Company: jc ebell research - Bern, Switzerland (HQ)
Members: Jackie Ebell – Founder & principal knowledge worker, Chris Ebell – Co-Founder & principal knowledge worker, Sigi Hauert – Partner & language specialist, plus other partners in a growing global network.
Team Context: Consulting
Team Background: jc ebell research specializes in helping European Union and Swiss corporations, governments, legal institutions, and programs write, translate, enhance, research, and edit their mission-critical documents to get the desired impact. The company specializes in many different areas, some of which include: bio-safety, security, technology, science, and digital content. Leveraging jc ebell research’s services, organizations can increase their chances of receiving grants, having their policies accepted, meeting their deadlines, and influencing decisions.
Team Challenge: Teams at jc ebell research need to be able to share, discuss, translate and edit time-sensitive, confidential, and complex documents with internal and external members across the globe. Most of the teams’ work is done remotely while team members travel to customer sites in China, Korea, South East Asia, and Europe. Being online all the time is not always possible for team members so documents, discussions, notes, and messages need to be available both online and offline.
In the past the company tried using Google writely, .mac internet drive, and email. They struggled with writely’s and .mac’s constraint to be always online when working on documents. Email provided offline access, but was not the ideal collaboration tool since countless emails were constantly being exchanged and finding the latest document version, team members’ comments, and supplementary documents was always a challenge. Additionally, being spread out across three different collaboration systems while trying to complete a document, made things even harder to manage.
jc ebell research decided to find a single collaboration tool that could keep the entire team well-organized, support Windows and Mac environments, allow offline access to project content and, was affordable. In addition, the tool had to support customer participation, ensure confidentiality of information and content security, and did not require additional costs as storage requirements increased.
Solution: Jc ebell research found out about Collanos through the web and since then they stopped looking for other solutions. Collanos allows teams at jc ebell research to create a workspace and store all the project’s notes, discussions, documents, tasks, and members in one location that is accessible also offline. Changes and additions made to a workspace would transparently get synchronized among team members. Working in the workspace was very easy to do and no longer required the use of multiple collaboration applications.
A member of the jc ebell research team shared this experience with the Collanos team:
While working on a project I was traveling from Zurich, Switzerland to Singapore in an internet enabled Singapore Airlines flight. Jackie a member of my team was in Adelboden, Switzerland working from a ski resort, while Sigi, another member, was in Brussels, Belgium. We all had our Collanos Workplace open and were collaborating on a customer project that was eventually completed somewhere over India. Collanos supports our non-conventional business setup and makes us more productive and profitable, while having fun.
With Collanos software it is possible for us to integrate our clients in an open environment if they wish. They have immediate access to the status of their documents in the process and they can give guidance at any time. It’s completely transparent. It’s the concept of open innovation.
Results: Collanos enabled jc ebell research to consolidate their collaboration tools into one system while allowing them to have the offline access and flexibility they needed to work as a remote team. The jc ebell research team is a perfect example of how Collanos can help consulting teams become more efficient without requiring them to change the way they work or spending a lot of money on collaboration tools. In the end, efficiency and reduced costs increase a company’s bottom line and these are the results jc ebell research saw with Collanos or in their words:
Since using Collanos we’ve been able to reduce the overhead load per work-unit by at least 20-25% which translates into a significant productivity gain.
Collanos Team Spotlight Series, a new Collanos community initiative, highlights each time a new team; who they are and why they have chosen Collanos Workplace as their team collaboration of choice.
If you are interested in having your team take part in this program please contact us.
Sphere: Related Content
