Verify In Field: The Millwork Podcast
Welcome to Verify In Field. Your host, Jacob Edmond, CEO of DuckWorks, will be interviewing experts in the architectural millwork industry to bring you insights and knowledge about updates, techniques, and challenges in millwork. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, this podcast is for you.
Tune in biweekly on Wednesday for a new episode, and visit duckworksmw.com to join our growing community of millwork professionals.
Verify In Field: The Millwork Podcast
Tools for Success: Navigating Digital Change with Paul Koetke
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In this episode of Verify In Field, host Jacob Edmond sits down with Paul Koetke, founder of Koetke Consulting and a Smartsheet Platinum Partner, to explore how growing millwork companies can scale their operations, improve visibility, and reduce manual chaos—all without jumping straight into a massive ERP system.
Whether you’re using Excel to schedule projects or relying on texts and spreadsheets to run your team, this episode shows how Smartsheet can bridge the gap between where you are and where you’re headed. With real-world examples from shops and field teams, Paul breaks down how to set up smart, flexible workflows that grow with your business.
About Our Guest
Paul Koetke is the founder of Koetke Consulting, a Smartsheet Platinum Partner focused on helping growing companies design smarter, leaner operations. A former Customer Success Manager at Smartsheet, Paul specializes in building custom solutions that streamline project management, resource planning, CRM workflows, and more, without the complexity of full-scale ERP systems. His team works with manufacturers, construction firms, and mid-size businesses to build flexible systems that support real-world
Where to Learn More
Koetke Consulting Website: https://www.koetkeconsulting.com
Paul’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkoetke/
Smartsheet Website: https://www.smartsheet.com/
Watch Paul's previous Verify in Field Episode: https://duckworksmw.com/podcasts/the-power-of-smartsheet-streamlining-project-management-with-paul-koetke/?utm_source=Buzzsprout&utm_medium=podcast
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And so for those of you who might be listening and thinking, Hey, I'm outgrowing my Excel solution. I'm comfortable in it, Smartsheet could be a really great option to not have to reinvent the wheel from the ground up and learn a completely new platform, but just expand upon what you're already comfortable with.
Jacob Edmond (2):Welcome back to Verify and Field everybody. I have a special guest today actually for a second time on the show. Paul Koetke of Koetke Consulting. He is a Smartsheet Platinum Partner and managing partner of Koetke Consulting. Um, and I'm glad to have you back on the show today to talk about Smartsheet, Paul.
Paul Koetke:Jacob, thanks for having me on. It's great to be back.
Jacob Edmond (2):Well, for those who haven't listened to the previous episode, we will link it here in the show notes for you. And I suggest going back and listening and hearing all about Paul's story. Um, but if you wouldn't mind, Paul, just giving a brief intro and your background and what, what it is you guys do at Koetke Consulting.
Paul Koetke:Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Paul. I'm a former Smartsheet Customer success manager, and worked at Smartsheet for two years and then left and became a Smartsheet Platinum Partner where I've been helping clients set up ER or ERP systems, project management solutions, CRM solutions. All sorts of different types, in Smartsheet acting as a central platform for their businesses. And, uh, Jacob, I believe you and I, we, we started doing a lot of this a couple years ago and I've since been doing more of the same and refining and building bigger solutions for these clients.
Jacob Edmond (2):Awesome. Yeah. You and I initially got introduced. You were helping us at, uh, USA Millwork.
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):We were using Smartsheet for multiple tools, um, and as a stopgap, um, in many ways for an ERP. And so you helped us refine and, and make the best use we could on a Smartsheet at the time.
Paul Koetke:Exactly.
Jacob Edmond (2):Well, so we touched on this a little bit. You know, Smartsheet in itself is not an ERP, but for a lot companies, especially companies that are maybe not at the scale or ready to make the jump to an ERP or another enterprise type software, it can fill a lot of that, jack of all trades, as you put it for a lot of the workflows we need in our businesses. So, you know, we talked about a little of this, like what we've used it in the past and today at Duckworks we actually leverage it for, for many of these purposes as well as
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):applicant tracking system. We use it for resource planning, capacity scheduling. Can you talk a little bit about that? In your experience with your clients today, you know, the companies that you see really getting the most outta Smartsheet, you know, what, what is that profile of company and, and how are they leveraging it?
