Dexterra unlocks value, drives process innovation with Smartsheet Modern PPM

What does Jorge Pilicita care about? Anything his clients care about.

Jorge is Operations Manager for the government contract facilities account at Dexterra, a large and growing infrastructure support services provider headquartered in Canada. Dexterra provides integrated facilities management services for this client contract, which include technical and trades services, janitorial, food service, fire life safety, security, and turnkey management solutions.

Providing high-level services at optimal prices requires Dexterra to operate at peak efficiency, particularly when meeting and anticipating customer needs. Data and insights must be available to everyone who needs it when they need it – the more real-time, the better. That's not limited to Dexterra's staff; making operational data available to its clients in real-time promotes transparency, accountability, and client confidence that they've chosen the right services provider. 

But the diverse, decentralized series of apps and information hubs formerly used by Dexterra’s various departments did not always support that goal. 

“It was all but impossible to hit the ground running,” says Pilicita. 

The solution that scales from one building to hundreds

Fortunately, the solution for Pilicita and Dexterra was close at hand. The company already had some experience using Smartsheet Modern Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) and turned to it as a potential solution. From piloting Smartsheet Modern PPM in one client building, Dexterra uses it across numerous facilities for this client. It uses Smartsheet Modern PPM for a growing range of functional areas, first onboarding staff, then for fire services, “soft” services such as housekeeping, human resources – even finance. 

The onboarding process is a perfect example of the results that Dexterra achieves with Smartsheet. The tools provided by Smartsheet enabled Jorge’s team to build an onboarding program that allowed all the required information to be centralized and completed using just one form. This cut down the administrative burden by 75%.

The more Dexterra uses Smartsheet Modern PPM, Pilicita says, the more it finds better solutions for its needs. Instead of emailing traditional spreadsheets throughout the organization, Dexterra uses Smartsheet portals and information hubs to make data easy to find and use. Dashboards make real-time data in those sheets available at a glance. 

Dexterra uses Smartsheet Dynamic View to provide role-based views of data, minimizing the need to create multiple portals. For example, the humidifier and HVAC maintenance programs developed and managed by the mechanical services manager Jordan Couto provide comprehensive views to staff, while contractors – who perform the work – see only the data that is required to complete and locate the assets allocated to them while protecting proprietary information that should not be shared with customers. This allows all parties to have a customized view while pooling work into a centralized sheet.  

With Smartsheet Automated Workflows, Dexterra speeds business processes that used to be managed manually. A financial report sheet, for example, has 93 automated workflows that expedite the process of invoicing and reporting on completed projects. The automation prompts contractors to submit invoices and other forms, eliminating the delays inevitably incurred with email. Dexterra managers use the report to check in real-time that Purchase Orders, payments, and more are up to date.

Taking advantage of the infrastructure Dexterra already uses, a Smartsheet portal pulls in data from an existing human resources app to make it broadly available, as appropriate. At the same time, integration with Dexterra’s Microsoft Teams instance enables employees to access Smartsheet data from within the app that already supports their virtual meetings.

The team at Dexterra has proved to be very innovative and the solution it has built reflects that.

Meeting the most stringent client requirements

Given its mission, it’s no surprise that this particular contract has perhaps the most stringent requirements of any of Dexterra’s clients. Nor is it any surprise to Pilicita that Smartsheet Modern PPM plays a crucial role in helping to meet those requirements and propel client satisfaction to new levels. 

“Because of the power of Smartsheet Modern PPM, we are better able to resolve issues and client concerns,” says Pilicita. 

For example, the work of Dexterra’s fire services division, led and developed by Bradey Goegan, Fire & Life Safety Manager, assisted the client in winning an award for compliance. 

“We have more than a thousand deliverables a year in fire services, and the Smartsheet system allows us to see at-a-glance which contractors are meeting KPIs, and which aren’t,” says Pilicita. “That’s actionable information that helps boost our client service.”

Dexterra finds that, with Smartsheet Modern PPM, the ability to deliver enhanced client service comes with cost savings. For example

• Dexterra has virtually eliminated – by 96%, or $80,000 -- costs associated with meeting Preventive Maintenance SLAs. 
• Travel costs are down by 80% because Dexterra uses Smartsheet portals to collaborate with employees at remote sites, avoiding hours-long travel to tough-to-reach locations. 
• Costs for contracting services are down – by as much as 46% -- because Dexterra uses insights from Smartsheet portals to anticipate needs better and fulfill them with in-house resources.
• Productivity in managing a system to process contractors’ service reports is up by 200%. 

“By using Smartsheet Modern PPM to reduce unnecessary costs, we can reinvest in delivering better, faster services to clients – helping clients and growing our business simultaneously,” says Pilicita.

Boosts on-time resolution from 66% to 93%

Pilicita and his colleagues wanted to speed up a variety of business processes. They achieve that with Smartsheet Modern PPM, too. 

“We can have six emergencies in a week that move the needle by $100,000,” says Pilicita. “Before we adopted Smartsheet Modern PPM, it could take six monthly meetings to understand our fast-moving KPIs. With Smartsheet, we’re all looking at the same information in real-time to make faster decisions that are better for our clients and us.”

Onboarding new staff is faster because the information new hires need immediately available via the portals. Trouble tickets are resolved more quickly, with on-time resolution soaring from its previous 66% to 93%.

Dexterra continues to invest in technology and process automation tools – like Smartsheet – that boost productivity and efficiencies, which help sharpen its competitive edge in the industry. 

For more information about this story, please see our case study.