One-on-One with Jay Irvine from Monterey AgResources

Jay Irvine, VP of Marketing for Monterey AgResources Industry: Products and services for the crop protection and animal feed industries. Location: Fresno, CA Team size: 80

 What issues were you looking to solve?

AgResources is not in a ‘simple' line of business and our products are far from being simple, however, being a medium-size business with multi-million dollar sales and 80 employees we had quite a simple problem - improving our bottom line without taking on new employees or endeavors. 

I am a small company (up against the big giants such as Monsanto) and can only increase my business by being more efficient. Clarizen allows this.

 
What type of projects does your company handle? Stakeholders? Industry? Internal/External? Level of complexity? Compliance issues?

AgResources produces and markets agricultural chemicals and nutrients, each of which entails creating projects that take the product from the early phases of R&D, through field trials, compliance, registration, production of marketing materials, warehousing, packaging and finally selling to resellers.

Each phase may involve both internal and external stakeholders all of which are dependent on each other to reach the final goal of adding a new line of products to the company. Chemists, marketers, compliance specialists, suppliers and management are constantly moving projects through the value chain until a project is marked ‘complete'.

What sort of tools have you been using to manage your projects before using Clarizen?

Before using Clarizen, we used Excel spreadsheets to capture and disseminate all project information coupled with endless emails and hard-copy reports. Errors and delays were taken for granted in a system that lacked any ability to truly track and collaborate, as had occurred in the past when we mistakenly double-paid a supplier $6500!

What immediate advantages did you gain from using Clarizen to manage your projects?

With Clarizen all my team members have access anytime, anywhere to project data, even members who are not very web-savvy, can complete their progress reports on assigned tasks directly from their inboxes using Clarizen's fully integrated email features.

Now our monthly meetings focus more on strategic decision making than sharing project data. More than anything else, I’m excited about the flexibility of the Clarizen system which allows me to start projects from R&D or anywhere else in the value chain as opposed to other solutions that require me to comply with very rigid guidelines.

How has the process been getting your team members / users on board with Clarizen?

After spending just a few hours on the Clarizen application, I shared the application with other members at AgResources and soon enough they were all sold onto it.

I’m confident that accelerated team adoption will, in turn, translate to an increase in efficiencies and eventually the bottom line.

How important do you think it is for a business to use a tool like Clarizen offers?

I believe that it’s an absolute necessity for every company, especially small to medium size to work more efficiently and to increase profitability, and Clarizen allows this.