Paul Koetke:Absolutely. So Smartsheet's an extremely versatile tool. You can build just about anything on the platform. Where I'd describe it in terms of fitting into the market is that middle of the bell curve solution, where at the top end in project management you might use Microsoft Project, uh, from a sales perspective, maybe you're in Salesforce or another major CRM like that. And then obviously, you know, on the, on the materials planning inside. You'll probably be in a dedicated CRM, but that's really reserved for quite large companies that ha that are really trying to scale their solutions. For a lot of companies in that, uh, you know, kinda the smaller end to the, to the mid-market range, smartsheets the perfect platform. It gives you a ton of capability without all the associated complexity that oftentimes confuses a lot of people and makes entering in information kind of a chore. And so given that it's a really versatile platform. The clients that I've worked with that use it most successfully are able to integrate multiple different solutions. So in your case, you mentioned being able to use it to track different jobs, but then also be able to use it for candidate tracking. And then where these different solutions intersect, making sure that they're speaking to one another. So if we've got a sales team that's going out and saying, Hey, we just sold a new project. Being able to automatically communicate that with the production or operations team and say, Hey, here's the new project. Here's the details on it. We're gonna hand it over to you in a seamless way so that you can keep working on it, on your end. And being able to make sure that these connection points are are done easily. But then also. That everyone's speaking the same language. The operations team knows how to go into the sales team side of the house and see what they're doing and communicate with them and vice versa in the other direction. So really breaking down those, those barriers of communication, standardizing processes, and uh, and opening everything up across, across the organization.
Jacob Edmond (2):Yeah. Yeah. And I think for, from my experience, you know,'cause a lot of people will, that haven't worked with it or maybe they've worked with it on a very basic use case. See, oh, well it's just Excel online. Right? Or, uh, they'll liken it to something else they've used before. But from my experience, you know, even at Duck Works, right when we first started, I had an Excel schedule for when we had just a handful of jobs and very quickly outgrew that solution. And what I found with Smartsheet is a lot of times organizations get into this whether they're using Excel or project or file-based solutions, software solutions. And it gets very difficult to manage even a small team of people. How is everybody using it the same way? Where are you storing or sharing those files? How are you sharing? And so Smartsheet is one of the first, uh, things that I find is it gives you a set of rails and a way of standard way of doing things across your team. And so, even in, you know, in our case. Rolling out projects and every project has its own, you know,
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):project sheet for example. We can standardize that template and we can standardize the workspaces and how things get shared and permissions and things like that, which very quickly eliminates a lot of the, the problems in the, that void of having an enterprise solution for whatever the, the business process you're talking about is.
Paul Koetke:Yep. Yep. You're, you're spot on there. And I want to, you know, I wanna reference something you said at the very beginning there is that it looks a lot like Excel and that was an extremely conscious decision by the Smartsheet product team because everyone has excel on their computers. Just their default included in your subscription with Microsoft. And so everyone generally knows how to use it. They're comfortable getting in there, seeing that grid interface. And so Smartsheet said, Hey, we're gonna leverage this and make it a seamless transition to say, Hey, we're coming from Excel and we're going into Smartsheet. Everything looks and feels the same, but then, wow, we've got all this add-on capability now. Now we can send automated approval workflows. We can push this information into dashboards in real time. And so for those of you who might be listening and thinking, Hey, I'm outgrowing my Excel solution, I'm comfortable in it. Smartsheet could be a really great option to not have to reinvent the wheel from the ground up and learn a completely new platform, but just expand upon what you're already comfortable with.
Jacob Edmond (2):Yeah, it, it's nice also in that they have evolved over the years and added some other different visibility states, I guess, or different ways that you can view the data. So.
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):You know, there's a kanban or, or a card view, and there's other, like you said, dashboards and reports. But, uh, what I like about that is'cause I've had users that have come and said, oh, well we've got experience with Asana or one of the other, you know, kanban based view, uh, solutions. And they, they're comfortable working that way and
Paul Koetke:Yep.
