Smartgrid technology company Actility uses GroupCamp to manage product innovation

The Customer

Actility is one of the leading smartgrid technology vendors in Europe with his Demand Response solution, providing software technology designed to allow factories, buildings, electric vehicle to communicate energy consumption information to the power grid.

Actility has multiple offices in France with technology partners and customers across the world. “Because we are a technology company, we have the tools brought in by the engineering team to manage our software development projects but we were lacking a collaborative tool which we could to use invite clients to participate in our projects” according to Boris Dezier, VP of Sales at Actility

The challenge

Actility (www.actility.com) faces two types of challenges. The company has 3 distinct user groups, sales, engineering and marketing with no dedicated personnel for internal IT-related issues. All users need a corporate email which can be accessed from anywhere and the ability to have their corporate emails synced with smartphones. The company needed the ability to have a shared calendar for client meetings and the need is also for project managers to make sure that project deadlines are met.

The way Actility builds solutions for utility companies, telecom providers, electric vehicle, car manufacturers and governmental agencies is by thorough technical cooperation with clients and other technical partners. The team needed a project management tool to synchronize every innovation project. In each of these projects Actility employees need to be able to control what every user can do in a project based on whether the user is from Actility or on the role of that user (regular project member or project manager)

“Our teams are spread across different locations. We need to be synced internally and have the ability to monitor progress on a project basis and email is not the way to do that.” Said Nicolas Jordan VP Marketing and Business Development of Actility

The results

Actility has installed GroupCamp Project from the Google Apps Marketplace and started defining one project for each of their major clients. Each project has 2 or more companies and the projects are customized based on the level of participation expected from each client. The Sales team members and the project are all equipped with smartphones and have all their project tasks and milestones automatically synced from their online projects.

The VP of Sales wanted a more productive way of processing his inbox and converting emails about customer feedback during the different roll outs of Actility’s technology within every client organization. He now has the ability, with GroupCamp Project Gmail contextual gadgets, to convert emails into tasks within the relevant project and assign the task to the right project manager. 

Actility went through a long and careful process before choosing Google Apps. They are now convinced that the Google Apps Marketplace model can bring them real value for the organization and its clients in the way that vertical apps will be integrated with their office software.