The paper and pulp industry is on the cusp of a period of unprecedented change. If you’re a leader in that industry, you want to be at the forefront of that change. That means all your people need to be focused on creating value for the business. You can’t do that unless the tools you use fully support your efforts, rather than creating a lot of work and distraction. We spoke to one IT leader who recently faced that challenge.
Q: What were the business needs you hoped to fulfill?
A: We were looking to address a number of objectives. Our IT department needed to be able to capture time accurately so we could manage chargebacks to different areas. We also needed to be able to create, update, and manage around 250 concurrent projects. We wanted to be able to disseminate this data in the way that made the most sense, rather than being constrained by a specific vendor’s approach to data presentation and analysis. Finally, we had to ensure our platform was stable, updated on a regular basis, and didn’t require a lot of management on our part.
Q: How did Clarity help you address those needs?
A: As existing Clarity SaaS users, our staff knew and trusted the platform. It had been delivering against our requirements for close to a decade, and we were confident that it could continue to do so. When we discovered the opportunity to migrate to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) it seemed like Clarity was still the logical solution for us.
Q: What did you do, and how did it help?
A: After discussions with Broadcom’s partner Capture, and some interactions with the Broadcom support teams, we felt confident that we could manage the migration to GCP ourselves. The process was remarkably smooth: we managed the process without any difficulties and without any data loss. The Broadcom support team in particular were a great help to us—it was clear they knew what they were doing and were constantly improving their best practices in order to help us succeed.
We were able to configure single sign-on between Clarity and our corporate network, which is a tremendous help for our users, who can now interact with the system more efficiently. Those users are also reporting greater uptime for the platform and greater performance levels. All of this reduces our costs and improves our ability to help our business partners deliver value and transform the business.
At the same time, we can still seamlessly get all of the information we need from the platform. Our management likes to see spreadsheets, so we export data from Clarity in CSV format and analyze it in Excel, which is a process that works well for us. Finally, we have the comfort of knowing we are now automatically getting the quarterly updates to Clarity, so we always have the latest and greatest functionality and performance. The process of updating is constantly improving and we’re now finding it virtually transparent.
Q: How is this driving your success?
A: Our company, indeed our industry, is facing a period of significant change as we seek to deliver greater sustainability in everything we do. That can only happen when our staff can focus on delivering value and pursuing innovation through our R&D initiatives. And that in turn means we need to minimize the overhead of administering and managing our work. We may not be the most complex users of Clarity but it gives us 100% of what we need, and that makes a difference.