Jacob Edmond (2):from an Excel background and they're comfortable working that way, but they need to interface with the same data and the same workspace. And so that has been helpful for us, for users in the past to be able to say, Hey, you can have data in your view, and you can have it in, in your view, but it's the same core data. It's the same working sheet, essentially.
Paul Koetke:Exactly, you're just presenting it a different way. And the point is to get the right information at the right people at the right time and kind of, you know, the fourth bit of that is in a format that they can understand and work with. And so that's, that's really key to a lot of teams.
Jacob Edmond (2):Because a lot of times you do have people that are, uh, cross-functional teams, especially in smaller companies, like we're we're talking about. If you're a growing business or, you know, you're not a very large scale business, but you still have cross-functional teams that need to interface with the data. You know, I've had, we had examples in the past where, for example, change order logs, for example.
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):The accountant working with us as well as the project managers, as well as with the engineering or production teams, right? And they're all looking for different pieces of the data. They don't need the whole pie, but it's all in the same core thing. And so we were able to serve that up in, in a report per function, for example, or review per function that gives them what they need. But we're not having to split this data across multiple sheets in different places and having multiple, um, instances of data entry and re-entry.
Paul Koetke:Exactly. Exactly. And a big part of that is being able to house all the data together, but make sure it's going to the right people. I recently worked with a, with a company that was doing property transitions and onboarding new properties into their portfolio. And what they had was an entire project plan for A to B, how we're going to get this property integrated into the portfolio and seamlessly working with everything else from this new acquisition, and what we ended up doing was having that standard project plan that everyone had access to, but then the individual teams were able to say, Hey, you know what, here's for our IT team. Here's what you need to know to make sure you get the point of sales computers set up, you get, you know, a printer, copier set up at the location, all of that good stuff. We have the security team that was in charge of changing over all the keys and locks and putting in video cameras and all of that. We had the branding team that would then come in there and say, Hey, we gotta paint the place we need to put up, uh, you know, put up our, our logo on the side of the building. And then, you know, there's the interior fit out team as well too. Like, Hey, here's how many different rooms are in here. Here's the types of desks and cabinets that are going into everything. So everyone got their own custom view into the process without getting overwhelmed with a giant deluge of information. That has all the different steps across all the different properties. It's just saying, Hey, here's what you need to be able to see all in one place. So it's actionable.
Jacob Edmond (2):Yeah. And that, that brings is a good segue into, you know, something that we use a lot, which is approval workflows.
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):And, and as you mentioned, if you have different people along a certain process that need, either approve or take action or, you know, they need a separate stage of the workflow to do something or to know something. That's been beneficial for us and we've used it, you know, for example, in Duckworks, we use it for everything from time off approvals where depending on the person requesting time, it might need to go to a supervisor and then a manager. Um, or depending on the amount of time, uh, they're requesting off, you know, it might need to go through a multi-stage approval, but in other instances it might just need to go to one person and we're able to build that into the workflow so that, you know, from the employee standpoint, they're just submitting a form and saying, I need these dates off and this is who I am. And, and then behind the scenes we already know who their supervisor is, who their manager is, all that type of stuff. And we're able to actually even cross reference that to our, uh, tracking sheet that says how many days off remaining they have, for example, in their, in their bank. And so, um, all of that is able to be automated, whereas in the past, that was an HR person who's manually rec, matching all that stuff and referencing all those things and then sending it. And so, workflows like that have been huge for us. We also use an applicant tracking of, Hey, this candidate now is at this stage, which means they're gonna go notify this person of an interview and things like that.
Paul Koetke:And where I really love the approval notifications is working with people who are external to the company and might not be using Smartsheet. So you brought up the change orders oftentimes what I, what I end up seeing happening is that people are saying, Hey, we're gonna build out a change order module, but we need to get approval from our customer to do this change order. So they might not be using Smartsheet, they might not even know what it is, but with the approval notifications. You can send it to someone and just say, Hey, here's the details of the change order. Do approve spending an extra$5,000 to accomplish X, Y, and Z, and all they do is click, approve or deny and boom, that information gets fed right back into Smartsheet. They didn't have to open up Smartsheet, you didn't have to type up some email for them. It's just, Hey, we're we're sending this out for approval and boom, everything else happens automatically.
