'Our employees were thrilled with Smplr', says CEO of Kolkata-based manufacturing firm

Smplr's earliest power user weighs in!

Prashant Mehra, CEO at Mangalkari Manufacturing & Marketing LLP, Kolkata has been an early adopter and a power user of Smplr. His feedback has been invaluable in the growth and maturity of our product. In this video, he tells us how his organization embraced Smplr in the aftermath of COVID-19 and how it improved collaboration, productivity and even company cash flows.

Here is a transcription of the video.

Employee productivity is a key tenet of our organization because we believe that it directly impacts our top line and helps us grow within the same resource constraints that we have. Traditionally, we've been using email, telephone calls, chat, and messaging applications, spreadsheets to collaborate.

When COVID-19 struck, the entire organization was thrown in a tizzy. I started getting telephone calls from my finance team, from my sales people. I had people call me directly from the loading dock to tell me that they are stuck and not able to communicate or not able to get instructions that they need at the right time.

Things were just not working. When we implemented Smplr, it was like a light had just shone on the organization. I was able to manage the organization through delegated tasks in a proper way. I was able to assign tasks to my finance team. They were able to in turn ask the operations people to ensure that all the supporting documentation, for instance, for an invoice was sent in a timely manner within the same document framework.

My salespeople who are on the road were able to dynamically look at price charts and seek approvals if they needed to change or get them revised. When we were looking at implementing Smplr, one of the concerns I had was how would my employees react? They are all stuck at home and I'm asking them to learn something completely new in such a short period in time and hit the ground running.

To my surprise, they were thrilled. Employees were able to talk across organizations, cut across hierarchies. When they were stuck with something, when their tasks were stuck, they could just mark that particular item as 'Stuck' and their superior would go in and get the particular problem solved immediately.

I had my accounts team who could now load receivable lists dynamically online. So that my salespeople could look at what the outstanding is when they visit a particular client. As a result, our cash flows went up. The employees particularly loved the fact that we had now a very simple approval workflow.

So for instance, the purchase order could get approved dynamically when a particular employee put in a request. Or the sales team could get my approval on a quotation they are making. The employees could get the leave applications approved, for instance. It was just thrilling for them. Even traditional functions in our organization, like the legal function was now using Simplr. They are now able to load all the documents related to particular litigation or an arbitration on one particular document, have all the discussions and conversations also captured within the same document so that they don't have to lug kilos of documents from one city to another when they go in for a particular hearing.

Smplr is now an integral part of our organization. We really look forward to Simplr continuously enhance their product. We look forward to things like Gantt charts so that we can manage our projects better. We look forward to having complex functions and formulas within tables. So that I can transfer a lot of what my spreadsheets are handling today over to Smplr and make it more dynamic and enable people to collaborate across the organization.