case study
Datamine is a world leading provider of the technology and services required to seamlessly plan and manage mining operations. With operations in eighteen countries, Datamine provides solutions ranging from exploration data management and orebody modelling to mine planning and operations to over 2,000 companies worldwide.
Datamine runs projects of various nature: from software development to training and consulting. They established time-tracking process both to track their billable hours for clients invoicing and to get accurate reports on distribution of their non-billable hours spent on testing, technical support etc.
The company tried various tools to make this process efficient: starting with Excel, they switched to another time-tracker, and ended up with the Mission Control feature in Salesforce.
Our main concern was the price: even though we used Salesforce as a CRM system, we still had to pay extra costs per user, even for those only using the time tracker features.. This wasn’t cost effective for our particular mix of users. We did some research and finally opted for actiTIME that costs us just $3000 yearly for a 150-user license.
Since adopting actiTIME, we have found that it is very intuitive and the users required minimal training to start using the new system. I particularly like the ability to switch off features we don’t use like all cost-tracking features – this makes our workspace clean and uncluttered.
In a consulting business it’s very important to keep track of the profit/loss ratio for each project, and smartly invest employees’ time into the relationships with the most prospective clients. actiTIME reports became a valuable part of Datamine’s business intelligence to help them manage resource allocation. They mainly utilize the staff performance report for different projects, detailed time track of billable hours for customer reports, and estimates vs. actual time comparison for better planning.
As a result, they get a streamlined and easy time-tracking process in the whole company at a reasonable price and make better decisions about staff scheduling and projects priority based on accurate data.