Jacob Edmond (2):Yeah, because that's a good point. That is a big friction point for most companies in adopting any kind of solution is the learning curve and how do people interact with it. And especially like in most of our listeners use case, they're in a manufacturing environment, so they
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):a large amount of their people who aren't sitting in front of a computer all day or aren't dealing with software other than at their machines. And so, approval workflows as well as, forms and things that can be served up through just, Hey, scan the, or click this link. Or even QR codes, which is a whole topic I think would be great to talk about. It's very easy from a user standpoint. They don't have to be familiar with the software. They don't even have to really know how it works. They just, Hey, click a link or follow this link and it serves up what you need from them of, Hey, either fill out this form or check this box, or respond to this approval request, and that automatically gets logged back. And so there is very, really no learning curve for those types of, um, implementations of interface.
Paul Koetke:Absolutely. And you also mentioned that you've got a lot of your customers who are in the manufacturing floor walking around. They're not just sitting in front of their computer all day. I think this is where the mobile app is pretty handy for these types of businesses where you're not stationary in front of your computer. Being able to pull that up on the go and say, Hey, yep, I approve this, or I'm gonna submit some information. I'm gonna use the camera on my phone to submit a picture that's gonna be attached back into Smartsheet again, so that everyone else can see it right there in that central repository.
Jacob Edmond (2):Yep. Yeah, it's like we've, we've had instances in the past where we used it for either, you know, shipping, shipment tracking, or even like maintenance logs of, of machines and
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):and where we would have a sheet that maybe has all the part numbers or things specific to what we're maintaining in or you could easily go in and request it and all the user has to do, like you said, is you can have it be a form that you post a QR code on the machine in the shop. So there's no like, Hey, I've gotta go through my phone and go find the right sheet or anything. It's just um,'cause this is huge for lean manufacturing is, have the data, have the information that needs to be done, where it needs to be done.
Paul Koetke:Uh huh.
Jacob Edmond (2):For us, we would have QR codes in the machines and the operator just needs to know, Hey, scan this to submit a part request or submit a maintenance request, or whatever it might be. And once they scan, it just takes them to the form and they can, like you said, a picture right there. They can say, Hey, I need this part. And then behind the scenes you can have it set up or that goes to the person that. Purchasing or maintenance or whoever needs to be notified from that. Um, all that can be set up. And, and I think what's important, you know, for those who are listening to this and wondering like, why are we talking about this? We're not being paid by Smartsheet, you know, for the instance. I am a paid user of Smartsheet. Obviously Paul works and helps clients with this software, and I think what's so interesting to me, what I'm hoping people take away from this is. There are still so many companies out there listening that are operating without any type of real solutions for this type of stuff. Or maybe you're a startup and you know that you're gonna need to make the jump to an enterprise solution, but you, you don't have the time to, like, you need a solution now. That's what this software has allowed us to do is, Hey, as we're going, we know we need some rails. We know we need these functionalities, and we can't have to operate for the next six months or whatever it is with just calls and paper and text or Excel sheets. And so that's what I think is, this is something that has allowed us to refine and define our processes while having true, software solutions that leverage the technology available today without the onboarding and, and cost, frankly, of making the jump to a true enterprise solution from day one. I dunno if that's what you found with a lot of your clients. You know, I think, you know, it starts that way. And even then when they jump to an ERP or a CRM or whatever. This now becomes a tool in your toolkit, in your tool belt that still continues to find uses though, even when you make the jump to enterprise solution, I find it's, Hey, we're not really sure how we're gonna handle this yet, but we can use Smartsheet to help us stand up a process while we work out the kinks and figure out is this something that exists on the market as an enterprise solution to begin with.
