KPI 1 | KPI 2 | KPI 3 |
|---|---|---|
Hours per week saved across the PM team | Annual budget planning went from weeks to days | Millions of dollars in budgets managed in Fieldshare |
Arletta Environmental is an environmental consulting firm based in Alberta, providing management and assessment solutions to oil and gas, commercial, industrial, and public sector clients. With over 500 active projects and millions of dollars in managed budgets each year, the project management team handles everything from Phase 1 assessments to multi-million dollar remediation programs across a diverse client portfolio.
Arletta’s team was growing, but their project management tools weren’t keeping up. Spreadsheets were the backbone of everything, but they were starting to show their limits where project complexity and increasing portfolios demanded more.
Year-over-year tracking was manual. Every new year meant rolling over existing spreadsheets and restarting annual tracking. It required a coordinated effort to ensure nothing fell through.
Project tracking approaches varied across the team. Project managers had the flexibility to organize and track costs on their own. Information was not always standardized across projects or clients. When coverage was needed, additional handoff time was often required to ensure continuity.
PMs were spending their days cost tracking instead of managing projects. A significant portion of each project manager’s time went to manually compiling costs, reconciling field tickets, and updating spreadsheets. These are geoscientists, engineers, and biologists, not accountants, and the admin burden was pulling them away from the technical work they were hired to do.
Annual planning consumed weeks of non-billable time. At the start of each year, creating program budgets for every client, getting approvals, and distributing the approved work to PMs took weeks of effort from ownership and the PM team. It was entirely manual and entirely non-billable.
Arletta implemented Fieldshare as its centralized project management and cost tracking platform. Reporting is now standardized and consistent across the board. With Fieldshare, every project follows a shared structure, with aligned filters, categories, and reporting views that ensure clarity from start to finish. The result is a reliable system where information is always accessible, and anyone can step in, generate the same reports, and move work forward with confidence and continuity.
Field staff now enter third-party tickets and costs directly into Fieldshare as they happen in the field. Project managers approve and track those costs before invoices are even issued, making real-time visibility far more efficient than before.
Integrated reporting connects approved budgets directly with ongoing spend. Budget variances surface early, allowing for proactive client correspondence.
The annual planning process was transformed. Once client budgets are approved, PMs can immediately see their assigned work and start executing, with no handoff meetings, no distribution spreadsheets. What used to take weeks of non-billable hours now takes days.
Hours per week saved across the PM team. Each of Arletta’s project managers saves approximately 2 hours per week on cost tracking and reporting. They still enter costs into Fieldshare, but the process is streamlined and they no longer need to do any analysis or reporting up to ownership.
Annual budget planning went from weeks to days. The start-of-year process of building client program budgets, getting approvals, and distributing work to PMs collapsed from weeks of non-billable effort to days. PMs see their assignments the moment budgets are approved and can start executing immediately.
Real-time cost visibility for clients. Some clients now request to be on the morning field summary emails so they can see costs accruing live from the field. That level of daily transparency is difficult to achieve without a streamlined system like Fieldshare.
Full visibility for ownership without asking anyone. Christine and Jennifer can view business operations, client overviews, and deep-dive into any project at any time without putting in a report request to a PM. If a client calls on a Friday afternoon, they can answer with accuracy immediately.
Seamless PM handoffs and onboarding. Since Fieldshare standardizes workflows and reporting, anyone on the team can step in, pull the same reports, and pick up any project without starting over. The days of calling a PM while on vacation for a project update are gone.
A recruiting and client development tool. Arletta pulls up their Fieldshare dashboard in client meetings, and clients consistently see the sophisticated project management tool they use. New PM candidates coming from competitors who are used to maintaining their own spreadsheets and doing all their own cost tracking setup hear about Fieldshare’s standardized filters and reporting, and, as Jennifer puts it, “they hear about filtering they’re like oh, that sounds like a dream.”
“Fieldshare has been a game-changer in terms of operations visibility and transparency of cost tracking. It has significantly reduced administrative load, duplication and manual entries. We use it to accurately forecast budgets and as a long-term planning tool.”
Jennifer Carscallen
M. Sc., P. Biol, P. Ag. Chief Executive Officer
“Fieldshare helps in timely and accurate site deliverables to clients. We are proud to pull up our dashboard in client meetings and show them the sophisticated tool we use to manage our workloads, and it has been surprisingly useful in trying to attract new project management talent.”
Christine Niemiec
B.Sc., P.Biol., President & Sr. Environmental Scientist, Arletta Environmental
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