Connect Disparate Systems for Resourcing Visibility

Client

JOAN Creative: an independent agency with offices in New York, London, and Berlin, offering advertising, design, production, and media services.

Results Summary

✓ Reduced weekly cross-departmental meetings

✓ Provided real-time visibility into project profitability 

✓ Enabled data-driven client conversations about scope changes

✓ Transformed reactive resource management into proactive planning

Challenge

JOAN Creative struggled with a fundamental resource planning problem due to disparate systems that threatened both team morale and project profitability. Without a centralized way to connect their financial data and project management platforms, the agency operated with significant blind spots in allocating their most valuable asset—team time.

Staff plans and timesheet data existed in NetSuite but remained isolated from project planning tools. Project managers manually extracted and formatted this data, meaning critical questions often went unanswered until too late: Who was overallocated? Where was untapped capacity? Were projects consuming more resources than budgeted?

This disconnect triggered regular scrambles as managers pieced together resource allocation pictures. Without automated comparison between planned and actual hours, they couldn't identify when projects were "burning too hot" or when capacity was underutilized. This visibility gap created unexpected shortages, planning difficulties, and impacts on both workload and profitability.

JOAN implemented Wrike for project management but needed someone to build an integration with NetSuite for resource planning.

Solution

I focused on both technical integration and human workflows to make the new platform successful.

Working with a Wrike-appointed developer, I designed a one-way integration between NetSuite and Wrike using Workato, carefully mapping information to ensure proper data sharing.

We created automated workflows that:

• Generated new projects in Wrike when deals met certain criteria in NetSuite

• Imported staff plans with hourly allocations in real time

• Performed daily checks for plan changes with automatic updates

• Transferred weekly timesheet data for planned versus actual hours visibility

• Calculated employee capacity for improved planning

Results

The implementation transformed JOAN's project management approach with new efficiencies.

Project managers gained unprecedented resource utilization visibility, identifying when projects consumed excess hours and taking corrective action before profitability suffered. The planned versus actual comparison created an early warning system for scope issues.

Account teams no longer waited for manual reports. They accessed information directly, having more informed client conversations about project health. This transparency eliminated weekly interdepartmental meetings, freeing time for strategic activities.

Leadership received comprehensive dashboards showing projected profitability and resource utilization, enabling strategic planning and data-driven decisions.

By connecting previously siloed systems, JOAN transformed project planning from reactive to proactive, creating the operational foundation needed to support continued growth.

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