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm. One, one of the big pieces that I often see as well too, is that people start building something out in Smartsheet and find that it is reflective of their process. So the analogy I'll use is like, it's like an Iron Man suit. Rather than you saying, Hey, we're gonna fit our process into the same industry standard software that every other company on the market uses. Let's build something to the way that we work that matches our competitive advantage, and that helps amplify what we already do really, really well. Rather than saying, Hey, we're gonna do the same thing as all of our competition on the market and hope that somehow we're, we're still gonna be different. So even though people use it as maybe a stop gap for a larger implementation, a lot of people get into it and say, Hey, this is better than anything else that we can find, even at the large end of the spectrum. And that being said, too. You know, there, there are so many companies that I've worked with as well that come in and say, Hey, this, this solution worked really, really well in operations. And then either, you know, have asked me to come in and say, Hey, I want, you know, I wanna see something now for our HR team. I wanna see something for our you know, you name it all the other different teams. Or sometimes I'll come back and chat with them two years later. And they're saying, Hey, yeah, we did this one project early on. And then next thing you know, every single department across the organization is using it in some capacity or another. And this holds true for large organizations as well, too. Smartsheet's being used by I, what did they say? I think it was like 98 of the Fortune 100. So it fits really well across the spectrum, and you can be sure that those are companies that do have full ERP and Salesforce setups and everything across the board, but there's a lot of other process that still needs to be managed in a way that oftentimes just needs to be, needs to be done fluidly, and you don't have the time to set up a rigid structure around it.
Jacob Edmond (2):Yeah. Yeah. And I find you know that a lot of times the biggest obstacle for any type of software implementation or in a organization is, is really not the software, it's the people and getting people on board with that change. And I think from my experience, what I've found that Smartsheet lends itself to, you know, building in, I think it's John Kotter's change model. He talks about building the coalition and which is the idea that to really get a team or an organization behind a change, you need to get the group of people that have to change all aligned on, Hey, we're all in agreement that we need to change. We all understand that there's a problem and now we're on board with, okay, why we're doing this.
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):And so like what you just described with, Hey, maybe you start in operations and then somebody from HR says, oh, wow, that I could really use that. I think what Smartsheet lends itself is you can start small. And naturally people start sharing like, Hey, this would really help you. I, I could help you set it up. And rather than an executive or you know, you know, a manager coming in saying, Hey guys, we're gonna use this tool. Everybody needs to use it. It's more of like, oh, I see that you're getting results from it. I, I want those results from my team, but I need something a little bit different. And it very quickly, naturally kind of takes hold and everybody says, oh wow. This can come alongside what we're already doing and it can enhance it. And then once you've implemented your, like you said, your existing process, the tool molds to your existing process. It's much easier to realize, hey, we could benefit from this feature. And, and it's not an overhaul of what we're doing. It's an enhancement.
Paul Koetke:Mm-hmm.
Jacob Edmond (2):And I think that's really interesting'cause I, I've experienced that in my team, you know, as my Operations Director has really learned it. Other people are constantly coming to him and saying, Hey, could you help us set up a sheet for this? Hey, could you help us do this? And at the same time, he's able to say, yes, absolutely. But we're gonna kind of follow the best practices that we've learned in the other departments so that you're able to, you know, be successful from the start.
Paul Koetke:Yep. Yep. It is, it is a little bit of a dangerous trap sometimes, and that's when you become that Smartsheet subject matter expert. You'll get a lot of requests from a lot of people across the organization. So it is important to do a little bit of boundary setting. I recently did have, you know, a really good story that a client shared with me. I was working with a director at a data center company, and every week they'd have weekly leadership standup meetings. And typically people would spend two to three hours pulling together all their information, putting it together in some nice PowerPoint slides, and then by the time the meeting came around, those slides were usually a day or two out of date. And what we ended up doing was building a Smartsheet dashboard. And that was updating real time with all the key information that he needed to present on. So his effort going to these meetings was just reduced down to zero. He would just walk in and say, Hey, here is real time, the state of the union for my department. And he came back after that meeting and said, Hey, I've got about 10 other people that want identical dashboards to manage their department's reporting as well too. And, it's one of those things, you go and you show people what it's doing. And then suddenly everyone else is like, wait a minute, you mean I can automate that entire process that's taking me two to three hours a week?
Jacob Edmond (3):Yep.
Paul Koetke (2):That's pretty good.
