finish and has been in use for over a year. I can tell you it has worked much better than email, because now anyone we chose to give permissions to can see the requests. Reminders go out if a request isn’t processed in xx days. A report is generated that shows open inspections and nobody has to lift a finger. From the data, a dashboard is created showing how many inspections each inspector is currently assigned. It shows how many inspections have been completed each month, by type of inspection. And we don’t have to use Crystal Reports to create these reports. We have replaced a great many of our Civic Plus forms with SmartSheet forms, so we can reduce our email traffic and implement all the other features mentioned above.

Example 2 is Contract and Budget Management. Geesh, this is the part of the job I don’t always enjoy. Using SmartSheet, not only can we keep track of our budget (Because we all know OneSolution ain’t cutting the mustard, so to speak.) in real-time, but it essentially creates the budget for next year at the same time. Sure, I can do this in Excel as well. But, combine this with contract expiration dates and the automatic notifications SmartSheet generates, and it’s a game changer for me. I don’t have to go look somewhere to find what contracts are coming due. It doesn’t matter if a team-member left and they were the main contact for a vendor and an unanswered email is sitting in their in-box to renew a contract. We all get notified and we use conditional formatting so any upcoming or expired contracts are easily seen when you go to the appropriate SmartSheet, which I do on a almost daily basis in order to keep track of things. Vendors always promote the “single pane of glass.” I think that’s like the paper-less office and it isn’t ever going to be a full reality, but SmartSheet greatly reduces those panes of glass for me.

The reality is SmartSheet is an incredibly powerful platform for us here in the City of New Braunfels. I estimate we use less than 10% of its full capabilities. But, what a return we get on the 10% we do use. Oh, I almost forgot one of the most important features. People outside the org can be invited to the account at no charge. They can see all the data I want them to see. We can use it externally and almost everyone finds it incredibly easy to use. I gotta stop. I can write an entire separate article on how it helps us engage people outside the organization, including our citizens and business partners. Look soon for a notice about quarterly user group meetings I am putting together for those use and/or want to learn more about SmartSheet uses. The possibilities are almost endless. I highly encourage you to take a look at this platform.