Delivering custom Teamwork reporting the easy way
When Umlaut, an Australian data management firm, needed better reporting across their project management system, they turned to SyncHub for a solution.
“It was a bit strange actually,” says Mark Elgar, the founder of Umlaut. “We are an IT integrator and we move data for clients all day. But we made a decision that we didn’t want to distract the development team by having them build us something to use internally.
“Instead, our operations team looked for a solution that would enable us to sync our project management system to a database for reporting.”
That solution was SyncHub
Umlaut uses Teamwork as its project management system, which allows them to manage multiple projects for their clients. However, the team needed to produce customised sets of reports. These weren’t just for internal use, but were also for sending to and sharing with clients on the progress on their projects.
“We love Teamwork. We run all our internal and client projects through it. The one thing that was slowing us down was the ability to produce custom reports from the system.” - Mark Elgar, Umlaut Founder
The team producing the reporting has limited exposure to rest APIs, and weren’t able to transform JSON into a format they can use in a report. As a result, they found that producing the reports they needed was very time-consuming.
By using SyncHub’s Teamwork Connector, the data from Teamwork is available to the Umlaut team for reporting, in whatever format they need.
“Accessing the SyncHub database has sped up development and delivery of these reports. It has also meant we don’t need someone with rest API skills to grab the data and massage it into a report, then worry if the data will refresh properly on schedule.” - Mark Elgar, Umlaut Founder
By using Teamwork and SyncHub in partnership, Umlaut has managed to streamline the delivery of reports to both new and existing clients. All their customers get a standard set of reports, and when the client wants to see it a different way, the Umlaut team can quickly customise the reports.
“We can knock up a bespoke project report for a client or a consolidated report for internal use very quickly, says Mark. “Accessing the data through SyncHub has also allowed us to drill a lot deeper into our project data with greater visibility than we could before.
“This has helped us to spot and close gaps in both our Teamwork use and our client communication.”
Umlaut now uses Power BI Embedded to deliver these reports to clients. The team knows that the reports will be refreshed on schedule and the clients get what they need.
“The guys building the reports don’t need to worry about new end-points or whether the API will let them refresh the report from the Power BI service,” says Mark. “They just build the reports.”
Through linking SyncHub, Teamwork and Power BI, the team at Umlaut can be sure that they and their clients have access to the information they need, exactly when they needed it.