Jacob Edmond (3):Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I honestly, that's the biggest feature we haven't touched on yet is dashboards that, you know, I've found and really where I live myself as, uh, for Duckworks as CEO, you know, there's a lot of processes that, for example, our sales workflow, I used to run our sales workflow and I was, as I was doing it, things would go through these stages and I was doing this very manually from our project sheet of like, okay, we've received a request for quote, now that goes into, it's assigned to an estimator. That's another stage. Then that goes into review, then it goes into scheduling, and there were these five or six different stages. That I was tracking things manually and I got to where I was like, okay, I really wanna be able to visually see what's in each stage at one in one view. And I was able to create a dashboard with just a series of report reports that all filtering for each stage, right? And so. For me, vis who I'm very visual, it was very easy to create one page on a dashboard that I can see. Everything moves from top to bottom and so every morning we have our standup and I'm able to see, and it was also made it easy for me to hand this process off to my sales coordinator and train her on, Hey, this is. What the workflow is that we need to follow. And basically our job in sales is to move things from top to bottom and everything should always be moving. And so it made it very visual and very easy, not only to refine and set up the process, I can at a glance every morning, check in and see what, what's in each stage and what needs to, what's not moving. But it also made it easy to train and hand that off to somebody. And as you mentioned now other departments have seen that and like, man, I want something like that for our workflow. Okay. I'm able to kind of say, Hey, here's some pieces, here's how you can help yourself do it. I can answer questions and stuff. And like you said, you gotta have some boundaries to where you're not just a full-time Smartsheet implementer. But as you get comfortable with the tools and you start to realize, you know, with any change management, it's like, where are the friction points? And then how can I start to remove those friction points? And that's where you focus in. And for me, it, it becomes a lot more apparent as I'm working with Smartsheet of like, Hey, I keep doing the same thing over and over again. There's gotta be some way to refine that and almost every time I'm able to kind of find some way to re relieve or at least ease the friction and make it, um, and it's, it's constantly evolving.
Paul Koetke (2):And I think that's a great example on, on the CRM side because it's so important to see that from a sales perspective, to understand what do we have at which stage? How do we make sure that those opportunities are being followed up on and continue moving through that pipeline. But then also from a forecasting perspective as well too. Do you have, you know, that one giant, opportunity coming up through the pipeline that you need to prep for make sure that you can handle from an operations perspective to it. Getting that visibility to the right people is what reduces or hopefully eliminates that, you know, feast and famine cycle of having too much work or too little work at any given time and helps you balance that out a little bit more.
Jacob Edmond (3):Yeah. I think that to me, that brings us to, you know, one of the, the main features that for us is really the number one reason we, we still use Smartsheet and. What, you know, even in those who are listening who are in a manufacturing environment, capacity planning and resource planning are kind of the core to everything we do, Which is, you know, you're constantly quoting and selling work and trying to basically find out, Hey, can we do this job when the client needs it? How does that overlay with what our capacity is at that time? In our shop or in our people or whatever it is. And so we're doing that daily and we use the resource view, the resource planning tools within Smartsheet, which allow us to one, assign people to tasks and with start and end dates. And, uh, I think with that you also have percentage of, I'm blanking on the word, allocation percentage. Yeah. Which says, Hey, is this 50% of their time or a hundred percent of their time? Right? And based on that, what's beautiful about, it's because we're constantly moving jobs across teams, but also moving people across jobs. And so you can say, Hey, for us we have a sheet per team. And so that means we have people being scheduled across multiple sheets. But resource view allows us to see that resource, that person. No matter how many places they're scheduled and how much of their time is scheduled. And so we use that. And like you said, that big view where you sort of view allows us to see all of our people and all of time essentially. And we can see, you know, when is the next time somebody comes available, when we get a new job to schedule. That's, that's the only way we're able to function. To be able to say, okay, who do we have available and when can they start? And then we can go in and put them in there and see how does that lay out? Can we get the job done on time? Do we need to shift people around? And that's constantly what's being done. I, I really don't know how we would function without that view of being able to see our people, all of our resources and how much of their time is scheduled and when it opens up. Which, you know, we use resources as people, but you could just as easily make a machine center or resource and say, Hey, when is the the CNC scheduled for, for how many hours or how many days? And when is the next available? A or an entire, you know, department for example. But that idea of, you know, like you, you said, being able to see that large view of all, of, all of what we're looking at and then move the pieces within it.
