Runbeck Votes for Clarizen

Situation:
Runbeck Election Services Inc, based in Tempe, Arizona, specializes in printed election ballots, vote by mail materials and processing, and related elections’ products and services.  Sentio, their ballot production system, provides election officials with the ability to accurately produce their own ballots on-demand

Runbeck expects to deploy about 175 such systems by the end of 2008 across ten to twelve counties in the states of California, Arizona, and Florida.  Deployment of these systems is a complex process.  A typical deployment project requires about eight to nine months and a team comprised of a project manager, several consultants, partners and at least one person from each of the counties to deliver, install and deploy an order of multiple Sentio systems across various sites within a county.   In order to manage projects of this scale without any surprises, Runbeck knew that they needed a centralized project management system.

Runbeck also knew that managing a large project using geographical and organizational distributed teams posed an execution challenge.  This was a challenge that their current software could not measure up to. As a result, Runbeck expanded their search to find a solution that addressed both project planning and execution and selected Clarizen.

Benefits:
Clarizen has enabled Runbeck to manage their complex projects very efficiently. By taking advantage of Clarizen’s capability to get status updates from team members via email and automatically compile project status, the length of status calls has reduced from 1.5 hours to about 20 minutes.  This translates into productivity improvements of several hours a week for the project team. 

The project manager also saves a few hours a week of administrative work by having the system automatically track and update project status and identify tasks that are late.  Since the Clarizen system automatically notifies the project managers on late tasks, they can proactively address such issues in a timely manner before they flare up.  This has led to on-time delivery of the projects, higher customer satisfaction and has strengthened the level of trust between Runbeck and its clients. Operating in a tight knit industry where failure is not an option, Runbeck expects this reputation to translate into increased business. Finally, Clarizen’s ability to save any project, with all related documents, notes and resources as a template, allows Runbeck to create new projects within minutes and utilize all the knowledge already captured in the system.

“Clarizen has become a key component of our ability to deliver on our promises and gain the trust of our customers.  We are glad we chose Clarizen to manage Sentio deployments”, said Jackie Nagel, Assistant Project Manager of Runbeck Election Services.