Construction and manufacturing projects can have many collaborators, from the people doing the physical on-site work to project managers, leaders, and support staff like human resources and marketing.
SMG Bahamas was managing the majority of construction tasks in PlanGrid, while also relying on Trello and Smartsheet to oversee their day-to-day.
Initial challenge: Keeping on top of construction projects in volume
Trello boards are used for managing construction jobs and lending oversight to project managers, executives, and even customers.
The sheer volume of boards, however, made keeping track of this information challenging. Moreso as client-facing teams struggled to decide just how much information they needed to share with customers, who don’t necessarily need every detail, they just want to know how things are progressing.
Smartsheet supports the team with everything from vehicle fleet management to inventory management. But it was difficult to extract crucial information from these sheets and make them visible in Trello.
“We tried automation solutions like Zapier and Microsoft’s Power Automate, but I was never confident that they were working. I always felt like I had to hover over it. Power Automate would automatically map fields that I didn’t need, and making sense of it all created extra work.”
Brendan Ginns, General Options Manager at SMG Bahamas
The solution: Syncing Smartsheet to Trello to support their customers
SMG Bahamas needed a better way to manage the relationships between their Trello boards and they needed crucial information trapped in Smartsheet synced over to Trello.
On the Trello side, connecting boards to each other took just a few clicks with Unito. With just one integration, Brendan could give oversight on important projects to executives while creating greater transparency throughout the organization.
To keep customers in the loop, Brendan set rules in Unito to sync tagged Trello cards with each customer’s board so they only received information they needed and nothing extra.
“That was a huge time-saver. You can say ‘we’ve done this, this, and this’ and no one had to go through the pain of collecting this information or explaining extra details to a curious customer.”
Since Unito mappings can be easily customized and matched with custom fields in Trello, Brendan and his teams were then able to recreate some of Smartheet’s functionality in Trello without forcing anyone to switch tools. They mapped fields including: Serial Number, Quantity, and Job Name to custom fields in Trello, creating a kind of executive summary that the rest of the team can consult.
The result: $2,200 USD and 21 hours saved each week in automated tasks
Now, internal teams have better oversight and can quickly consult a wealth of information without leaving their tool of choice, even from a single Trello board.
Beyond creating additional transparency into crucial projects, Unito also gives SMG Bahamas the ability to smash through tool silos.
Unito’s internal estimates of SMG Bahama’s usage (a combination of items in sync and users working with Unito workflows) calculates approximately 21+ hours and $2,200 USD saved per week in time that would otherwise be spent on manual tasks.
No more complicated automations and no more hopping from one tool to the other. All it takes to get important, up-to-date information from Smartsheet to Trello is setting up a Unito flow.
“You can simply go into your Trello board, and it might take two minutes to get an update. Your CEO can watch over while you work on a project without him needing to reach out all the time.”
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About SMG Bahamas
SMG Bahamas is a construction and millwork company that builds high-end homes, large construction projects, and manufacture interiors for restaurants, residential projects, and more.
