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Here’s how the accounts payable team used Drag to collaborate on their complex workflow.
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COMPANY
Northern Wide Plank
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing
COMPANY SIZE
50-100 employees
LOCATION
Canada
80% less
emails landing on team member individual inbox.
2 hours
saved per agent per day.
Clarity
Far less confusion with easy organization.
The context
Northern Wide Plank is a leading manufacturer of specialty wood flooring. For over 25 years they have searched the globe and sourced one of a kind woods that are designed and crafted to create beautiful spaces that exceed their clients expectations.
Dealing with such a diverse number of suppliers scattered around the world leads to a lot of emails.
The finance department has one email inbox to receive bills, packing slips, records and visa receipts, but every purchase needs to go through a complex workflow including many people with different functions within the team, like processing emails and uploading data to the ERP.
“We appreciate anything that’s simple.”
Jamie Peebles
Director @ Northern Wide Plank
The challenge
Before Drag, their team was facing several challenges to juggle all the steps of the purchasing process with all the different suppliers. They needed to bring all their bills into one place. Considering the team was already collaborating in Google Workspace, they thought about sharing one account. However in order to do so they would have to share passwords and lose visibility of individual team members activity on the workflow. So they tested setting up a Google Group for accounts payable.
However, this setup had several challenges:
First, they knew sharing an account’s password was a no go. Also, Google Groups was clunky and didn’t have “status/progress” of to-dos. Finally, the interface wasn’t nice.
Jamie Peebles, director, then started to look for alternative solutions. He has considered / tried Asana, Clickup and other project management tools but they were too complicated to be used on just one of the company’s workflows. They decided there was no need to get an extra app.
Jamie then started looking for solutions that used Google Groups, but they were customer service oriented. He realised they needed an easy to use visual collaboration solution integrated with Google Groups and task management oriented.
The solution
Jamie came across Drag while looking for Google Workspace add-ons and decided to run a trial with his team to manage their accounts payable workflow.
Today, the Northern Wide Plank team uses Drag boards to manage their suppliers.
“What we like the most is the simplicity of having bills landing on a Kanban board to be looked after the finance team.”, said Jamie.
According to Jamie, Drag is the perfect solution for Northern Wide Plank team because there’s no need to get an extra app. It’s easily accessible and there’s no need for IT in the back.
The use case
Their team has created a Google Groups shared inbox integrated with the accounts payable Google Group.
They shared with the finance team a shared inbox board to receive incoming mail from suppliers. This way, they can easily manage the process, customizing the Kanban board’s columns to each step of the workflow with its respective owners.
For example: the first column is New where they receive all the emails from suppliers. The second column is Bills here they place all mail regarding purchases that needs to be processed. Then there’s Packing Slips & Records where the task-cards are placed once they have attached the documents to the thread and so on. The workflow includes steps where they check Invoices for cargo, add packing slips that match the invoice, add freight receipts, upload the data to the ERP and, of course, pay the supplier. Each of them with its respective owner.
Since implementing Drag, Northern Wide Plank has already achieved:
- 80% less emails landing on team member individual inbox;
- 2 hours saved per agent per day;
- Simplicity and Clarity – Far less confusion with easy organization.
“It is the best! Allowed our team to go paperless, we couldn’t have without it. Saves so much time and makes everything so much easier.”
Taylor Bailey
Office assistant @ Northern Wide Plank
