Impact Housing bridged the gap between verticals, building visibility and ownership
Impact Housing needed a holistic view of its various departments. With Smartsheet—and the new-found sense of ownership and autonomy it provides—the team can focus its efforts where they matter the most.
Industry
- Architecture, Construction and Engineering
Organization Size
- Emerging and SMB (1-199)
Region
- North America
Platform Capabilities
“Our executives can see how things change week over week, and how they come together. This gave them a new, more holistic level of understanding. Now, they can focus the company’s attention where needed.”
Senior Manager of Operations at Impact Housing
Most real estate developers in Southern California concentrate on high-end homes or housing with financial aid for low-income buyers. But Impact Housing is different. It specializes in unsubsidized housing priced for low- and moderate-income households—the most underserved segment of the population. With a vision to help everyone love where they live irrespective of income, the company is determined to alleviate the effects of Southern California’s housing crisis by developing socially responsible, affordable multifamily developments at scale.
Building interdepartmental bridges
With seven business units collaborating to complete real estate development projects, Impact Housing realized early on that it needed a robust project management tool. “The key was to bring together the different verticals of the company—like architecture, construction, and manufacturing—onto a single platform, helping these teams coordinate and collaborate in real-time each project,” notes Michelle Choate, Senior Manager of Operations at Impact Housing.
After some trial and error, Impact Housing discovered Smartsheet. “I fell in love with it right away,” recalls Diego Morales, Senior Director of Finance and Operations.
“We set up a subcommittee dedicated to implementing Smartsheet throughout the company, especially middle management. The idea was to give a voice to the people who are in the trenches and understand what’s happening inside each vertical, and who always strive to improve efficiency and collaboration through technology.”
Using a wealth of solutions
Soon, Impact Housing discovered everything Smartsheet had to offer. The acquisition team kicks off each project from Smartsheet’s Control Center, with different departments chiming in with key documents like budgets, schedules, and designs, making Smartsheet the one-stop shop for all the information throughout a project’s lifecycle. Using DataMesh and Data Shuttle, the team automatically syncs internal information with external programs. The construction team relies on Dynamic View to manage invoices, providing third parties a tailored view into who they can bill for each cycle. “We also use Dynamic View to track the status of expense reports as they go through managerial approval,” adds Choate, who is the go-to person in the company for anything Smartsheet.
Smartsheet has also made its way onto construction sites. Impact Housing staff use the Smartsheet Mobile app in their fieldwork, making tasks easier. “Every superintendent gets a custom workflow designed for their specific site needs,” shares Choate. “We also use this system for site inspections after construction. Plus, there's a 'Supervisor Toolkit' I've created that new supervisors get when they join us. It gives them one-stop access to work orders, incident reports, and attendance tracking."
Building an award-winning template
One striking gap was in tracking key performance indicators of the company’s manufacturing operation. “Our new Chief Manufacturing Officer, challenged us to develop a tool that he and other leaders in our manufacturing team could use at daily meetings to track and report key performance indicators across various timeframes at a glance and forecast our performance based on the past month,” Choate says. To address this, she built a Smartsheet template for tracking key performance indicators (KPIs). It was so impressive that it enabled her to be recognized as a winner of the Smartsheet Community Created Template Showcase.
“We categorized KPIs based on three levels, with the top level designed for our C-level executives,” she explains. “The bottom level showed us the nitty-gritty of our daily workflows, like if we passed all our electrical tests for the day.”
With the new dashboard, executives can now see how things change week over week and how everything comes together. “This gave our leaders a new, more holistic level of understanding,” Choate adds. “Now, they can focus the company’s attention where needed.” For instance, the team noticed a high level of employee turnover for its fledgling manufacturing team in its first year of operation. The company decided to focus on our talent onboarding, retention, and employee satisfaction. As a result, employee turnover has improved dramatically. If you're interested in implementing Choate’s award-winning Multi-Category KPIs template, you can download it from the Smartsheet Template Gallery now!
Owning each task
With Smartsheet, the Impact Housing team now finds it easier to understand and follow through on their tasks. “Every morning, we get together, see all of our work items in one place, and focus on the most urgent tasks. We review trends and spot avenues for improvement,” notes Choate.
This system has fostered a sense of ownership throughout the company, which ultimately empowers employees to work more independently. “With a solution like Smartsheet, we could give our staff more autonomy, letting them expand their creativity,” shares Morales.
With time, the manufacturing and engineering teams also completed the Smartsheet certification courses, enabling them to build solutions independently. “Every single person feels like they can solve their own problems, innovate, and grow professionally,” adds Choate. “The entire engineering department creates their tools. For example, they developed a time study application for supervisors, letting us observe and record the time it takes for an employee to complete a job at a predefined level of performance. We could also track the number of time studies each manager conducted and incite a bit of competition among them.”
Collaborating like a well-oiled machine
Smartsheet solutions like the KPI tracking template have also resulted in unexpected benefits. “We’re constantly raising capital for the company, and our investors want to understand how things work,” explains Morales. “With Smartsheet, we’ve been able to show them dashboards with real-time information. They’ve been very impressed. We’ve demonstrated how a relatively small company with complex interrelated verticals can work so smoothly by having its departments talk to each other and collaborate, so long as the primary collaboration tool is as robust and agile as Smartsheet."
Impact Housing continues to leverage technology to serve the needs of its departments, with Smartsheet as a central hub.
“If we need a new solution, the first question we ask is if it integrates with Smartsheet,” observes Morales.
For Choate, the key is encouraging teams to work in concert. “I love the collaborative nature of Smartsheet, being able to build things together and help people think through what they want to achieve,” she concludes. “That’s one of my biggest passions in life—creating an avenue for people to achieve their goals more easily and express their dedication.”
