BACKGROUND
Metis Communications was named after a Greek Titan – goddess of wisdom and good council. It’s apropos for an award-winning marketing communications firm known for creating revenue-generating strategic communications for its clients.
Founded in 2005, Metis focuses primarily on business-to-business (B2B) technology and healthcare industries, employing a senior team of marketing, analytics and communications practitioners. Its remote-first team works across the United States and out of its Boston headquarters.
With a dispersed talent base, reliance upon functional collaboration and specialized partners, along with a constant charter to innovate, Metis’ leadership uses a data-driven approach to support all efforts.
CHALLENGE
Metis employs a multi-faceted approach to serving its clients – and no two programs it creates are alike. While work is custom-fit to serve individual needs, all initiatives have a common goal of demonstrating bottom-line benefits and revenue growth.
As a result of the firm’s bespoke approach, the operations team was using a variety of software as a service (SaaS) solutions and homegrown manual spreadsheets to analyze profitability, margins, output and revenue growth. The company wanted to track its operational workflows in real-time and reduce the time and resource-intensive nature of the work.
According to Cathy Atkins, founder of Metis Communications: “As a longstanding business, we rely on our revenue growth and ROI data to guide us daily. However, our internal processes couldn’t keep up and didn’t reflect the work we were doing. We had introduced far too much complexity into our growth analysis and started experiencing tool and data sprawl.”
WHY VOGSY
Metis enlisted the VOGSY professional service automation (PSA) platform to help streamline its crucial operational workflows and provide greater transparency to its team.
“With VOGSY, we’ve been able to quickly develop as an organization, tie analytics more closely to our future, simplify processes and think of the business in ways that move us ahead.” Cathy Atkins, Founder, Metis Communications
THE SOLUTION
After a fast, easy on-boarding of VOGSY, Metis was quickly up-and-running and able to gain a new understanding of its processes and where improvements made the most sense.
With their new solution, the Metis business – and everyone in it – has a unified view of operational data. It automates activities in finance, operations, sales and project management to cover the quote-to-cash process. VOGSY gives Metis the visibility and capabilities to improve efficiency and profitability, along with real-time insights based on the company’s data.
“VOGSY helped us reboot our analysis, eliminate irrelevant legacy metrics and provide a complete view of our business data. It has simplified our entire reporting process and lets us focus on the KPIs that matter most,” said Atkins. “Automating so many processes and providing this insight to the team enables real-time decision making and moves our business forward.”
VOGSY reduced reporting time by 75 percent and allowed Metis leadership to share new insights across the organization.
Timesheets now facilitate staff utilization, with heat maps offering at-a-glance views of team resources, accompanied by role and skill matching. Consultants and partners can also submit their own invoices, saving time and reducing errors.
“With VOGSY, we’ve been able to quickly develop as an organization, tie analytics more closely to our future, simplify processes and think of the business in ways that move us ahead,” added Atkins.
“We are all ‘prisoners’ of our own experience and if we don’t change what we do, then we’ll get what we always got. That may be fine for some but not so for the Metis team. They recognized that you can run a more sophisticated services firm by simplifying and streamlining the operations. This matches VOGSY’s mission and ethos 100 percent and we are happy and proud to be part of the Metis journey!” Mark van Leeuwen, CEO, VOGSY
