From Spreadsheets to Unified Resource Planning and Time Tracking

About Sievo

Sievo provides procurement analytics software for data-driven enterprises. Their platform consolidates spend and supplier data to drive insights and savings for Fortune 500-level clients. The company has a global team of about 200 professionals specializing in transforming messy procurement data into actionable intelligence. Sievo’s culture emphasizes a data-driven approach, applying analytics and transparency in both their product and internal operations.

The Situation Before Operating

Before adopting Operating, Sievo’s professional services team managed resource planning with a patchwork of spreadsheets and legacy tools. “We had an Excel for time tracking, an Excel for vacation planning, and so forth,” recalls Perttu Paarma, VP of professional services at Sievo, highlighting the fragmented process. Project managers manually updated multiple sheets to allocate consultants to projects and track time off. Visibility was limited: data lived in silos, and it was hard to get a real-time view of who was available or which hours were billable. According to Operations Manager Silvia Geier, “Our old manual system used to be quite tedious to use,” especially for time tracking and reporting. These pain points resulted in wasted effort and even missed billable hours due to the disjointed system.

Perttu Paarma, Sievo's VP of Professional Services had a long tenure at Deloitte before Sievo, and he know what a successful consulting organization looked like, so when he saw Operating live for the first time, he know the team was onto something.

Phased Adoption of Operating

Sievo decided to modernize its resourcing process and selected Operating, a SaaS platform for resource management, staffing, and time tracking. They took a phased approach to implementation:

1. Initial Pilot – Resource Planning: Sievo first rolled out Operating for resource allocation planning. The tool was introduced to a pilot group to replace spreadsheet-based project staffing. Early success in matching people to projects and visualizing allocations built confidence in the platform.
2. Co-Developing Time Tracking: Next, Sievo partnered closely with the Operating team to co-develop a time tracking module tailored to consulting needs. This collaboration ensured the new module met Sievo’s requirements and was user-friendly. After iterations and feedback, time tracking was integrated into Operating, eliminating the need for Sievo’s legacy timekeeping software.
3. Company-Wide Rollout: With resource planning and timesheets in place, Sievo expanded Operating to the entire company. Over 200+ employees across all departments were onboarded onto the unified platform. Change management was supported by training, and within a short time every “Sievonian” was planning projects and logging hours in Operating instead of disparate tools.

Throughout this phased adoption, Sievo worked hand-in-hand with Operating’s team, configuring the system to their workflow. The gradual rollout ensured minimal disruption and allowed power users to champion the tool internally.

Integrations with NetSuite and HiBob

A key to Operating’s success at Sievo was its ability to integrate with existing systems. Sievo connected Operating to their CRM/ERP and HR systems to automate data flow:

• NetSuite (ERP): Operating is synchronized with Sievo’s NetSuite, so client and project data flows in automatically. This integration eliminated double-entry and kept project info consistent across tools.
• HiBob (HRIS): Operating is also integrated with HiBob, Sievo’s HR information system. Employee information, such as roles and skills, and time-off/leave data from HiBob are reflected in Operating. Approved vacations and holidays automatically populate as allocations, ensuring resource plans always account for people’s availability.

These integrations tie Operating into Sievo’s broader tech stack. The CRM integration means the resource planners see upcoming projects from the pipeline, and the HR integration means availability is always up-to-date. Everyone looks at the same data, breaking down the silos between sales, staffing, and HR.

Retiring Spreadsheets and Legacy Tools

By implementing Operating, Sievo was able to sunset several fragmented tools. The cumbersome Excel workbooks used for capacity planning, vacation tracking, and skill matrices were gradually retired. Likewise, the old standalone time tracking software was decommissioned once Operating’s timesheets went live. Instead of juggling multiple files and systems, Sievo’s team now plans and tracks everything in one place. This consolidation has not only simplified the toolkit but also reduced errors and manual reconciliation.

Results and Outcomes

Moving from spreadsheets to Operating has yielded tangible improvements for Sievo’s professional services operation:

• Hours Saved on Planning: Resource planning that once took hours of manual work each week is now streamlined. Creating staffing plans is much faster – tasks that “used to use several hours to do” are largely automated. This translates to a time savings of several hours per week for the operations team, freeing them to focus on value-adding activities instead of updating Excel grids.
• Real-Time Visibility into Billable Work: With everyone using one system, Sievo has full transparency into utilization and billable hours. Managers can see, in real time, who is allocated where and which hours are billed vs. unbilled. This has improved billable utilization by ensuring work doesn’t “slip through the cracks.” In fact, the team now captures time that might have been missed before. “We always see up-to-date information on our resourcing, so we can balance out the work,” notes Perttu Paarma, Sievo’s VP of Professional Services, ensuring optimal workload distribution and preventing burnout across the team.
• Higher Utilization & Proactive Staffing: Armed with forward-looking data, Sievo can forecast capacity and adjust staffing proactively. Operating provides real-time projections of utilization based on pipeline and current projects. This has enabled Sievo to increase its consultant utilization rate – more of their consultants’ time is spent on billable client work. For example, if a consultant is rolling off a project, the team can see it coming and allocate that person to a new billable project immediately. The result is fewer bench hours and a higher percentage of time spent on revenue-generating work. Sievo’s leadership attributes part of their annual growth and project profitability improvements to this improved utilization and foresight in hiring needs.

Sievo’s leaders are enthusiastic about the transformation. “I’m really excited about Operating because it provides us a platform that ties everything together,” says Silvia Geier. By having resource planning, staffing, and time tracking in one system, Sievo has achieved a new level of operational clarity. The platform’s transparency ensures that the information that used to live in people’s heads or separate files is now visible to all – a shift that has strengthened decision-making and collaboration in a team that's spread over three continents.

Conclusion

Sievo’s journey from Excel-based planning to an integrated digital operations platform showcases the power of a unified approach. In a phased rollout, they replaced tedious manual processes with automated, data-driven workflows. The move to Operating has delivered concrete results: saved time, higher billable utilization, and improved team morale through better workload balance. Perhaps most importantly, Sievo now has real-time visibility into its operations, enabling truly proactive resource management. This case highlights how a consulting and software firm transformed its internal operations with the same data-driven ethos it delivers to clients – achieving a more efficient, transparent, and scalable way of working through digital operations excellence.