In search of insight and efficiency

VideoTaxi is a digital production house, offering everything from graphic design through to animation and video production on a subscription model. One of their key challenges was staying on top of the number of hours used against a client’s subscription. They needed a better way to project burn rate and understand how efficient they are on different parts of a project.

Chief Cabby (Digital Content Producer Manager), Bruce Knoetze, said that the VideoTaxi team wanted this information to be in an at-a-glance, visual form. “The software that we use to time track and log all that against projects is very much the same as our accounting software, so it’s not really sexy to look at. Being a bunch of creatives, we need something visual to give us the information that we need at hand every time we log in.”

They’d started off with what Bruce describes as a ‘duct tape’ solution they had built themselves, using Google Sheets and a time tracker app, with an API to feed information. “It was a manual process of getting those sheets to work and then feeding that information into something, which would give an infographic of that data.

“Obviously, as we started to scale, this process started to fall over.”

Data-driven conversations

Finding a solution off the shelf was difficult; there was nothing that really ticked all the boxes. So VideoTaxi spoke to Rally, who had a good understanding of their business model, and came up with a solution to deliver dashboards that would give both VideoTaxi, and their clients, helpful insight about their projects.

Paul had recommended WorkflowMax as a platform for logging projects and tracking time. It worked well internally, but still didn’t give VideoTaxi the visual snapshot they needed. Rally was able to create a dashboard, which pulls data from Xero and WorkflowMax constantly.

This dashboard syncs up with Microsoft Teams, which is where the team communicates internally, so everyone can see how client projects are progressing or where each cabbie is tracking with their efficiency.

“Now, every day we have up-to-date information on how much time has been used on projects. We can either share the dashboard with clients, or we can export the report as a PDF so they can view it.”

Bruce says this information can now be used to guide client strategy sessions, or to discuss subscription options in a way that delivers value back to their clients. “We can use it to talk about the use of their subscription - whether they are putting it to use for what they intended, whether they can be more strategic about how they are using it, or whether they actually need an additional subscription to suit their needs. When we sit down with decision makers it’s much better to have these data points to show them.”