A&S Landscape accelerates rapid growth and client satisfaction with Smartsheet

Throughout its 44-year history, A&S Landscape has manufactured and installed canopies and shade sails for well-known institutions such as The Football Association, The Royal Estate, Team GB, McDonalds, and the NHS. Ensuring that projects run on budget and on time is essential, so when A&S Landscape set out to ensure everyone across its organisation could manage information smoothly and prevent procedural breakdown, Smartsheet was the obvious answer.

At A&S Landscape, project management is a complex undertaking. From the production of an initial drawing to the moment a final bill is paid, the business constantly juggles moving demands, dates, staff and other resources. Dropping the ball at any point typically has devastating trickle down effects for the life of the project, leading to missed deliverables, upset clients, and financial implications.

Before Smartsheet, project management wasn’t handled efficiently. Along with display boards, employees relied on spreadsheets, word documents, emails, and shared folders, but it was often difficult to tell which was the most recent information. Any updates also required project managers to email stakeholders – and all too often, those updates were missed by the person who really needed to know. In time, the operations department did adopt a project management tool for managing schedules and monitoring progress. But without capabilities to share tasks and responsibilities, the solution fell short. 

Acknowledging that better emails or bigger spreadsheets just weren’t going to scale to support the ambitious growth goals of the company, A&S set out to invest in an end-to-end solution. Following a visit from Richard Rymill from Smarter Business Processes – Smartsheet Consultants and Gold Partner, A&S Landscape introduced Smartsheet and set up some initial workflows. 

These workflows allowed the company to automate a significant number of its processes, with a Gantt chart overview containing schedules for hundreds of projects. A&S Landscape can now rely on this single workflow to take its projects from the initial point of order, all the way to the final client satisfaction survey, with the ability to run reports at each stage of the project, generate task lists, and share up-to-date information with every department. 

Several years later, Smartsheet is used throughout the organisation. The finance department use it for credit control, debt collection, collation of profit projects and achieved targets; HR embrace the platform for everything from job applications to holiday calendars. In sales, the team use Smartsheet at every stage of the process, from capturing key information to client onboarding – while teams like purchasing/procurement and operations use it to stay in sync across projects. The marketing team also use Smartsheet for their marketing calendar and associated budget and have recently started using the dashboard functionality, too. 

A key outcome of the organisation’s success with Smartsheet is the ability to create critical paths and connect dependencies. The workflow dependencies ensure that any timeline change is reflected across the whole project, giving the company and its clients access to a holistic, real-time view of the project’s progress and the agility to anticipate and address any future changes. This also ensures that delays are caught immediately, no matter what stage of the process they occur, and any ill effects can be planned for. 

This is crucial for delivering high quality customer service as it empowers A&S Landscape to advise clients of any delays weeks ahead, rather than simply hoping to make up time and then letting the client down at the last minute. This functionality has also become all the more important during the Covid-19 pandemic, as it enabled a “seamless continuation” of business (according to Roger Penprase) - even while juggling remote working and furloughs.

Overall, the use of Smartsheet has transformed customer care – a key part of A&S Landscape’s culture – across every step of the business. By systemising every process, and delivering transparent and efficient communication, the company can promise consistently excellent service to its customers. As Managing Director, Roger Penprase says: “With the highest client satisfaction scores in the industry, I know it’s paying off.”

Time saved, efficiency improved, happier customers: The business has benefitted from significant time savings and greatly enhanced efficiency, ultimately meaning it can deliver better end-to-end customer experiences. Smartsheet’s automated processes save A&S Landscape endless hours (avoiding manual extraction of tasks for individuals) and free up employees to work on value-adding endeavours – like winning new business, serving customers, and growing the company’s reputation. And, with less chance of projects going off the rails, customer satisfaction is at an all time high.

Everyone on the same page: Crucially, Smartsheet has ensured that every member of the A&S Landscape team is on the same page. Projects can now run smoothly with full visibility and responsive updates, and collaboration and efficiency have been massively improved as a result. Smartsheet’s intuitive functionality has also allowed more staff to have access to, and understanding of, the overview planner and relevant Gantt charts. Roger Penprase explains that Smartsheet has helped A&S Landscape keep on top of complex and constantly updating projects, some spanning years.

“A single source of truth may sound clichéd but it really is what Smartsheet gives us... There comes a point when you have to stop relying on memories and get the facts into a single system. For us, that’s Smartsheet!”

Culture of improvement and agility: Introducing any new tool into a business can be challenging – but with Smartsheet, it wasn’t long before staff could see the benefits and embraced the platform with open arms, contributing to a culture of continuous improvement and agility. Staff across different business functions are consistently finding better ways to work, and have eradicated outdated processes like dual data entry or running between departments with updates. Now, all staff members – no matter their team or experience level – can use Smartsheet to run their day-to-day. 

Likewise, Smartsheet has improved agility within the business. The platform has been instrumental in assisting A&S Landscape with some big changes required due to Covid-19, when data from the 700 most recent clients was used to quickly see which product lines would be most affected according to market sectors. In this sense, Smartsheet has become part of the business’ fabric, with Office Manager Tina Hopley describing it as “more than a software system – it’s a way of thinking.”

Combined, all of these benefits have contributed to impressive growth for the company. In just a few years, A&S Landscape has expanded rapidly, with a team of almost 100 fitters working on projects right across the UK, a complex supply chain, and many time critical projects. Smartsheet has been crucial to that growth, supporting the company’s expansion in a managed, sustainable way.