Paul Koetke (2):Yeah, absolutely. And this is, this is also where we start reconnecting with those other departments too, and being able to say, Hey, we are good until September, starting September. We don't have enough capacity to deliver work. right, let's loop this back over to the HR team. We need to hire one or two more people in, you know, this specific role so that we can continue delivering. We forecast this to go out exponentially into the future, or maybe we just need to bring in a temporary consultant for six months to help us through, uh, you know, a high point and get us through, get us through that time. So that is. You know, it's more than just the operations and capacity planning. It's, it's being able to share that information to, to make sure that you can continue delivering that longer term scale. Now, another interesting point that you brought up was that you can also manage resources such as equipment,
Jacob Edmond (3):Hmm.
Paul Koetke (2):which I see all the time. Uh. only caveat that I wanna call out there from a manufacturing standpoint is that the resource management and tool and Smartsheet measures down to the day, but doesn't measure time of day. And that's really important in a manufacturing environment where you're saying, Hey, this is coming off the saw and is going into a CNC mill. You know, and we're gonna, it's gonna require two hours of saw time and then five hours of mealtime. We need to make sure that we plan that throughout the day on an hourly cadence in many cases. If you are working maybe in the construction side of side of the world and you're planning, Hey, we're gonna have this excavator on site for eight days at a job site, that's pretty easy to do. You can resource
Jacob Edmond (3):Yep.
Paul Koetke (2):allocate that out, but if you need to make sure you get the right process sequence on a daytime scale, uh, that can get a little bit trickier.
Jacob Edmond (3):Yeah, good point. Yes, and I think I would, I would take a different approach than resource view for something like that at this point. In your experience working with companies who are going through a digital transformation or either implementing Smartsheet or just trying, they're in that middle ground of like, Hey, we're, we know we need something to get out of our old, you know, manual processes. We don't know what that is yet. Um, you know, and a lot of that, or maybe we've already chosen Smartsheet, we're implementing this, but we're unsure of how to use it best. You know, how do you guide companies through that? What are some advice or things you've learned from your clients on how you guide them through this, this change management process of hey, getting some sort of, you know, rails in place and, and some digital standards for processes for these workflows.
Paul Koetke (2):Yep. And there, there are so many different ways that you can, you can approach that, uh, you can, you can check out the templates that Smartsheet has. There are a lot of really good templates out there for a lot of different processes. And just kind of self-teach, try see what works. You can also reach out to a consultant and have someone guide you through that process as well too. But as for that process, you know, the very first step that I do with all of my clients is say, Hey, we're gonna sit down and we're gonna start talking about terminology. We're gonna agree on what words we use. Oftentimes people say, Hey, listen, we've been doing this for 20 years. We don't need a talk about vocabulary, but every single time we get into a conversation and you know, things come up, it's like, what does a red status ball mean to you? Does that mean that the project is stopped? Does that mean that we have a potential risk? Does that mean that the project is over budget? It could mean so many different things. It means different things to different companies, and most of the time it means different things to different people within the same company. So that's step one. Let's make sure we're speaking the same language. Let's define all of our statuses. Let's define our project phases or stage gates along the way, make sure that we are all communicating the same way. From there then it becomes a design process of saying, Hey, now that we've got this baseline foundation, what do we need to accomplish and how do we want to organize the structure to do this As much as we can, standardize in terms of process, goes back to that speaking the same language again, to be able to say, Hey, here's a standard project plan. Everyone can jump from one project plan to the other cover for people when they're out on vacation, but then also be able to compare projects apples to apples and understand which projects need a little bit of extra support, which ones are going well and can be completely hands off and that allows from a leadership perspective to make better decisions faster because you're going to have all of that standardized process built beneath it.
Jacob Edmond (3):Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I remember even when we worked with you, we, many, many weeks of meetings, we spent a lot of the time agreeing on or aligning on terminology that, you know, like you said, everybody kind of thought, oh, we all, we all know this, but when we really got into it, it was, Hey, we weren't using the same terms or what, maybe we. Based on our function in the business, had a different idea of what that term meant. Um, which became very important as we were defining and saying, Hey, these are the, the statuses or the stages this work is gonna go through and this is how we're going to track it to where everybody's gonna be speaking the same language. And very often companies don't even realize that they're not speaking the same language or at least understanding it the same way within their existing workflow.
