Creative Retail Packaging (CRP) Ships 2.9 Million Cases and 634 Work Orders With Smartsheet
CRP has a reputation for providing five-star customer service and award-winning custom packaging for brands like Sur La Table, West Elm, and Tesla. Smartsheet helped them improve the quality of client projects and internal operations while saving time.
"Having one common but flexible tool has been a huge gain in efficiency. Smartsheet saves each of us an hour every day because details are no longer buried in servers and email."
Design and Marketing Manager
Creative Retail Packaging (CRP) provides innovative packaging solutions to some of the world’s top brands, such as Sur La Table, West Elm, and Tesla. The company designs and distributes nearly three million cases of retail packaging each year, but it didn’t have a project management tool that could provide a single source of truth for its business.
“Everyone had their own system for tracking which meant less access to projects and duplicative efforts,” says Heather Pugh, CRP project and account manager.
Smartsheet brought everyone on the same page, and helped the growing company streamline operations.
Templates
Custom Smartsheet templates allowed Pugh to document all of the project requirements into a single sheet that became a consistent template for all account managers to use.
Streamlining documents helps the company live up to its well-earned reputation for providing five-star customer service and award-winning custom packaging for beloved brands. With Smartsheet, CRP could improve the quality of client projects and internal operations while saving time.
Data Visibility
In addition, the company needed a better way to share data.
“When I started the Seattle office, I had to both learn a new role and create tools to ensure the business would succeed,” says Kristen Johnston, design and marketing manager.
Using the shared worksheets feature, Johnston moved timesheets, client estimates, and POs to Smartsheet. She then linked the sheets so the data flowed automatically. Without any extra effort, cell formulas indicate when hours are close to exceeding the estimate.
Efficient Onboarding
Finally, the company needed a more efficient way to onboard new employees.
“We’re doing a lot of hiring and there’s a standard set of information each person needs to get started. We didn’t have one place to send them which also meant we didn’t have version control,” says Denise Quach, administrative assistant
Using Smartsheet’s single source for documents cleared up the problem. Quach and Pugh collaborated on a workspace for new and existing employees. This allowed them to create sheets and folders with a clear structure for everything from a how-to directory to hiring timelines.
“Before Smartsheet, we were managing our business on paper using printed reports. Operations tasks that would take 2 - 3 hours now take 10 - 15 minutes,” says Johnston.