Paul Koetke (2):This, this is where I take my, uh, you know, my opportunity as an outside consultant. Come and say, Hey. Talk to me like I'm five years old and you're explaining your process, you know, to a little kid. Like get, get all the different terms out there. Help me through this. I find that those conversations always open up some areas where. There was miscommunication happening. It's like, okay, let's go through it. It's a little bit harder to do when you're, when you're already embedded within an organization and you've got that process already running. So sometimes it's those moments of change when you're pivoting to say, Hey, you know what? Let's, let's actually go through and do this. Right? Let's start from the very bottom and completely clean up our process and make sure that everything's completely aligned.
Jacob Edmond (3):Yeah, what I find is it makes it so much easier when you do have to onboard new people because those new people are gonna be struggling just like you are as their consultant to understand what they're talking about. And, and I found so many times, you know, when I've onboarded an organization. Or I've onboarded people, they start asking questions that the people in the company who have been embedded there are like, why are you asking that? I don't understand. It's because they don't know what you know within your organization. And if it's hard for, if they're asking those questions, there's a reason because that something's not clear. And I find that when you take the time, like you said, as you do with your clients to, hey, let's all speak the same language, it makes it so much easier when you do have to onboard people to get them into your processes.
Paul Koetke (2):Yeah, exactly. And oftentimes I feel like those onboarding people are such great candidates to go through and just say, Hey, watch the process. Write down everything that you don't understand, and then go back and compare that over multiple people that you've on onboarded in the last year. If everyone's reporting the same thing in certain areas, probably something that needs a little bit of extra attention there because. They are your fresh sheets of paper there. They're absorbing everything as much as they can, but if you've got different departments using different terminologies or talking about different processes that don't align, they're gonna be the first to realize it because they're trying to learn it from the ground up.
Jacob Edmond (3):Right. What advice do you have for companies that maybe are currently struggling? They're listening to us and saying, you know, yeah, a lot of what you're saying makes sense, or, we struggle with those things too, but you know, they're hesitant to make the jump to either an ERP solution or Smartsheet or that first step of like, Hey, let's do something about it. What would you say to those, those people that are like, Hey, I know we have a problem, but I don't really think we're ready to, to change something.
Paul Koetke (2):Yeah, I think the big part is qualifying the problem. You know, as much as I think everyone wants to have a business that's running perfectly smooth all the time, you know, my own include, we're always fighting some sort of fires here and there. How big of a fire is this right now? Is it just, eh, it's maybe not ideal in that case. If it's not really, if it's not really rocking the boat too much, just let it ride. But if you're saying, Hey, this is holding me back from taking on that next big job, or scaling to that next level, or hiring that next team member to take my company where I want it to go, then. It's probably time to get serious and, and start looking at options here about what that next stage in, in your growth looks like from a software perspective. That's the first part. There, there is really no, you know, no reason to do something if the ROI and value isn't behind it. So once you qua, quantify whether it is or it's not, that'll guide the process.
Jacob Edmond (3):Yeah, that makes sense. That's great advice. So, for those that are listening, if they are interested in finding out more, uh, about Smartsheet or about how maybe, you know, Koetke Consulting could help them, what's the best way for them to to reach out?
Paul Koetke (2):Yeah, go ahead and check out my website. It's Koetkeconsulting.com. That's K-O-E-T-K-E consulting.com. Also, feel free to reach out, connect on LinkedIn at Paul Koetke and look forward to seeing you there.
Jacob Edmond (3):Awesome. Yeah, we'll link all that in the show notes. If you're listening, you should be able to go down and, uh, click the link to the website, uh, or Paul's profile. Paul, as always, it's great anytime we get to chat and, and talk Smartsheet. I appreciate you coming on again and sharing with everybody. Um, your advice and, and about, uh, what you guys do and look forward to, to, uh, hopefully having you on again in the future.
Paul Koetke (2):Hey, thanks. This has been wonderful. Great to, great to be back on again.
Jacob Edmond (3):Thanks, Paul.
